At the time noted photographer Matthew Brady made this image, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) had stopped teaching modern languages at Harvard College and was working full time as a poet.

The image was used as the frontispiece in Vol. III of the Craigie Edition of The Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an eleven-volume work published in 1879 by Houghton, Mifflin and Co.