#15
J.B Gilder
'85
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Camden
Feb. 18
My dear J B G
I have no feeling of objection to your substituting a nom de plume in place of Mr Scovel's name1—
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
Joseph Benson Gilder (1858–1936) was, with his
sister Jeannette Leonard Gilder (1849–1916), co-editor of The Critic, a literary magazine.
Notes
- 1. A reference to "Walt
Whitman in Camden" which appeared in The Critic on
February 28 under the signature of George Selwyn. It was reprinted in Authors at Home, ed. J. L. and J. B. Gilder (1888), and
in Critic Pamphlet No. 2 (1898), in which Whitman was
cited as the author and a page of the manuscript was reproduced in facsimile.
Apparently Whitman's original intention was to use the name of Whitman's friend,
the Camden lawyer James Matlack Scovel, as he had done in the article published
in the Springfield Republican in 1875 (see the letter
from Whitman to Rudolf Schmidt of July 31, 1875).
"Selwyn's" account was filled with factual errors. [back]