Thanks, thanks indeed, dear friend—to yourself, Mr Roberts, Bessie and Isabella Ford, C R Ashbee, Wm Thompson,2 & brother & sister, for the kind & generous birthday gift—for your letter with the £45 which has just reached me—
We have fine weather here, & I am enjoying it—My health remains nearly as usual, but there is a little decline & additional feebleness every successive year—as is natural.
The Staffords are all living and well—I drive down there Sundays & they often speak of you. Harry (at Marlton, New Jersey)3—and Ruth4 (in Kansas) are some time married, & have children.
Love to you & to B[essie] and I[sabella] F[ord]— Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
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).