Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton to Walt Whitman, 3 November 1875

Correspondent:
Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885), Lord Houghton, was an intimate of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), as well as a poet. He was a collector of famous people; in Dictionary of National Biography he is characterized as "eminently a dilettante" (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 21. Houghton wrote to Joaquin Miller on September 1, 1875, from Chicago: "Please give my best regards to Mr Whitman." On September 5, 1875, Miller informed Whitman that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Lord Houghton. Houghton himself wrote to Whitman on September 27, 1875, and proposed a visit at the end of October or early in November. See In Re Walt Whitman (1893), ed. Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned, 36; and Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (1934), 141–143.