#birkbeckvoices

On Wednesday 30 January, the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies welcomed Prof. Michael Robertson (The College of New Jersey)to mark the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth with two papers that examined his reception in Victorian Britain. During the 1890s, Whitmanite activity in Britain was centered, improbably, in the northern industrial town of Bolton, where a group of lower-middle-class men corresponded regularly with Whitman, made pilgrimages to his home in Camden, New Jersey, and were in frequent contact with every prominent Whitman apologist in Britain and North America. The men of the Eagle Street College, as they called themselves, integrated multiple approaches to Whitman’s poetry: religious, political, and most of all affectional. Contemporaries of early homosexual theorists Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, they were stirred by Whitman’s paeans to male love, but they had no interest in the emerging Continental discipline of sexology. Instead, they created a male world of