1. Harper's Weekly, August 8, 1857

Nothing to Wear [Editorial]

P. 498: Some little stir has been created in literary circles by a claim set up by a young lady, the daughter of the Rev. Isaac Peck, to the authorship of the now famous poem of "Nothing to Wear," first published in No. 6 of this Journal in February last. The story which the lady's friends tell is, that Miss Peck tore her dress, and was led by that accident to a train of highly moral reflections which found vent in verse; that she carried the verse aforesaid about in her pocket, and unhappily lost it on leaving the cars near Twenty-sixth Street; leading to the inference that Mr.Butler, from whom we obtained the poem, picked up the idea, the title, and some thirty of the identical lines, in or near the cars aforesaid, and appropriated them to his own use.

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For our own part, we regret to confess that we do not believe that Miss Peck or any one else but Mr. Butler wrote a single line of that poem. We see no serious reason for going behind the original manuscript, which is now before us in Mr.Butler's handwriting, and to which, at our request, he added some twenty-five lines to fill out the page.