Walt Whitman to Harry Stafford, 24 July 1887

About This Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Harry Stafford, 24 July 1887
Date: July 24, 1887
Creator(s): Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: loc.04004
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: Ryan Furlong Stefan Schöberlein Caterina Bernardini Stephanie Blalock
Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Walt Whitman to Harry Stafford, 24 July 1887." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 09 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
Source File: loc.04004.xml (TEI)

loc_vm.00224_large.jpg Camden Sunday P M1 July 24 '87

Well, Hank dear boy, how are you standing it this hot summer? Eva2 I want you to write to me & tell me. We have had it fearful hot & tainted here for over seven weeks, but I am alive & kicking yet—it is rainy to-day but warm yet—I shall drive down to your parents3 in a day or two—(intended to have gone to-day)—Nothing very new with me, much the same old story—H G4 is here yet—the sculptor Morse5 also—I remain in good spirits but a pretty bad case bodily.

Love to you & E & the little one6 Walt Whitman

loc_vm.00223_large.jpg

Correspondent:
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).

Notes

1. This postal card is addressed: Harry Lamb Stafford | RR Station | Marlton | New Jersey. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Jul 24 | 5 PM | 87; Marlton | Jul | 25 | N.J. [back]
2. Eva Westcott married Harry Stafford in 1884. [back]
3. Susan (1833–1910) and George Stafford (1827–1892) were the parents of Whitman's young friend, Harry Stafford. Whitman often visited the family at their farm at Timber Creek in Laurel Springs (near Glendale), New Jersey, and was sometimes accompanied by Herbert Gilchrist; in the 1880s, the Staffords sold the farm and moved to nearby Glendale. For more, 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). [back]
4. Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist (1857–1914), son of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, was an English painter and editor of Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). For more information, see Marion Walker Alcaro, "Gilchrist, Herbert Harlakenden (1857–1914)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
5. Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903) was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to 1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan, Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 105–109. [back]
6. Dora Stafford was the first child of Harry and Eva Stafford. [back]