I was right glad to hear of you again through the medium of the newspaper, you so
kindly sent me, I have been thinking of writing you afew
lines these months past, only I was afraid your illness1 would
prevent you form
feeling any interest in one so far away as me, and I also felt so deeply for you
that I did not like to disturb the repose you seemed to need from your Duty.
the enclosed papers2 will show you the use I have made of the paper, so that other
English friends of yours should also learn the good news from Camden. Hope these few
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Chapters upon you and your work may make your work and you more known to our working
Classes the periodical in which they were published as principally its main subscribers
amongst them. the writer of them is a fellow of deep sympathy and has contributed from
time to time some fine feeling and Sympathetic articles to its pages. the first one I
noted was on W.Blake3 our Poet Artist of whom
Swineburne 4 has
written of so nobly and so well. I post these by letter (and send also two by newspaper
Post,) so that I may feel somewhat certain some of them will reach you. I had some hopes
of seeing you in our land, and
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was delighted beyond measure when I saw in our papers our Tennyson5
had written to invite you to visit him, I also feel glad to be enabled to inform you
that W.M. Rossetti's6 Edition7 has been
all sold.
and the 1872 are subscribed too by our English Publisher has also met with a good sale,
of course in a way that is not very complimentary to English appreciation of your Work.
I.E. by being sold in what is termed the "remainder sale" of
course my own feeling respecting this is, it gives to people of small means an opportunity
to possess a Book they
otherwise would never have, "so out of evil cometh forth good"
so saith the Old Book
last year I was down at oxford at the time Emerson8 was there, I had
no opportunity to speak to him of you,
that is I did not think it wise to open the question at the times when I saw. I would
gladly have done so, only I was not quite certain how he felt towards you, so as he did
not name you out anytime I was in his company as a listener at Max Muller's,9
I thought it best to be silent, and while at oxford I wandered through the Marketplace
(for I love to mingle with all kinds of my fellow men, but I most especially love country
folk, fisher folk, and hard workers amongst our people I dearly love to mingle with and we
chat in their ways, and to enjoy a kind feeling of sympathy one with the other on these
occassions .) well while I wandered here
and there I saw a stout wellbuilt man in a small shop selling paper and when I looked at
his wares I saw thereon your Family name, so felt a desire to
talk with him. I bought some paper then had some talk and he said the only persons he
Knew bearing the name lived at Egham in Surrey and where
mostly Market Gardners.
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and one branch of the family had been Stewards to the Duke of Richmond, and one had emigrated
to America some distant relation of his family years ago, but they had never heard any
news of them—so when I told him there was such a name in America owned by a family
there and one of them was a poet, he thought perhaps it might be possible you
where a desendant
of that distant relative. he was quite a build of man like you, a noble large bodied and
large featured man, full of seeming good honest purpose in his nature, and more like a
farmer then a humbl
Stationer, so that he did honour to the Stock, though not exactly
in his trade. he was a type of man I like to see, only he seemed rather confined in his
ideas of Books.—
I sent to him some small notice of you and your work, from Chambers paper, but I never received any reply, so feel afraid your work is not of a kind to suit his tastes. I note also recently your Poem on Lincoln has been read in London at a Liberary Association, so slowly though I suppose and hope certainly will you become known to us more widely and truly. Well I must conclude this rambling note, with a hearty wish that you will be once again, able to do some more work for our race and help on the Life, that our hope is! yet shall be. Ruskin10 is also working hard too to help on a nobler life, and one not much unlike the one you also long to see. so many souls labouring for one end must someday effect the accomplishment of the "Golden Days" so long sung, so long toiled for, prayed for—and fought for!!
Yours Affectionately T DixonCorrespondent:
Thomas Dixon (1831–1880), a corkcutter of
Sunderland, England, was one of Walt Whitman's early English admirers. In 1856,
he had bought copies of Leaves of Grass from a book
peddler; one of these copies was later sent by William B. Scott to William
Michael Rossetti. Dixon vigorously supported cultural projects and represented
the ideal laborer of John Ruskin, who printed many of his own letters to the
corkcutter in Time and Tide (1867). See Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto
(1892), 2, 32–33, 267–269; Harold Blodgett, Walt
Whitman in England (1934), 15–17; The Works of
John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1905), 17:
lxxviii–lxxix.