Footnotes

EMERSON TO CARLYLE: the friendship between the two dated back to 1833 when Emerson, bearing a letter of introduction from John Stuart Mill, sought out Thomas and Jane Carlyle, then living in Craigenputtoch obscurity: 'Emerson later described his host as "tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow ... clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour which floated everything he looked upon" (R. W. Emerson, English Traits, in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1903–4, 2.165). Eager for companionship, Carlyle was at his entertaining best: he impressed Emerson with his wide range of literary and philosophic knowledge and with the broad motifs of his non-sectarian spiritualism. Like Mill, who had met Carlyle in London, Emerson felt that Carlyle's charismatic presence and power for spiritual good overrode their differences of personality and belief' (Fred Kaplan, ODNB).

On 17 May 1858, Emerson wrote to Carlyle: 'Mr and Mrs Joseph Longworth of Cincinnati are going abroad on their travels. Possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. Their father, Nicholas Longworth, is one of the founders of the city of Cincinnati, a bigger town than Boston, where he is a huge land lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. And his family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in the Ohio Valley, as people who have well used their great wealth. His chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement of German planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to the general benefit. His son Joseph is a well-bred gentleman of literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely hospitable. His wife is a very attractive and excellent woman, and they are good friends of mine'. To which Carlyle replied on 2 June: 'Your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time. Nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score. -- If only these Cincinnati Patricians can find me here when they come? For I am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native Scotland probably) so soon as I can shake the final tag rags of Printer people off me; -- "surely within three weeks now!" I say to myself. But I shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will stand to her point, I hope'.

The present letter is not printed in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. II (1884). A letter by J. Jefferson to the ceramic designer [Maria Longworth] Storer (1891) is included in the lot.