ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT OF WALT WHITMAN’S
“BY EMERSON’S GRAVE”
There is also some impalpable quality in a great man’s handwriting which draws one to it; people who have never dreamed of collecting, who never heard of the collecting mania, will suddenly react to old letters and documents. They are mad to own them. Some human attraction exists in the written word of other years quite different from the appeal made by printing. This appeal is primarily emotional, rather than intellectual. Especially is this true of autograph letters. They naturally hold a more personal message, in that they interpret the spirit and reflect the period of the writer, who in informal letters is off his guard, quite unlike the mood that an author brings to his work when he knows it may be published. I have known people to weep with delight at the sight of one of those charmingly familiar letters written by Bobbie Burns. Indeed, I once became rather dizzy with joy myself, when I bought the Harry B. Smith Library, which included that famous letter of Charles Dickens about the inception of Pickwick, which he writes to his publishers, Chapman and Hall. It is dated 1836, and was written one Thursday evening from Furnival’s Inn, London. It says:—
Dear Sirs:—
Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory. The first chapter will be ready tomorrow.
I want to publish The Strange Gentleman. If you have no objection to doing it, I should be happy to let you have the refusal of it. I need not say that nobody else has seen or heard of it.
Believe me (in Pickwickian haste)
Faithfully yours,
Charles Dickens
