Whitman and the Irish

4. Boston, 1860

4 B O S T O N , 1 8 6 0 “I rose this morning early to get betimes in Boston town . . .” “Boston Ballad” In February 1860, with no apparent instigation on his part, Walt Whitman received a letter from the Boston publishers Charles Eldridge and William Thayer proclaiming, “We want to be the publishers of Walt Whitman’s poems.”1 The tone of the letter was exciting, with a kind of electric quality about it that appealed to Whitman. The writers, both still in their twenties, claimed to have read Leaves of Grass at its first publication when they were clerks in the firm they now owned; they declared it “a true poem and writ by a true man.” Whitman had an idea from the letter just how effective they might be in their advertising of books, for the writers declared, “We are young men. We ‘celebrate’ ourselves by acts. Try us. You can do us good. We can do you good — pecuniarily.”2 Thayer later claimed to have been the sole writer of the letter, executed with his partner’s approval. So proud was he of it that in his unpublished autobiography he says Whitman later showed the letter to Emerson, who expressed his delight that Boston had such a free press in the hands of such capable young men. The previous editions of Leaves of Grass, in 1855 and 1856, had been self-publications printed by Rome Brothers in Brooklyn, with the first edition distributed by Fowler and Wells of New York and the second by the author. As Thayer later explained it, because Fowler and Wells “could not endure the assaults of the critics, and some of the sentiments of the book were not acceptable to some readers ,” they had notified Whitman of their intention “to discontinue selling the book.” Without saying how they learned of this, Thayer continues, My partner and myself were indignant, and by letter informed the “Good Grey Poet” that there was one free press at least, that one controlled by Thayer and Eldridge, which was freely offered to him. The result was the publication of a superb edition of the book under Whitman’s personal supervision. It did not sell rapidly but the demand was moderately steady and showed a gradual enlargement all the time we had control of business. Our motto was to stimulate home talent, and encourage young authors.3 Whitman had hoped to find a publisher for another edition of Leaves and had been actively seeking publication outlets for individual poems preparatory to the event. Now, suddenly, the opportunity presented itself, along with an invitation to come to Boston and oversee the edition himself. These, then, were the circumstances that brought Whitman, for the first time, to the city that was not only the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation but the city with the second largest Irish population in America. More significantly, it brought him into a hotbed of antislavery activity supported by the intellectual transcendentalist faction to whom, on this matter, the Boston Irish were adamantly opposed. Predicting which of the two groups Whitman would side with seems not to be difficult, given his desire to continue to impress Emerson and his eagerness to publish another edition of Leaves; but, as it turned out, Whitman’s workingclass attitudes overrode all other considerations, and while he was not openly supportive of the Irish point of view, it becomes clear that he shared their sentiments. Thayer and Eldridge were very much involved in Boston’s rampant radicalism, especially abolitionism, which they hoped to advance through their publications. They were full of plans and enthusiasm , “go-ahead fellows,” as Whitman described them, of the sort he had been hoping to find. With the exception of some copyrights and stereotype plates acquired at the time they purchased the publishing house, all of their publishing ventures, other than Leaves of Grass, were in the antislavery cause. Among these was to be a novel, “an American Novel,” as Eldridge emphasized to the neophyte novelist chosen to produce this marvel, William Douglas O’Connor, who signed a contract with the firm in the same month as Whitman.4 O’Connor’s book proved to be Harrington: A Story of True Love, a romance about a slave who escapes the South and makes his way to Boston, only to find there conditions of gross inequality. Through this plot device O’Connor managed to rebuke both North and South { 76 } b...