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Joseph M. Stoddart to Walt Whitman, 13 January 1891

 loc_gt.00175.jpg ans'd | told them | to come Dear Mr. Whitman

I am coming over on Thursday about noon or say one o'clock p.m. with the proofs &c.— & I am going, unless you stop me, to bring with me several young ladies and Francis Wilson (the actor)1 who is much anxious to meet you—

Will it be all right?—

The young girls are beautiful  loc_gt.00176.jpg one of them is Julian Hawthorne's2 daughter—

The March number3 is to be a great one—Whitman-galore—

Yours Truly J.M. Stoddart

Perhaps DuChaillu4 will be in the party—Do you know him?—


Correspondent:
Joseph Marshall Stoddart (1845–1921) published Stoddart's Encyclopaedia America, established Stoddart's Review in 1880, which was merged with The American in 1882, and became the editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1886. On January 11, 1882, Whitman received an invitation from Stoddart through J. E. Wainer, one of his associates, to dine with Oscar Wilde on January 14 (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 235n).


Notes

  • 1. Francis Wilson (1854–1935) was an actor, playwright, and memoirist. He would go on to become the founding president of Actor's Equity. [back]
  • 2. Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934), an American critic and journalist, was the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He was a prolific writer in his own right, and he publicly frowned upon Whitman and his writings. [back]
  • 3. In March 1891, Lippincott's Magazine published "Old Age Echoes," a cycle of four poems including "Sounds of the Winter," "The Unexpress'd," "Sail Out for Good, Eidólon Yacht," and "After the Argument," accompanied by an extensive autobiographical note called "Some Personal and Old-Age Memoranda." Also appearing in that issue was a piece on Whitman entitled, "Walt Whitman: Poet and Philosopher and Man" by Horace Traubel. [back]
  • 4. Paul Belloni du Chaillu (1831–1903) was a French-American explorer, anthropologist, and zoologist. [back]
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