Many of the Longfellows were avid letter writers, as thousands of letters in the site’s archives written to family, friends, acquaintances, business partners and even complete strangers attest to. Coming from a place of wealth, both that of the Appletons' as well as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's own success later on as a famous poet, they could afford to purchase high end writing implements, such as the pen shown here.
The pen is made of gold (probably 14K), with a mother-of-pearl handle and a slide that allows the nib to be drawn into the barrel of the pen for protection. It is of a form known as dip pens, so called because they do not hold any ink inside the pen itself but need to be repeatedly “dipped” into an inkwell or bottle. Popular in the 19th century, dip pens supplanted the use of quills, only to be replaced themselves in the later part of the century with the widespread introduction of fountain pens.
This pen is accompanied by its original box, labeled “EDWARD TODD & Co / GOLD PENS / NEW YORK”. Edward Todd & Co. formed in 1870, though Todd himself had been involved in the pen and pencil business for years before. His pens were well regarded, and he was a supplier of them to luxury retailers such as Tiffany and Co. In an 1894 letter written to a U.S. Senate inquiry on the potential effects of new tariffs on his business, Todd had this to say about his pens “Gold pens are used to some extent in Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, and are very largely of American manufacture. I had occasion to visit all of these European countries twenty years ago, and looked carefully into the foreign product, which is simply nothing . . .”
Which member of the Longfellow family owned this pen is unknown. Pens of this type were being manufactured well before Henry W. Longfellow’s death in 1882, but Longfellow’s brother and biographer Sam claimed that the poet “used only quills.”