Walt Whitman Collection

W.H. Trimble’s Walt Whitman Collection

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Among the diverse holdings of the Reed and Special Collections at Dunedin Public Library is a nationally unique and internationally significant collection of works, including rare early editions, by the nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman.

The Whitman Collection was gathered by the Whitman scholar and librarian William Heywood Trimble, assisted by his wife Annie Eliza Trimble, and donated by William’s daughter Dorothy Heywood Stewart in 1927.

W.H. Trimble was born near Liverpool in 1860, and emigrated to the North Island of New Zealand with his family in 1875. He worked in the public service in New Plymouth, Wellington and Gisborne before moving to Dunedin in 1898.

Shortly before his shift south, Trimble had overcome an initial dislike of Whitman, to become a markedly enthusiastic and active admirer of ‘the good grey poet’. In Dunedin, he established perhaps the most significant Whitman collection outside the Americas, undertook his immense Concordance to Leaves of Grass, and wrote bibliographical and biographical works on Whitman.

In 1910, he became the first librarian of the Hocken Library, where he prepared a catalogue of the Library’s collection, while simultaneously preparing his own Whitman catalogue at home, based on his burgeoning personal collection.

Trimble realised that he needed to establish connections with ‘Whitmanites’ in the Americas if he was to become a serious Antipodean Whitman collector. He thus initiated a lifelong correspondence with the pre-eminent Whitman collector of the time, Toronto-based Henry Scholey Saunders - the two men eagerly trading thoughts and publications.

A gregarious character of somewhat military demeanour, Trimble lectured on Whitman in Dunedin, and was an energetic advocate for the poet in cultured circles. Sara Fels, daughter of Bendix Hallenstein and wife of Willi Fels, was among his notable converts.

Trimble died in 1927 at his St Leonards home, Concord, but the growth of his collection did not end there. After donating her father’s collection of Whitman books, pamphlets, periodical articles, scrapbooks and photographs to the Library in 1927, Dorothy continued to add to the Collection until her death in 1974.

The Whitman Collection today numbers more than 700 volumes, including numerous editions of his classic work Leaves of grass, from the 1856 second edition to modern publications. It also includes one of only two copies of William and Annie Trimble’s Concordance, the couple’s unpublished labour of love.

Trimble was a ritualistic observer of Whitman anniversaries, and the poet's 200th birthday, on 31 May 2019, will be marked next year by a Whitman exhibition in the Reed Gallery, on the City Library’s 3rd floor.