The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Susan Stafford, 1 August [1887]
Date: August 1, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03933
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein, and Caterina Bernardini
 image 1 |  image 2 |
Camden1
Monday Evn'g Aug 1
We have had three hot days right in a string but I am getting along with it all, & there is a great let up evenings & nights—Nobody here to day—I think of you & George2 & all—H3 yesterday told me he was much better—good—I will be down one of these days—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Susan M. Lamb Stafford
(1833–1910) was the mother of Harry Stafford (1858–1918), who, in
1876, became a close friend of Whitman while working at the printing office of
the Camden New Republic. Whitman regularly visited the
Staffords at their family farm near Kirkwood, New Jersey. Whitman enjoyed the
atmosphere and tranquility that the farm provided and would often stay for weeks
at a time (see David G. Miller, "Stafford, George and Susan M.," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings [New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998], 685).
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: Mrs: Susan Stafford | Kirkwood | (Glendale) | New Jersey. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | [illegible] | 8 PM | 87. [back]
2. According to a notation in the Commonplace Book on July 24 George was ill with "lung hemorhages" (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). On August 4, when Whitman drove to Glendale, he found George "better." [back]
3. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]