The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to The Proprietor, Westminster Hotel, 16 April 1887
Date: April 16, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07190
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:83–84. 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, and Stephanie Blalock
Camden1
April 16 '87
By oversight I left a book "Poets of America,"2 by E C Stedman3 —in my room in the hotel, Friday last—Won't you hunt it up, & kindly send it to J H Johnston's, Jewelry store,4 150 Bowery, cor: Broome st. for me?
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Westminster Hotel was
located on the intersection of Irving Place and 16th Street in New York. It was
sold and renamed in 1895. Whitman and his companion William Duckett stayed at
the Westminster Hotel when the poet gave his Lincoln lecture in New York's
Madison Square Theatre on April 14. A reception for Whitman was held at the
hotel.
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: Proprietor | Westminster Hotel | Irving Place | New York City. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Apr 16 | 3 PM | 87. [back]
2. The book was inscribed "New York April 14th 1887" (See Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Thursday, April 26, 1888). [back]
3. Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote "Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862. In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster, 1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
4. John H. Johnston (1837–1919) was a New York jeweler and close friend of Whitman. Johnston was also a friend of Joaquin Miller (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, August 14, 1888). Whitman visited the Johnstons for the first time early in 1877. In 1888 he observed to Horace Traubel: "I count [Johnston] as in our inner circle, among the chosen few" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Wednesday, October 3, 1888). See also Johnston's letter about Whitman, printed in Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1915), 149–174. For more on Johnston, see Susan L. Roberson, "Johnston, John H. (1837–1919) and Alma Calder," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]