The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to the Editor of Once A Week, 25 January 1891
Date: January 25, 1891
Whitman Archive ID: loc.08105
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), 5:156. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Cristin Noonan, Stephanie Blalock, and Andrew David King
Camden New Jersey1
Jan: 25 '91
Yes, inclined favorably—If you have any definite subject, or any thing special might indicate it2—Send me two or three papers by mail3—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Nugent Robinson
(1838–1904) was a journalist and editor from Dublin, Ireland. After
graduating from Trinity College, he served an apprenticeship in London and
worked as a correspondent for the Daily Chronicle during
the Franco-German War. He moved to the United States in 1876, and he edited Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Once a Week, and, later, Collier's Weekly.
Robinson was apparently highly regarded among writers like Julian Hawthorne and
James Whitcomb Riley, and he authored a number of books himself, including a
farce and works on history. For more information, see "Nugent Robinson," Collier's 32.14 (January 9, 1904), 20.
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: Editor | Once-a-Week | Warren st Paper | New York City. It is postmarked: CAMDEN, N.J. | Jan 25 | 5 PM | 91; P.O.N.Y. | (?) 25-91 | 11-15 | 6 (?). [back]
2. Whitman seems to be responding to a previous request for a piece or pieces of writing from Nugent Robinson, the editor of Once a Week. Once a Week was a New York magazine founded by Irish immigrant Peter Fenelon Collier (1849–1909) in 1888. For more information on the magazine, see Susan Belasco's "Once a Week." [back]
3. Four months later, on May 19, 1891, Melville Phillips, an editor at Munyon's Illustrated World, wrote to Whitman, noting that Nugent Robinson of Once a Week had asked Phillips to "get him some verse." Whitman published two poems—"On, On the Same, Ye Jocund Twain" and "Unseen Buds"—in the June 1891 issue of Once a Week. [back]