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Oblong 12mo. "I forward to you by mail to-day, addressed same as this card, a set of my Books, Two Volumes. Please send me word (by postal card will do) soon as they reach you safely." George Henry Lewes, a respected Victorian author, critic, and philosopher, is perhaps best known as the soulmate and common-law husband of the writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). In 1856, as the editor of the London Leader, a prominent literary periodical, he and Eliot became acquainted with Walt Whitman's poetry, and each have been credited with the first positive British review of Leaves of Grass, "Transatlantic Latter-Day Poetry," which was published in the newspaper's June 7th issue. However, Eliot was sensitive to the potential damage her relationship with the married Lewes could cause to both her social reputation and literary celebrity, and it was this, exacerbated by the increasingly conservative nature of English sexual politics in the 1870s, that caused her to pull back from her public advocacy of Whitman's provocative work, most notably in her unsuccessful attempt to remove at Lewes' instigation a Whitman quote she had included as an epigraph for Chapter 29 in her controversial 1876 novel, Daniel Deronda. This book her last was published less than one month after Whitman, seemingly unaware of the couple's change of heart, sent this brief postcard to Lewes. The "two volumes" he refers to are almost certainly Whitman's combined author's edition of Two Rivulets and Leaves of Grass, which he had printed himself in Camden, NJ, that summer. Postcard, autograph text recto and verso, franked. Light toning along right edge, with small crease lower right corner. Addressed to Lewes in London.
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