Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 136: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Feb. 1, 1876,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 389-390 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 389, continued:]

136. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 282

My dear Mr. Ingram,

The tone of your letter of Jan. 13, received last evening, has so profoundly grieved and surprised me that I hardly know how to reply to it.

I can well understand your indignation at Gill's presumptuous claim that you were indebted to him for a considerable portion of your material! I cannot understand your assumption that I am in any way responsible for his offences. You must strangely have misunderstood my letter, if you thought that I countenanced or excused them. I simply attempted to account to you for the antagonism which had induced this preposterous & incredible & uncredited claim.

I returned no answer to Mr. Widdleton's letter introductory to the volume (a copy of which I sent you), simply because I would not seem to endorse this statement of Gill's which he, Mr. Widdleton, may have had pecuniary reasons for inserting.

I could not have written anything for publication of the subject without telling a long story & invoking a bitter controversy, & one which would have been attended with a painful notoriety.

Moreover, Mr. Gill's claim to have written an unpublished Romance, the first complete vindication of Poe from the slanders of Griswold, a part of which he permitted you to use, was not a claim to injure you, so preposterous and improbable was it. You exaggerate the importance of the Boston publisher whom you seem to accept as the representative man of “the North” — “one of a crew whom you think it would be better to wipe your hands of, & give up having anything further to do [page 390:] or say in connection with Edgar Poe,” in whose attempted vindication you say you have sacrificed time & money & health.

For all this I am sincerely & profoundly grieved; in truth I have been anxious from the beginning. If you will look at my first letter to you, written in reply to yours of December [18]73, asking for information as to the facts of Edgar Poe's life, you will see that I warned you that you had a difficult task before you, that you would find the facts of his life singularly elusive & difficult to authenticate.

Since your very first paper on the subject, I have watched your course with interest not unmingled with intense anxiety. You will remember how repeatedly I urged you to “keep cool,” to curb your impetuous spirit, & not to believe every new story or resent every supposed wrong or insult. Your success has surpassed my most sanguine hopes.

I will not say how earnestly I have sought to further your wishes in everything that lay in my power, & now that you are about to wipe your hands of all your Northern friends, I shall not cease to care for your prosperity & success in any new literary enterprise to which you may devote your genius & your talents.

Did you receive the paper I sent you on your article in the London Quarterly on Politian? It was much talked of.

Did I mention to you in my last hurried note that the lady in whose album (as Mr. Didier claims) the Scribner facsimile poem was written was Mrs. Judge Balderston?

I knew nothing of the Poe letter or letters to me of which you wrote having been published in the Graphic, and have not yet seen them.

Gill has had no new facts from me since the winter of 1873-74, when you first wrote to me, but there are some interesting papers in his Laurel Leaf article. I wish I had a copy to send you.

And now, my dear friend, I subscribe myself for time & eternity (dastardly Northerner though I am), your sincere friend,

P.S. I have not had a line from Rose since she went away from us. Her father told me last night that she was well.