Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe, 11 May [1886]

Date: May 11, 1886

Whitman Archive ID: obl.00001

Source: Oberlin College. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:28. 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 St. Camden New Jersey1
May 11—noon—

I am still here & nothing very new or different—I suppose you rec'd the Press with a brief report of my Lincoln lecture in Phila: April 15—I go out every day with my mare & rig—sometimes to Phila.—Alice2 comes often, was here Saturday.

Has Dr Bucke arrived?—& you too I haven't heard from you in a long time—I am sitting here in the little front room down stairs—


Walt Whitman


Correspondent:
Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe (1864–1945) was a political activist, art historian, and critic, whom Whitman once called his "staunchest living woman friend." A scholar of Italian Renaissance art and a daughter of Robert Pearsall Smith, she would in 1885 marry B. F. C. "Frank" Costelloe. She had been in contact with many of Whitman's English friends and would travel to Britain in 1885 to visit many of them, including Anne Gilchrist shortly before her death. For more, see Christina Davey, "Costelloe, Mary Whitall Smith (1864–1945)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

Notes:

1. This letter is addressed: Mrs.: B F C Costelloe | 40 Grosvenor Road | Westminster | London S W | England. It is postmarked: Camden | May | 11 | 3 PM | 18 (?) | N.J. [back]

2. Alys or Alice Smith, Mary's sister. [back]


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