Text: William Henry Gravely, Jr., “Preface,” The Early Political and Literary Career of Thomas Dunn English Story, dissertation, 1953 (This material is protected by copyright)

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About the year 1926, the late William Southworth Hunt of Newark and South Orange, New Jersey, set aside certain data relating to Thomas Dunn English which he had incidentally accumulated during the course of a lifelong study of American history and letters from 1840 to 1850. When he set this material aside, he entertained some notion of writing a brief life of English in the event that he could unravel the obscure circumstances of his parentage, birth, and boyhood. During the next ten years Mr. Hunt made considerable progress in this direction, but not enough to clarify the matter to his own satisfaction. Consequently, the biography which he had long contemplated remained unwritten.

When Mr. Hunt learned that I planned to write a full-length study of English's life, he immediately displayed a keen interest in the undertaking. It was high time, he felt, that a study of this kind be made of a man who, not-withstanding his relative obscurity, had so vitally influenced the lives of a great many of his more prominent contemporaries. Mr. Hunt had known English during the last five years of the latter's life and had frequently conversed with him. He remembered him “bent with years, desperately poor, a shadow of the past, but with a devastating glare and an unconquerable dignity.”

After an exchange of letters and a subsequent meeting between us, Mr. Hunt graciously turned over to me for [page iv:] my temporary use the data concerning English which he had assembled. He was certain that this material would enable me to avoid a considerable amount of useless research, but he left me under no illusions as to the magnitude of the task I had undertaken, which he predicted would prove to be a dismaying one. I was about to begin a biographical journey which he had already described to me, in the light of his own investigations, as being “of a very intricate and tedious kind.” He had also previously warned me that a life of English was “a matter of great length” and that my chief difficulty would arise from having to decide what to exclude. After many years of laborious research — often rewarding, but more often futile — I know that Mr. Hunt did not overestimate the difficulties involved.

Although I originally intended this study to cover the entire period of English's long life, I have limited it for the time being to his early career or, more specifically, to the period from 1819 to 1852. Near the end of 1852, English temporarily abandoned an unusually active life alternating between Philadelphia and New York, and isolated himself, along with his family, in the thinly populated and mountainous region of what was then still western Virginia. The year 1852, therefore, is the logical one in which to, conclude the story of English's early life. However undesirable such a truncated biography may be, in that it fails to present a complete portrait of [page v:] its subject, it has at least enabled, me to treat the most important and. most vital period, of English's life — the decade of the 1840's — more thoroughly than I could have possibly treated it had I attempted a more extended study at this time.

In concluding what — even in its shortened form — has developed into a lengthy study, I wish first of all to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to the three men to whom I owe most. These are Professor James Southall Wilson, who directed this study in its earlier stages and under whom the general plan of the whole work took shape; Professor Armistead Churchill Gordon, Jr., who, after Professor Wilson's retirement from active duty, kindly consented to direct the study in its middle and later stages and whose suggestions in matters of style and criticism have proved exceedingly helpful; and the late Dr. Hunt, who so generously gave me the benefit of his prior researches.

I wish to thank all those who have communicated with me, either of their own accord or in response to my requests for information, concerning the subject of this study. Although the large number of these precludes my mentioning individually, there are a few to whom I am especially obligated and whom I therefore want to name specifically. To Professor Thomas O. Mabbott of Hunter College and Dr. Herbert L. Ganter, Curator of Rare books in the Library of the College of William and Mary, I am [page vi:] indebted for a long-continued interest in the progress of this study and for numerous references to Thomas Dunn English which they have discovered in the course of their respective investigations in the fields of American literary and political history. I am indebted to Mr. Otto Eisenshiml of Chicago for supplying me with certain manuscripts from his private collection and to Miss Anne E. Atkinson of New Brunswick, New Jersey, for valuable information concerning English's maternal line. To Mrs. Lewis Chase I wish to express my appreciation for her gift to me of numerous notes and other data relating to Thomas Dunn English which her late husband, Dr. Lewis Chase, had assembled. I wish also to take this opportunity to thank several of my correspondents for providing me with important material which, since it pertains to a later period of English's life, has not yet served the purpose for which it was so generously intended. I am particularly indebted to Mr. F. B. Lambert of Barboursville, West Virginia, for supplying me with a photostatic copy of a not easily accessible study which he himself made of English's life in western Virginia from 1852 to 1857; to Mr. William Rich of Newark, New Jersey, for his generous gift to me of the original autograph manuscript of English's one-act play, “The King of Coney Island,” first performed at the Olympic Theatre, New York, in 1857; and to Mrs. Effie Cook Deuel of York, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. R. B. King of Verona, New Jersey, for furnishing me with [page vii:] their written recollections of English during the periods of his residence in Fort Lee and Newark, respectively.

Finally, I wish to express my appreciation for the generous and courteous assistance given me by the staffs of the following libraries and other institutions — where, with the exception of the last two mentioned, I have carried on my research — and for the privilege which has been granted me of reproducing materials in the holdings of some of these institutions, either, from the originals or from photostatic copies of them: the Alderman Library, University of Virginia; the Library of Congress; the National Archives, Washington; the Central and Medical Libraries, University of Pennsylvania; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Free Library, Philadelphia; the College of Physicians, Philadelphia; the New York Public Library; the New York Historical Society; the New York Academy of Medicine; the Hall of Records, New York; the Newark Public Library; the New Jersey Historical Society; the Boston Public Library; and the American Antiquarian Society. More specifically, I wish to express my appreciation for the frequent help given me by Mr. John C. Wyllie and Mr. Francis L. Berkeley, Curators of Rare Books and Manuscripts, respectively, in the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. To Mr. Berkeley I am indebted for his successful efforts to obtain for me permission to make use of numerous reference photostats in the Poe-Ingram Collection of the Alderman Library. To [page viii:] Colonel Willard Webb, Chief of the Stack and Reader Division of the Library of Congress, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for the Study Room facilities that I have long enjoyed and without which I could have carried on my research only under a great disadvantage.