Camden1
April 16 '87
By oversight I left a book "Poets of America,"2 by E C
Stedman3 —in my room in the hotel, Friday last—Won't you hunt it up,
& kindly send it to J H Johnston's, Jewelry store,4 150 Bowery, cor: Broome st.
for me?
Walt Whitman
Correspondent:
Westminster Hotel was
located on the intersection of Irving Place and 16th Street in New York. It was
sold and renamed in 1895. Whitman and his companion William Duckett stayed at
the Westminster Hotel when the poet gave his Lincoln lecture in New York's
Madison Square Theatre on April 14. A reception for Whitman was held at the
hotel.
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Proprietor | Westminster Hotel | Irving Place | New York City. It is postmarked:
Camden, N.J. | Apr 16 | 3 PM | 87. [back]
- 2. The book was inscribed
"New York April 14th 1887" (See Horace Traubel, With Walt
Whitman in Camden, Thursday, April 26, 1888). [back]
- 3. Edmund Clarence Stedman
(1833–1908) was a man of diverse talents. He edited for a year the Mountain County Herald at Winsted, Connecticut, wrote
"Honest Abe of the West," presumably Lincoln's first campaign song, and served
as correspondent of the New York World from 1860 to 1862.
In 1862 and 1863 he was a private secretary in the Attorney General's office
until he entered the firm of Samuel Hallett and Company in September, 1863. The
next year he opened his own brokerage office. He published many volumes of poems
and was an indefatigable compiler of anthologies, among which were Poets of America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1885) and A Library of American Literature from the Earliest
Settlement to the Present Time, 11 vols. (New York: C. L. Webster,
1889–90). For more, see Donald Yannella, "Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 4. John H. Johnston (1837–1919) was a New York
jeweler and close friend of Whitman. Johnston was also a friend of Joaquin
Miller (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, August 14, 1888). Whitman visited the Johnstons for the
first time early in 1877. In 1888 he observed to Horace Traubel: "I count
[Johnston] as in our inner circle, among the chosen few" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Wednesday, October 3, 1888). See also Johnston's letter about
Whitman, printed in Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man,
Poet and Friend (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1915), 149–174. For
more on Johnston, see Susan L. Roberson, "Johnston, John H. (1837–1919) and Alma Calder," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and
Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]