“Banned in Boston”: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice

Abstract

After laboring on outside margins of polite literary circles for his entire career, Walt Whitman traveled to Boston in August 1881 to oversee publication of his Leaves of Grass. The poet was on verge of enjoying national reputation that had eluded him for so long. He viewed publication of seventh and definitive edition of Leaves of Grass by a leading Boston publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, as a vindication of his lifelong labor. Now Whitman was about to be ranked with other notable Osgood authors, including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain.2 To be sure, some of New England's most famous authors had admired Whitman's poetry. Perhaps most distinguished author of day to applaud Whitman's work was Ralph Waldo Emerson. After reading first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson privately wrote that he found twelve poems to be the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. Yet it was not only, as Charles Eliot Norton protested in an unsigned review in 1855, Whitman's self-conceit, lack of rhyme, and scorn for wonted usages of good writing that hindered his reputation. Whitman also celebrated sexuality, openly singing of phallus and glorifying hymen!3 According to Norton, Whitman mixed Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism.4 Other early critics