Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Sydney H. Vines, 27 November [1877]

Date: November 27, 1877

Whitman Archive ID: prc.00065

Source: Kendall Reed Collection. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Ted Genoways (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 7:51. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Alicia Bones, Nima Najafi Kianfar, Eder Jaramillo, and Nicole Gray




Camden New Jersey
U S America1

Nov 27—I send by mail to-day to same address as this card, the two Vols. L of G—and TR—please notify me (by postal card will do) soon as they reach you safely—2


Walt Whitman


Notes:

1. The envelope for this letter bears the address: Sydney H Vines B A | Christ's College, Cambridge [back]

2. Sydney Howard Vines (1849–1934) was among Edward Carpenter's circle of Whitman admirers in England. On November 13, Carpenter sent Whitman—in a letter now lost—Vines's request for books. On the same date he sent this letter to Vines, Whitman sent a letter to Carpenter, noting, "have to-day mailed Mr Vines' books" (The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–77), 3:103). At that time, Vines was Fellow and Lecturer in Botany at Christ's College, Cambridge, and later was named Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford. Whitman received word from Carpenter on December 19 that "I hear from Vines that your books have arrived" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906), 1:189). Vines's copy of Leaves of Grass inscribed by Whitman, "Sidney H. Vines from the author," was among the books offered for sale in the Spring 2001 catalog of Bertram Rota, Ltd., an antiquarian bookseller in London. [back]


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