The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Edited by Edwin B. Bronner The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Edited by John B. Pickard. Cambridge , MaSs.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and London, England. 1975. 3 vol. Illus., index. $75.00. The long-looked-for collection of Whittier's letters is out at last; For twelve years Professor John B. Pickard of the University of Florida, author of John Greenleaf Whittier, An Introduction and Interpretation, has been collecting and editing them; three handsome volumes containing 1488 letters written over a period of sixty-four years are the admirable result. These letters have been selected from a total of 5500 known letters of which 4500 were written after 1861. Those omitted were brief notes, copies of autographed poems, refusals of invitations and similar trivia. The research done for these three volumes is formidable. Every name mentioned is identified in the footnotes. Quotations—and there were hundreds —are located and if necessary corrected; Whittier quoted most frequently from the Bible and copiously from Shakespeare, whose plays he knew from As You Like It to Troilus and Cressida (unusual in a Quaker of his period); also widely from Chaucer, Milton, Vaughan, Pope, Blake, Byron, Goethe and scores of others. The recipients of his letters are given brief biographical sketches and in some cases answering letters of interest are included in die footnotes; forgotten public events are explained. Manuscripts and other sources are located. All of this material is made accessible through a comprehensive index that occupies 128 pages of the final volume. The first two volumes contain all the extant letters from 1828, when Whittier was twenty-one, to 1860, totaling 961. Of these a little more dian half are manuscripts, the rest from hand-written or typewritten copies and from printed sources such as Samuel T. Pickard's definitive Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, or from newspapers. The 527 letters in the third volume are mostly from manuscripts. The original letters in all three volumes are scattered over the world in some seventy university and other libraries, in private collections and Quaker collections in Dublin and London. The letters are arranged chronologically in 15 parts, each part preceded by a Chronology and a five-page Preface, summarizing the events of the years covered, the whole making up a brief biography of Whittier. All of this scholarly apparatus is interesting and illuminating and with the letters presents a rounded portrait of a many-sided man and of the age in which he lived. The stream of letters to family, friends, fellow Quakers, abolitionists, editors, writers, congressmen, newspapers, editors, politicians, public figures of many varieties, reveals the development of a self-divided, ambitious, likable young farmer into a dedicated, effective, non-violent warrior for a great cause; from the local politician to a statesman-behind-the-scenes, from a 109 110QUAKER HISTORY writer of polemic verse to a much loved poet of nature and a man of deeply felt religion and something close to a saint with a sense of humor. Though his life-long bad health kept him confined to his small frame house in the village of Amesbury, Mass., where his fellow villagers knew him chiefly as a member of the school board and pillar of the small Friends Meeting , his correspondents, his interests and his influence ranged far over die world. His many letters to John Quincy Adams, to Henry Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner and Caleb Cushing, as well as the entire block of 196 letters written during the two years, 1838-1840, that he spent in Philadelphia editing The Pennsylvania Freeman, are especially interesting to students of the abolition movement. The letters to James T. Fields, his publisher of Ticknor and Fields, as well as those to Bayard Taylor, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes and others have literary interest. His letters to women have especial charm: to Elizabeth Lloyd Howell, with whom he was deeply in love and whom he came nearer to marrying than anyone else; and after his sister's death to a number of younger women friends who helped to fill the lonely places in the nearly thirty years remaining of his long life; to Gail Hamilton, the lively...