LETTER: Autograph letter signed, "Julia Ward Howe," to "My dear neighbor" (1899) and signed "J.W.H." to "Good neighbor" (ca. 1890).
Howe, Julia Ward. Autograph Letter Signed “Julia W. Howe” to “My dear neighbor.” Boston: “Thursday 14th”, 1889; one 9 ¾ x 8 inch leaf “241 Beacon Street” stationery, bifolium, writing on two sides; four small adhered circular stickers and some light pencil markings to verso.
Howe replies to an invitation, declining with previous engagements. Her note, in full:
I am just back from Fall River, whither I betook myself upon yesterday’s club reception, to do battle in behalf of my sex. Thanks for your kind invitation, but I am already engaged to go to the Round Table with Mrs. Mack. I was sorry not to see you yesterday.
Despite Howe’s varied career – abolitionist, poet, activist – she focused her work on women’s reform following her husband’s death in 1874. The “club” she mentions to in her letter could refer to a number of organizations she chaired or belonged to during this period: the Association of American Women, the New England Women's Club, the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, or the New England Suffrage Association.
(with):
Howe, Julia Ward. Autograph letter signed “J.W.H.” to “Good neighbor.” [Ca. 1890]; one 4 ¾ x 8 inch leaf, bifolium, writing on three sides; slight wrinkling around creases.
Howe extends a last-minute invitation to friends or neighbors coinciding with the visit of Russian activist Sergius Stepniak, a political exile-turned-writer who drew support from American abolitionists like Howe, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell in his formation of The Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom in the 1890s, a group with the purpose of “aid[ing] by all moral and legal means the Russian patriots in their efforts to obtain for their country political freedom and self-government.” Howe’s letter reads, in full:
Mrs. Howe expects Mr. [Sergius] Stepniak this afternoon, and will be glad to see any or all of the Walkers at as [] punctually. I have just thought of it. I am the two-party one. I only knew of this late on Saturday afternoon – wanted to have slipped in to invite you this morning, but could not.
Fellow abolitionist and occasional Society meetings visitor Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote about Stepniak, his political stances, and his relationship with American activists in her 1913 book American Chivalry:
This mysterious person was a man apparently about forty-five years old when he came with his wife for a brief lecturing and propagandist effort in America...He had become a Russian reformer in his early youth, not, he said, because of any special virtue in himself, but in obedience to a sense of duty which had, as it were, descended upon the youth of his class and generation, — the duty to atone to the Russian peasantry for their own immunity from the hardships which those people had suffered...He had left Russia for reasons connected with the Revolution. He had often secretly returned, but it was fully understood that he could not go there openly. In his exile, he had developed ability as a writer, and “it had been decided” that his best work was to live outside of Russia and try to influence opinion in Europe and America...[in the] dwelling of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe...we met Sergius Stepniak who unfolded to the company his plan for the formation of a Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom, and also explained “Nihilism” (Chance, Lillie Buffam. American Chivalry. Boston: W.B. Clarke Co., 1913. 134-136).
(#13496)
Print Inquire
