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Camden
April 12 '87 A M
Dear friend
Yours of yesterday rec'd this morning1—I shall leave here in the
4:30 P M Camden via Trenton to NY train to–morrow, Wednesday, & expect to be in Jersey
City by or before 7, early evening—A friend, R. Pearsall Smith2 is convoying
me, & I understand I am to go with him to the Westminster Hotel, for the night—Yes, meet
me in Jersey City—I shall expect you:—the young man Wm Duckett3
is coming on with me—I am feeling better than for the last two weeks, & shall go through
with the lecture, according to announcement4—I am to have, (according
to wish & arrangement of Mr Smith) a reception at Westminster Hotel, Thursday evening—returning
here Friday—
Best love & thanks—
Walt Whitman
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Correspondent:
The naturalist John Burroughs
(1837–1921) met Whitman on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1864. After
returning to Brooklyn in 1864, Whitman commenced what was to become a decades-long
correspondence with Burroughs. Burroughs was magnetically drawn to Whitman.
However, the correspondence between the two men is, as Burroughs acknowledged,
curiously "matter-of-fact." Burroughs would write several books involving or
devoted to Whitman's work: Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and
Person (1867), Birds and Poets (1877), Whitman, A Study (1896), and Accepting
the Universe (1924). For more on Whitman's relationship with Burroughs,
see Carmine Sarracino, "Burroughs, John [1837–1921] and Ursula [1836–1917]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and
Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This letter has not been
located. [back]
- 2. Robert Pearsall Smith
(1827–1898) was a Quaker who became an evangelical minister associated
with the "Holiness movement." He was also a writer and businessman. Whitman
often stayed at his Philadelphia home, where the poet became friendly with the
Smith children—Mary, Logan, and Alys. For more information about Smith,
see Christina Davey, "Smith, Robert Pearsall (1827–1898)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 3. William H. Duckett
(1869–1902?) was Whitman's young Camden friend, who drove the poet's horse
and buggy, lived for a while in Whitman's house, and accompanied Whitman on
numerous trips. Duckett later established a career in the telegraphy industry;
he lived and worked in Ohio and North Carolina before passing away in his native
Philadelphia as a result of alcoholism in about 1902. For more information on
Duckett, see Stephanie M. Blalock and Brandon James O'Neil, "'I am more
interested than you know, Bill,': The Life and Times of William Henry
Duckett, Jr.," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
39.2-3 (2022), 89–117. [back]
- 4. The Lincoln lecture was a
tremendous success, and Whitman was so showered with adulation that he observed
in his Commonplace Book, "If I had staid longer, I sh'd have been killed with
kindness & compliments." The arrangements for the lecture were made by John
H. Johnston; see his letter to Whitman on March
24. The poet stayed at the Westminster Hotel in a suite once occupied by
the British novelist Charles Dickens. On April 13, Whitman was visited in the
suite by friends, including Johnston, Burroughs, the writer Edmund Clarence
Steadman, and the editor Richard Watson Gilder. At the Madison-Square Theatre on
the following day, he was escorted on stage by Duckett and gave his lecture
before an audience that included the poet James Russell Lowell, the statesman
John Hay, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the industrialist and
philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. After his speech he received "two or more
hundred friends" at the Hotel, appearing a "little fatigued," according to the
New York Evening Sun. On the following day, he sat for G.
C. Cox, the photographer, and Dora Wheeler, "portrait painter" (Clara Barrus,
Whitman and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston,
Houghton Mifflin, 1931], 264–265). A lengthy notice appeared in the New York Times on April 15. For this lecture, Whitman
received $600, $250 from the sale of tickets and $350 from Carnegie.
For more on Whitman's Lincoln lecture, see Larry D. Griffin, "'Death of Abraham Lincoln,'" Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, ed. (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998), 169–170. [back]