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Camden Sunday P M1
July 24 '87
Well, Hank dear boy, how are you standing it this hot summer? Eva2 I want you to write
to me & tell me. We have had it fearful hot & tainted here for over seven
weeks, but I am alive & kicking yet—it is rainy to-day but warm
yet—I shall drive down to your parents3 in a day or two—(intended to have
gone to-day)—Nothing very new with me, much the same old story—H
G4 is here yet—the sculptor Morse5 also—I remain in good spirits but a pretty bad case
bodily.
Love to you & E & the little one6
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
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).
Notes
- 1. This postal card is
addressed: Harry Lamb Stafford | RR Station | Marlton | New Jersey. It is
postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Jul 24 | 5 PM | 87; Marlton | Jul | 25 | N.J. [back]
- 2. Eva Westcott married Harry Stafford in 1884. [back]
- 3. Susan (1833–1910) and
George Stafford (1827–1892) were the parents of Whitman's young friend,
Harry Stafford. Whitman often visited the family at their farm at Timber Creek
in Laurel Springs (near Glendale), New Jersey, and was sometimes accompanied by
Herbert Gilchrist; in the 1880s, the Staffords sold the farm and moved to nearby
Glendale. For more, see David G. Miller, "Stafford, George and Susan M.," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 4. Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist
(1857–1914), son of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, was an English painter
and editor of Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887). For more information, see Marion Walker Alcaro,
"Gilchrist, Herbert Harlakenden (1857–1914)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 5. Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903)
was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to
1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden
many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier
bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006), 105–109. [back]
- 6. Dora Stafford was the first child
of Harry and Eva Stafford. [back]