The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Jeannette L. Gilder, 27 May [1884]
Date: May 27, 1884
Whitman Archive ID: tex.00443
Source: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 3:370. 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 and Kyle Barton
Private
328 Mickle st Camden
May 27
My dear friend
If convenient & you can print the following, just as it is,1 put in & oblige your friend
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Jeannette Leonard Gilder (1849–1916) helped
her brother, Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), edit Scribner's
Monthly and then, with another brother, Joseph Benson Gilder (1858–1936), co-edited
the Critic (which she co-founded in 1881). For more, see
Susan L. Roberson, "Gilder, Jeannette L. (1849–1916)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. The Critic printed on May 31 "A Fabulous Episode," in which Whitman, writing in the third person, repudiated an anecdote related by James Berry Bensel in the Lynn Saturday Union of May 24: when Whitman allegedly asked Longfellow for permission to dedicate to him the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the latter was ready to consent if certain passages were excised. The notice in the Lynn newspaper was sent to Whitman by S. W. Foss on May 26, 1884. [back]