ABSTRACT

Unsigned review by William Howitt or William J. Fox, London Weekly Dispatch (1856). Included in Imprints, pp. 29–30.

The attribution of this unsigned favourable review is of some interest. Unfortunately authorities equally eminent in Whitman studies disagree about it. The attribution to William Howitt is made by Gay Wilson Allen on p. 176 of his book The Solitary Singer, and he in turn bases this upon the volume New York Dissected, edited by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari and published in New York in 1936. Professor Harold Boldgett, on p. 14 in his excellent study Walt Whitman in England (Ithaca, New York, 1934), attributes the review to the lesser known critic WilliamJ. Fox.

Although it is difficult to pin down the attribution of this brief, interesting notice with complete certainty, the balance of the evidence seems to favour the authorship of William J. Fox (1786- 1864). The review appeared around the middle of March, 1856 in the Weekly Dispatch. The attribution by Allen, Holloway and Adimari is based upon the reprint of it in Fowler and Wells’ Life Illustrated on 19 April 1856. Fowler and Wells had an interest in the success of Leaves of Grass, the second edition of which they were to bring out two months later. What makes the Howitt authorship of this review unlikely is that he appears to have written a review of the Leaves in the Spiritual Magazine, of January 1870. This was a review of the Rossetti Selections from Whitman, published in London two years earlier. This latter review is quoted in Carl Ray Woodring’s Victorian Sampler: William and Mary Howitt (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, Kansas, 1952). Although it has some favourable things to say about Whitman, it is altogether more critical of his accomplishment (‘ . frequently oppressive’) than this review. Fox, on the other hand, as we learn from the biography of him by Richard Garnett (London, 1910), was a regular contributor to the Weekly Dispatch from 1846 to 1856 and his 79contributions, according to Garnett, ‘are practically a chronicle of Radical thought of the day’. There is no evidence to support Howitt’s discovery of Whitman much earlier than the appearance of his review in 1870.