The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Walt Whitman to Edward Carpenter, 3 May 1887
Date: May 3, 1887
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00557
Source: Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 4:89–90. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein, Kevin McMullen, and Stephanie Blalock
328 Mickle St—Camden New Jersey
U S America May 3 '871
Yours of Ap: 20 just rec'd & welcomed.2 Write oftener—The Staffords3 & I remember you with greatest affection & esteem—I also with deepest gratitude—I am still here in the same little old house—of course gradually sinking & dissolving—Harry S[tafford]4 had a surgical operation on his throat—it seems to have been properly done, & the cut is healing—He is at Marlton, New Jersey, married, has a child—I send you some papers—always best love—
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was an English
writer and Whitman disciple. Like many other young disillusioned Englishmen, he
deemed Whitman a prophetic spokesman of an ideal state cemented in the bonds of
brotherhood. Carpenter—a socialist philosopher who in his book Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure posited civilization as
a "disease" with a lifespan of approximately one thousand years before human
society cured itself—became an advocate for same-sex love and a
contributing early founder of Britain's Labour Party. On July 12, 1874, he wrote for the first time to Whitman: "Because you
have, as it were, given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually
in my heart . . . . For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest
instinct of their nature." For further discussion of Carpenter, see Arnie
Kantrowitz, "Carpenter, Edward [1844–1929]," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes:
1. This letter is addressed: Edward Carpenter | Commonwealth Café | Scotland Street | Sheffield England. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | May 3 | 12 M | 87. [back]
2. Carpenter's letter of April 20 had the awe-stricken and confessional tone characteristic of Whitman's youthful admirers: "Dear old Walt—I was right glad to get your card and find you hadn't forgotten me; and that you still keep going along, fairly cheerful." Carpenter went on to relate: "I have had a baddish time the last few days, and feel tired out & sick. A very dear friend of mine—we have been companions day & night for many months now—has taken to girl whom I can't say I much care for. . . . Just now I feel as if I had lost him, and am rather dumpy—tho' I don't know that it will be altogether bad in the end." Whitman received £25 from Carpenter on May 23 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). [back]
3. Whitman often visited the family at their farm at Timber Creek in Laurel Springs, New Jersey; in the 1880s, the Staffords sold the farm and moved to nearby Glendale. [back]
4. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]