Worshipping Walt: Lancashire’s Whitman Disciples
Michael Robertson tells how a group of lower-middle-class men in late-Victorian England found the American poet an inspiration in their desire to reconcile spirituality, science and socialism.
On a spring evening in 1887, Dr John Johnston and Mr J.W. Wallace of Bolton laboured together over a letter to Walt Whitman, who was about to celebrate his sixty-eighth birthday. ‘Dear Walt,’ they boldly began – then, appalled at their temerity, hastened to explain:
In no less familiar or colder terms can we bring ourselves to address you, the most loved of friends, though such a salutation from strangers to anyone but yourself would seem an impertinence.
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