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John Greenleaf Whittier’s Seventieth Birthday on monday, 17 December 1877, the Atlantic threw a party that did double duty by celebrating John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday and its own twenty-year survival. William Dean Howells planned the event as if it were a grand opening of one of his farces—published for home entertainment in the Atlantic’s Christmas issue—at the Boston Museum. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , and Oliver Wendell Holmes agreed to play their venerated selves, with Mark Twain providing the comic relief. For this mustering of contributors from 1857 to 1877, the magazine got its publicity machine churning early. Readers of the Boston Daily Advertiser were privy to news of those who accepted or declined invitations, and as the day neared, it could confidently predict that the assembled company would be “the most notable that has ever been seen in this country between four walls.”1 At six o’clock on the appointed day, guests gathered for cocktails in the Brunswick Hotel abutting Copley Square. At seven, they adjourned to the east dining hall to find their places and autograph seating charts commemorating their attendance. In honor of Whittier, the Atlantic had commissioned his portrait, which hung—garlanded with English ivy—behind the head table. To its left, a winter scene of his house in Amesbury, Massachusetts, recalled his most famous poem. “So days went on,” he 12 It was not given to all of us to be born in Boston, but when we find ourselves in The Atlantic we all seem to suffer a seachange , and aesthetic renaissance; a livelier literary conscience stirs in us; we have its fame at heart; we must do our best for Maga’s name as well as for our own hope; we are naturalized Bostonians in the finest and highest sense. w. d. howells, Whittier Dinner Speech, 1877 John Greenleaf Whittier’s Seventieth Birthday [ 101 ] wrote in Snowbound (1866), “a week had passed / Since the great world was heard from last.” Striking a chord with war-weary readers nostalgic for simpler times, in its first few months Snowbound sold twenty thousand volumes, or ten times what the usual collection of poetry sold. The Atlantic’s publisher, Henry Houghton, presided at the dinner, and Howells acted as master of ceremonies. Lending “a reverend, almost holy air” to the cavernous room, Emerson sat at Whittier’s right next to Longfellow . Oliver Wendell Holmes, Howells, and Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s neighbor and editor of the Hartford Courant, made up Houghton ’s left flank. It took nearly three hours for the guests to work their way through the menu, which started with raw oysters paired with a sauterne and proceeded through separate courses of soup, fish, capon, and mutton . The entrees included squabs en compote and fillet of beef in Madera sauce with a separate serving of game. Cheese, fruit, and coffee followed the pastries. If diners had not had their fill with the sauterne, sherry, Chablis , champagne (Dry Verzenay and Roederer Imperial), Burgundy, and claret, they could request a glass of cognac topped with flaming sugar. At ten minutes past ten Houghton called his guests to order. The doors to the east room swung open, and a throng of women entered to take seats set up between the tables. The servers (mostly African Americans) took their stations along the back wall, where they, too, were allowed to witness the so-called “literary exercises”—or what organizers called “A Rich Feast of Reason.” Houghton addressed his opening remarks to the magazine’s younger contributors. Look to the nation’s primeval forests, he exhorted, to the prairies, rivers, and mountains of the West, the brooks and rivulets of New England, or the country in its entirety as it struggles with the “enfranchisement of a whole race from bondage.” For twenty years, the Atlantic Monthly had stood for “the highest American culture in literature, the most impartial and independent criticism in science and art, and the freest discussion of politics, not from a partisan standpoint, but, as heretofore , in the cause of righteousness, truth, and common progress.” With “the best business talent” and “the loftiest efforts of authorship” it would continue its domination. The audience rose to its feet and cheered. Howells followed Houghton’s introduction with an exuberant tribute to the magazine. He recalled what it had meant to him as a young man in the Western Reserve of Ohio, where the arrival of a new Atlantic drew a [3...

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