Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 140: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Feb. 29, 1876,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 399-401 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 399, continued:]

140. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 285

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Since reading the “Reply” to your “Disclaimer,” a copy of which was sent me yesterday by the author, I am not so much surprised at the aggressive tone of your last letters. It may be that his letter to Widdleton contained an insinuation that I approved his course. The “Reply” shows that he is utterly reckless in his statements.

I wrote him a letter yesterday, a verbatim copy of which I send you. While I deeply feel the wrong & the pain inflicted by the tone of your last letters — your resentment of my disposition to make some allowance for the irritation Gill felt in finding that you had forestalled him in his desire to write the life of Poe seems to me somewhat more intelligible.

I told him in my letter that I felt it due to you & to myself to make to [page 400:] you the same explanation of the quoted paragraphs from my letters, paragraphs which he had printed without consulting me on the subject, that I had made to him.

I received this morning from Wm. D. O’Connor a press copy of a letter to Miss Rice, written at her request for the Memorial volume which she is preparing. It is an eloquent & superb defence & characterization of Poe. The pressure of O’Connor's official duties had delayed it beyond the time when she had hoped to receive it, but it will doubtless soon be printed, if not in that volume, in some magazine or literary journal.

You say you have “wiped your hands of the Poe matters,” but you may not object to read an allusion made to your own work on one of its closing pages, or rather its closing paragraph:

For I know that his vindication draws nigh. He has been long coffined {I cannot distinctly make out all the words in the press copy} in slander, but the miserable tangle of the lies & forgeries of Griswold & his allies will soon be cleared away forever. Thanks for this to the movement begun by Mrs. Whitman in her beautiful little book, Edgar Poe & His Critics, & soon to be completed by the patient research & clear insight of Ingram. Thanks also to you & your coadjutors for fresh glory upon his memory and the flower of marble upon his grave. I am, dear Miss Rice

Dec. 9, 1876[1875]

[Enclosure: Sarah Helen Whitman to William F. Gill. Copy]

I have read with regret & amazement your “Reply” to Mr. Ingram's “Disclaimer.” It were far better to have abandoned a claim which you must see to be untenable and which in your recent interview with me I thought you frankly admitted to be so. The only evidence you adduce of Mr. Ingram's having been permitted to use “material previously assigned” to you, is assumed to be presented in extracts from two of my letters to you, containing three requests. The first request cited is:

Will you lend me for a few days the extract which I gave you from the literary recollections of Mr. Gowans, the New York bookseller? I have recently received a letter from an English gentleman who has written an article on Griswold's “Memoir” of Poe, which he tells me will shortly appear in an English monthly. He asks my aid as to certain points of Mr. Poe's history, & as it is in furtherance of his request that I wish to send him the favorable testimony of “the truthful & uncompromising Scotch bookseller.” I will return the copy in a few days.

The paper in question was a printed slip from the New York Evening Mail. I had no idea that in asking the privilege of copying it for an English correspondent I was violating the International [page 401:] Copyright Law, as a paragraph in your “Reply” seems to charge me with doing. On the contrary, I thought you would be glad to give further publicity to testimony so valid & so favorable to one whose cause you were generously proposing to advocate. Your prompt compliance with my request, which I gratefully acknowledged, was unaccompanied by any intimation that my request was a presumptuous one.

Your second citation from the same letter is an incorrectly quoted request for the return of a letter addressed to me in the autumn of 1849 by Dr. Rufus W. Griswold, a letter which I had lent to you for your private perusal, under the strictest injunctions of secrecy — a letter which you had apologised for not sooner returning, under date of October 13, 1873, three months before I had any correspondence with Mr. Ingram, who has never used the letter, never even seen it. Yet you have quoted my request for its return in evidence that you had kindly permitted Mr. Ingram to use material which had exclusively been assigned to you! — which had been asked & obtained of you “on his account.”

Your third & last extract from my letters was a request to be allowed to copy an autograph letter from Mr. John Willis of Orange County, Virginia — one of Poe's classmates at the University. I had promised Mr. Ingram to ask you for a copy of this letter, but you will remember that you never answered this request. You had an undoubted right to withhold the letter, since I had given it to you unconditionally, nor did I blame you for withholding it, knowing how valuable all such “material” had become. But was it right, in quoting my letter, to leave it to be inferred that you had complied with it?

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There were other corrections of unfair statements, but this covers the principal misinterpretations.

I am anxious to know how he will meet this sifting of evidence.