The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Donald Nicholson to Walt Whitman, 29 May 1879
Date: May 29, 1879
Whitman Archive ID: loc.07445
Source: The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1842–1937, 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.
Related item: This letter has been crossed out and repurposed. Whitman wrote a series of notes on the back, seemingly brainstorming titles for an unspecified work or the poem clusters that would appear in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Contributors to digital file: Jeannette Schollaert and Nicole Gray
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MEMORANDUM.
From WHITELAW REID1,
The Tribune Office,
New York, May 29 1879
To Walt Whitman Esq.
1309 Fifth Ave
near 86th St.
Dear Sir—,
Mr. Reid directs me to enclose your cheque on our Cashier, for $45 for the three letters referred to in your note of the 28th.2
I am,
Respectfully
D. Nicholson
Correspondent:
Donald Nicholson (1834–1915)
served as the managing editor of the New York Tribune.
Born in England, Nicholson graduated with honors from Christ College, Cambridge
before moving to New York in 1868. In New York, Nicholson and Albert D.
Richardson wrote a popular biography of Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant.
Through Richardson, an editorial staff member at the Tribune, Nicholson met then managing editor Whitelaw Reid, who worked
under editor Horace Greeley. Nicholson began work at the Tribune as Reid's secretary, eventually becoming managing editor under
Reid when Reid succeeded Greeley as editor in 1872. Nicholson came into contact
with Whitman during Whitman's attempts to publish in the Tribune.
Notes:
1. Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912) was the editor of the New York Tribune from 1872 to 1905 and later American ambassador to France (1889–1892) and England (1905–1912). He met Whitman in the hospitals during the Civil War. Of his relations with the poet, Reid later observed: "No one could fail then [during the War] to admire his zeal and devotion, and I am afraid that at first my regard was for his character rather than his poetry. It was not till long after 'The Leaves of Grass' period that his great verses on the death of Lincoln conquered me completely." See Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1915), 213, and Studies in Bibliography, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1956), 8:242–249. [back]
2. No note from Whitman to Whitelaw Reid or the Tribune dated May 28 has been found. "Broadway Revisited," which appeared in the Tribune on May 10, was the first of three "chatty" letters Whitman submitted that May (The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller [New York: New York University Press, 1961–77], 3:153 n39). The others were "Real Summer Openings," published May 17, and "These May Afternoons," published May 24. See the letters from Whitman to Whitelaw Reid of May 8, 1879, and May 12, 1879. [back]