Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to William Michael Rossetti, 19 October 1875

Date: October 19, 1875

Whitman Archive ID: med.00453

Source: The location of the original manuscript is unknown. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 5:302. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Janel Cayer, Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, and Eric Conrad




431 Stevens St. / Camden, N. Jersey. / U.S. America
19 October 1875. 1

My dear Mr. Rossetti,

Let me by this introduce to you an old and valued friend of mine, J. B. Marvin, who is making a short visit to London on business.2

Mr. Marvin is a New Englander, literary, democratic, has a family, and has a position in the Treasury at Washington.

I still continue here, laid up, but working a very little. Best wishes, congratulations etc. on the marriage. Kindest respects to Mrs. Rossetti. I have lately received a good kind letter from Tennyson.3

Write soon and freely. I am pretty lonesome here.


Walt Whitman


Notes:

1. Transcript.

William Michael Rossetti noted receipt of this letter on December 23, 1875. [back]

2. In a letter dated November 16–30, 1875, Anne Gilchrist referred to a pleasant visit with Marvin, who had gone to England with a "Treas[ury] squad" on official business (see Whitman's December 17, 1875 letter to John Burroughs). On December 23, 1875, Rossetti described to Whitman a dinner he gave for Marvin, which was attended by the following "good Whitmanites": Anne Gilchrist; Joseph Knight, editor of the London Sunday Times; Justin McCarthy, a novelist and writer for the London Daily News; Edmund Gosse; and Rossetti's father-in-law, Ford Madox Brown. [back]

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written to Whitman on August 11, 1875[back]


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