BIB_ID
397209
Accession number
MA 8732.59
Creator
James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Display Date
1896 Jan 2.
Credit line
Gift of Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane and Mrs. Stanley B. Hawks, 1968.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 17.5 x 11.0 cm + envelope
Notes
Part of a collection of letters from Henry James to Dr. William W. Baldwin between 1887 and 1900 (MA 8732.1-75). This collection is part of a much larger collection of letters to Dr. Baldwin from authors, English royalty and other luminaries of the period, including Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Cabot Lodge, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton and Constance Fenimore Woolson. See MA 3564 for more information on the complete Baldwin collection.
Written on stationery embossed "34, De Vere Gardens. / W."
Written on stationery embossed "34, De Vere Gardens. / W."
Provenance
Gift of Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane and Mrs. Stanley B. Hawks, 1968.
Summary
Thanking her for the photograph of her children and "...for all that it represents of friendly remembrance as well as of fine juvenile humanity. They are a magnificent lot & with their little serious & [illegible] Florentine faces, wonderfully like each other & their parents. I take a special interest in the young person on whose coming into the world I, summer before last, so serenely intruded. She looks even still a little disconcerted by it...I rub noses affectionately with all of them. When I think that you & the doctor not only do that, but feed & clothe & house & school them, & live with them every hour, I feel that you are of heroic mould & that I'm the most pusillanimous of bachelors. Still, I enjoy my friends' children more than they would have enjoyed mine. I am writing by this post to the Doctor - I'm so glad he is to have rest & relief. It will make him over. I wish you, dear Mrs. Baldwin, a year exempt from disappointment or alarm & I am yours very faithfully / Henry James."
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