The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to George W. Childs, 3 January 1886
Date: January 3, 1886
Whitman Archive ID: med.00719
Source: The current location of this 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), 4:15. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Stefan Schöberlein, Kyle Barton, and Nicole Gray
328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey,
Jan. 3, 1886
Thanks for the $50, which has reached me safely.1
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
George William Childs
(1829–1894) was an American publisher from Baltimore, Maryland, who became
the co-owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. He was
married to Emma Bouvier Childs; the couple had no children.
Notes:
1. On January 1, Whitman received $50 from George W. Childs, co-owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger (Whitman's Commonplace Book, and see Whitman's letter to Childs of December 12, 1878). He had received a similar amount on January 13, 1885 (Whitman's Commonplace Book). In "Personal Recollections of Walt Whitman," Scribner's Magazine, 65 (1919), 685, William R. Thayer, in discussing Whitman's slyness in money matters, stated that for the last six or eight years of the poet's life Childs and Horace Howard Furness subscribed "an annual sum," and paid a young man to act as his driver and valet. [back]