Autograph Letter, signed. 3 pp.
To an unknown American correspondent: “…I returned to England a week or two ago and found your kind letter and parcels awaiting me. I am charmed to have the large paper edition of Praed’s Poem’s and shall have it bound as it deserves. I sent the copies to Mr. Coleridge and Mr. [Willkie?] Collins and had acknowledgements from both…I have written to Mr. Holmes to thank him for his 2 Vols. I did receive Mr. Saxe’s letter, as also one from Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Bryant. I have not heard from Mr. Lowell…I received the books for which I am much obliged…I am not sorry to have Whitman, as he is a curiosity…I hope if you ever come across a notice of my book you will kindly send it me. You said I think, that Mr. N.P. Willis might notice it…I congratulate you on your late War successes, but you know it is very difficult for an Englishman to satisfy an American of the warmth of his sympathy. Your newspapers say that America should declare war with England…I have talked to many Americans and they all say, and I believe them, that when the War is over, the North will declare War with England. Now we do not wish to go to War, and it is very difficult for us to sympathize with a nation that intends to go to War with us when it suits them. If the North overcame the South, which you say is not far distant, I feel sure they will declare War with England…” Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821-1895) was a Victorian poet and famous bibliophile - his Rowfant collection, “one of the famous private libraries of the world”, was sold in America after his death. Most importantly, he was a friend of the greatest British writers of his time: Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Ruskin, George Eliot, Rossetti, Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, even illustrator Kate Greenaway. Locker had close family ties to America: His grandfather had been a good friend of George Washington’s, and his future father-in-law, whose surname “Lampson” he added to his own in later life, was a rich British baronet born in Vermont. This remarkable letter, written during the early months of the American Civil War, reveals his literary and personal ties across the Atlantic, mentioning Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Walt Whitman – and expressing his fear that manifest British sympathy for the Confederacy might lead to war between the United States and England in the not-too-distant future.