- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1949 : July]
-
-
- Date
- July 1949
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
North Carolina historical review [1949 : July]
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The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume XXVI JULY, 1949 Number 3
JOHN RUSSELL: “LORD JOHN” OF CHARLESTON
By Madeleine B. Stern
In Charleston, one autumn evening in the 1850’s, a group of
young men might have been seen walking along narrow King
Street until they paused at No. 251, a large store with handsome
plate-glass windows and a name in prominent gilt letters above
the main door.1 The young men had already earned enviable
reputations in Southern society, and whatever careers they had
embarked upon, they were all, in addition, of a literary turn.
There was the handsome Basil Gildersleeve, who had received
his doctor’s degree from Gottingen and was about to enter upon
a long and honorable life as professor of Greek at the University
of Virginia; there was young Dr. John Dickson Burns, soon to
teach physiology at the New Orleans School of Medicine; there
was the vigorous young lawyer, Samuel Lord; and there were
others, who, in the leisurely fashion of Charleston in the ’50’s,
met at No. 251 King Street, to talk perhaps of shooting” and
riding, of racing and the Cecilia Society, to talk surely of life
and letters and the Southern culture they were themselves creat¬
ing.
1 For the description of Russell’s bookstore and the literary gatherings there, see Van
Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York, 1947), 71; Virginia P. Clare,
Harp of the South (Oglethorpe University, Georgia, 1936), 51; Sidney J. Cohen, "Three
Notable Ante-Bellum Magazines of South Carolina,” Bulletin of the University of South
Carolina, no. 42, part II (July, 1915), 38-39; “The Death of Mr. John Russell,” Charleston
Daily News, November 23, 1871 (courtesy Dorothy Smith, South Caroliniana Library, Univer¬
sity of South Carolina); Charles Duffy, The Correspondence of Bayard Taylor and Paul
Hamilton Hayne (Baton Rouge 1945), 4; Paul Hamilton Hayne, “Ante-Bellum Charleston,”
The Southern Bivouac, New Series, I, 6 (November 1885), 327 ff .; “The Late John Russell,”
The Charleston Daily Courier, November 23, 1871 (courtesy
В.
E. Powell and Mrs. Anne C.
Orr, Duke University, and Kathleen Blow, University of Texas) ; Edgar Long, Russell’s
Magazine As An Expression of Ante-Bellum South Carolina Culture (doctoral dissertation
in typescript, University of South Carolina, 1932), 42 ff.; Frank Luther Mott, A History
of American Magazines, 1*50-1865 (Cambridge, 1938), 488; Alfred T. Odell, "William Gil¬
more Simms in the Post-War Years,” Bulletin of Furman University, vol. XXIX, no. 3
(May, 1946), 73; La Salle C. Pickett, Literary Hearthstones of Dixie (Philadelphia and Lon¬
don, 1912), 82-83, 109, 141; The South in the Building of the Nation (Richmond, 1909), VII,
453-454; Samuel G. Stoney, “The Memoirs of Frederick Augustus Porcher,” The South
Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, vol. XLIV, no. 2 (April, 1943), 65; Henry
T. Thompson, Henry Tirnrod (Columbia, S. C., 1928), 26; William P. Trent, William Gilmore
Simms (Boston and New York, 1892), 228-229.
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