Title: Walt Whitman to Thayer & Eldridge, August 1860
Date: August 1860
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00147
Source: T. E. Hanley Collection, University of Texas. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 1:55. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Vanessa Steinroetter, and Alyssa Olson
[Walt Whitman referred to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press, who "wrote more than once to me while I was in Boston, to become the solicitor and medium of pecuniary aid from you to him, to support his paper. Such solicitations I declined to act upon. He then wrote directly to you—and you advanced him $200. I think the money has been well enough invested—The paper has many original . . ."]1
1. Incomplete letter
draft.
This fragment is written on the verso of a poem manuscript,
"The ball-room was swept and the floor white." The date is apparently
August, since on August 17, 1860, Thayer &
Eldridge thanked Whitman for his advice about the New-York
Saturday Press and informed him that the firm had made an offer to
Clapp to assume financial control on September 1. Thayer & Eldridge
believed that it could make the journal "pay": "Beside[s] we are deeply
interested in sustaining any journal that dares in these days of literary
flunkeyism to be independent, and make the literature of a country what it
should be." Clapp had suggested to Whitman on March
27, 1860, that he might get Thayer & Eldridge to "advance me say one hundred dollars on advertising
account." On May 14, 1860, Clapp was
"in a state of despair . . . all for the want of a paltry two or three
hundred dollars" which he needed to bring out the next issue. [back]