Abstract
Using Wilkerson’s Caste and Isenberg’s White Trash, along with Andrew Lawson and William Dow, the Whitmans’ economic position becomes clear. Walt Whitman’s education and training as printer, newswriter, and school teacher in Brooklyn and congruent parts of New York.
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Notes
- 1.
Walt Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982: 691–92. Hereafter referenced as Library.
- 2.
Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Confusion of Tongues,” Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996: 25–26.
- 3.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 29–30.
- 4.
John A. Kouwenhoven, “Introduction,” Modern Library, ix. Drawing from Louisa Whitman’s papers held at Duke University, Clarence Gohdes and Rollo G. Silver add this comment: “Edward, her youngest son, was feeble-minded and crippled …. Jesse, her oldest son, had fallen from the mast of a ship and after being hospitalized for six months seems to have recovered, but in 1860 overt signs of insanity developed, and at last his attacks became so violent that in December, 1864, he was committed to an asylum. Andrew, another son, a joiner by trade, who lived not far away with his wife Nancy and two little boys, was taken into the army but was soon discharged.” Faint Clews and Indirections. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1949: 183. Similar descriptions appear to this day, as in John Tytell’s Reading New York. New York: Knopf, 2003: 118.
- 5.
Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980: 56–57.
- 6.
Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Library, 699.
- 7.
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash. New York: Viking, 2016: 2.
- 8.
Isenberg, White Trash, 3, 14.
- 9.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020: 290.
- 10.
Wilkerson, Caste, 44–45.
- 11.
Wilkerson, Caste, 327.
- 12.
Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Library, 699.
- 13.
Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Library, 700.
- 14.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 38–39.
- 15.
William Dow, Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 229. He usefully lists a number of Whitman’s editorials through the decade that show his political and aesthetic positions.
- 16.
Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006: xxiii–iv.
- 17.
Lawson, Walt Whitman, xv.
- 18.
Lawson, Walt Whitman, xiv.
- 19.
Dow, Narrating Class, 17.
- 20.
Dow, Narrating Class, 3, 17.
- 21.
Dow, Narrating Class, 23, 33.
- 22.
Dow, Narrating Class, 21.
- 23.
Dow, Narrating Class, 29.
- 24.
Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 323.
- 25.
Porte, Representative Man, 325.
- 26.
Fletcher, “The Book of a Lifetime,” 306–7.
- 27.
Fletcher, “The Book of a Lifetime,” 310.
- 28.
Richard Chase. Walt Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961: 13, 17–18, 45.
- 29.
Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” Library, 657, 666.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). The Pride of Family. In: Walt Whitman. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77665-7_2
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