The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Charles Aldrich, 12 June 1884
Date: June 12, 1884
Whitman Archive ID: med.00763
Source: University of Iowa Special Collections and University Archives. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 7:75. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Stefan Schöberlein, and Nicole Gray
328 Mickle Street
Camden New Jersey
June 12
'84
Dear Sir
I send you, same mail with this, a copy of the $3 autograph edition of Leaves of Grass—yours of some weeks since sending $2 was received—leaving $1 due which please enclose in letter & send me here.
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Charles Aldrich
(1828–1908) was an ornithologist, a member of the Iowa House of
Representatives, an infantry captain in the Civil War, and founder of the Iowa
Historical Department. He was also an avid autograph collector, especially of
Whitman's. He was so eager that the poet termed him "a very hungry man . . .
never satisfied—is always crying for more and more" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, August 20, 1889). Aldrich visited Whitman at his Camden home
numerous times, and he served as a conduit between the poet and William Michael
Rossetti in England, who edited the first British edition of Whitman's work. For
more information, see Ed Folsom, "The Mystical Ornithologist and the Iowa
Tufthunter: Two Unpublished Whitman Letters and Some Identifications," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1 (1983),
18–29.