Celebrity Encounters: Famous Americans in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

EditorialP á r a i c F i n n e r t y a n d M a r k F r o s t ( G u e s t E d i t o r s ) On 4 June 1869, a year after dining merrily with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton in Paris, John Ruskin records the following in his diary:VERONA. -As I was drawing in the square this morning in a lovely, quiet Italian light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little daughter, a girl of twelve or thirteen, with springy-curled flaxen haircurls or waves, that wouldn't come out in damp, I mean. They stayed talking beside me some time. I don't think it was a very vain thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and his daughter talking to me at my work, some people in England and America would have liked copies of it.