Walt Whitman's "Who Was Swedenborg?"

(ProQuest: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.)An article entitled "Who Was Swedenborg?" appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times on June 15, 1858.1 Although no byline accompanies the text, substantial evidence points toward Walt Whitman as the author of this editorial article on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Swedish mystic, scientist, and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg. Whitman's professional involvement with the Daily Times began as early as 1857 and lasted possibly through the spring of 1859. Owing in large part to Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz's I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times (1932), biographers have long assumed that Whitman served as the editor and, by extension, as the author of the editorial columns that appeared in the Daily Times between the years 1857 and 1859.2 Indeed, while Holloway and Schwarz do not include "Who Was Swedenborg?" in / Sit and Look Out, Holloway does reprint an excerpt of the article in the second volume of The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (1921).3Jerome Loving, however, casts doubt on the authorship of some material from the Daily Times long attributed to Whitman, and he has shown in his biography Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999) that Whitman more likely worked as a contributor and occasional editorial writer rather than as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper.4 It is nonethe- less almost certain that Whitman penned the "Who Was Swedenborg? " editorial, as Holloway claimed long ago. Indeed, two sets of archival documents today held in the Trent Collection at Duke University pro- vide persuasive evidence for Whitman's authorship.The first document is an article entitled "The New Jerusalem," which Whitman clipped from the original publication and on which he made handwritten marginal commentary (see Figure 1). Richard Mau- rice Bucke, one of Whitman's literary executors, first enumerated this piece of marginalia amongst 554 other newspaper and magazine articles found in Whitman's possession at the time of the poet's death in 1892.5 The accumulation of so many news clippings serves as a testament to Whitman's varied intellectual interests as well as to his infamous hoard- ing instincts. It would be erroneous to assume that Whitman's preserva- tion of "The New Jerusalem" article in and of itself suggests anything more than Whitman's passing curiosity about Swedenborg's life and teachings. However, the similarities between "The New Jerusalem" text and the Daily Times's "Who Was Swedenborg? " reveal important details about Whitman's awareness of and interest in Swedenborgianism in the years surrounding the 1858 composition and publication of the Daily Times article. The depth of Swedenborg's influence on Whitman is undeniable, as demonstrated by Anders Hallengren in two substantial publications on the subject: Deciphering Reality: Swedenborg, Whitman and the Search for the Language of Nature (1992) and " A Hermeneutic Key to the title Leaves of Grass" (2004).6As of February 2013, the Trent Collection's archival description of "The New Jerusalem" lists this document as an anonymous and undated piece of Whitman marginalia, filed under the generic heading, "notes on Swedenborg."7 Using digital tools, I have determined that "The New Jerusalem" article originally appeared in the February 23, 1856, edition of Charles Dickens' weekly publication, Household Words.8 Although published anonymously, "The New Jerusalem" article was written by George Hogarth, the father of Dickens' wife, Catherine Thomson Dickens (nee Hogarth).9 Dickens exercised firm editorial control over Household Words, and, despite the fact that there were "some three hun- dred ninety writers" who contributed to the publication, Dickens did not allow other authors' names to appear in the journal's pages (Lohrli 24) ,10 By attaching only his name to the articles, advertisements, and fictional contributions that appeared in Household Words, Dickens im- plicitly endorsed as his own the opinions expressed within the pages of his publication. …