Title: The English Masses
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1850 and 1860
Whitman Archive ID: duk.00199
Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the marginalia and annotations, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note(s): At one point, this manuscript formed part of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook.
Contributors to digital file: Caterina Bernardini and Kevin McMullen
(Talk with Frank Leonard, "Yank," &c—their travels through English towns with the American Circus)
The large mass (nine tenths) of the English people, the peasantry, laborers, factory-operatives, miners, workers in the docks, on shipping, the poor, the diseased, the old, the criminals, the numberless flunkies of one sort and another, ^have some of the bull-dog attributes but are all generally minus the best attributes of humanity; they have some of the bull-dog attributes They are not a race of fine physique, or any spirituality, ^or manly audacity, or with ^—have no clarified faces, candor, freedom, agility, and quick wit.—They are short, have mean physoiognomies, (such as you are in the caricatures in "Punch,") and fine-shaped men
Among the common classes, ^in towns, chastity is not common.— dwindling out.—It All drink—few are virtuous. In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of the people, are belong to the in comparison with the masses of the US. are at least two hundred years behind [h?] us.—With all thisese terrible things about the common people, what grand things must be said about England! Power, wealth, ^materials, energy, individualism, a proud pride, command, are her's—and there is to-day but one nation greater than she is, and that one nation is her own daughter.—