System Number: 11398
Date: [27 December 1883][1]
Author: JW
Place: [St Ives]
Recipient: Edmund Hodgson Yates[2]
Place: [London]
Repository: Published
Document Type: PL[3]
Delightful! Atlas -
I have read here[4], to the idle miners - culture in their manners curiously, at this season, blended with intoxication - your brilliant and graphic description of 'Arry[5] at the other end of my arrangement in telescopic lenses.
The sensitive sons of the Cornish caves, by instinct refined, revel in the writhing of the resurrected 'Arry.
Our natures are evidently of the same dainty brutality. Cruelty to the critic after demise is a revelation, and the story of 'Arry pursued with post-mortem, and, for Sunday demonstration, kept by galvanism from his grave, is to them most fascinating.
I have, my sympathetic Atlas, the success that might have been Edgar Poe's[6], could he have read to such an audience the horrible "Case of Mr Waldemar."[7]
This document is protected by copyright.
Notes:
1. [27 December 1883]
Dated from press-cutting.
2. Edmund Hodgson Yates
Edmund Hodgson Yates (1831-1894), novelist, 'Atlas' columnist and editor-proprietor of the World [more].
3. PL
Published in the column 'What the World Says' in the World, no. 496, vol. 20, 2 January 1884, p. 17. Reprinted in Whistler, James McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, London and New York, 1890, pp. 111-12.
4. here
JW was in St Ives, Cornwall where he would spend several weeks painting seascapes with his pupils Mortimer Luddington Menpes (1860-1938), artist [more] and Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), artist and writer on art [more]. See, for example, Green and Silver: The Devonshire Cottages (YMSM 266) and St Ives, The Nets on the Hill (YMSM 270).
5. 'Arry
Henry ('Arry') Quilter (1851-1907), advocate and art critic [more]; on 18 September 1879, Quilter purchased JW's studio house, the White House for £2700 in the aftermath of JW's bankruptcy. He proceeded to make substantial changes to the house, much to JW's annoyance. See also JW to E. H. Yates, #11403.
6. Edgar Poe's
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), writer and poet [more].
7. Case of Mr Waldemar
A reference to Poe's lurid tale of mesmerism of the dying, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845).