Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection that consists of manuscripts and correspondence. The manuscripts comprise poems and a holograph review of Celia Thaxter's "Wreck of the Pocahontas", as well as manuscripts relating to the author by J. R. Lowell, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Elizabeth H. Whittier. The correspondence includes letters written by the author, dating from 1833 to 1892, to William Richardson Dempster, Thomas Donaldson, James T. Fields, Horace Greeley, Lucy Larcom, James R. Osgood, Bayard Taylor, Celia Thaxter, and others. Also present are letters relating to the author, dating from 1889 to 1904, between various correspondents, including Z. S. Davis, Jacob Chester Chamberlain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lucy Larcom, George Riker, Susan Hayes Ward, and Walt Whitman. There are letters to Whittier from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Sumner, and Bayard Taylor, dating from 1856 to 1890.
The John Greenleaf Whittier collection of papers are arranged in two series: