*20. Dickinson liked to play with this familiar passage from Isaiah 64:4, already famously adapted by Paul in I Corinthians 2:9 and Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream: see Fr132, Fr1261, and L92 and L1035.
*21. Bullard remembered being ridiculed by other children after his conversion at sixteen. In his four years at Amherst College, “the laws and rules . . . never came in conflict with my wishes.” As a student, he started a Bible class for the town’s African-Americans, once getting up early Monday morning to “have a good religious talk” with “Mother Phillis” (Phillis Finnemore, judging from James Avery Smith’s History of the Black Population of Amherst). In his senior year he roomed with the Dickinsons, later marrying the Squire’s daughter Lucretia. Defining himself by his service to the young and the disenfranchised, Bullard was a good organizer and storyteller, had a blinkered mind that moved easily in beaten paths, and often gave signs of various unadmitted resentments. His sister was the wife Henry Ward Beecher wasn’t faithful to.
*22. Bullard’s publication probably had an impact on a young reader in faraway Missouri. In 1841 it was announced that “between fifty and sixty new schools” had been established in that state, and the publications of the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society had been sent “into hundreds of schools and families. . . . The influence of these books . . . will be felt on thousands of the rising generation there in the far West.” Exactly, and Tom Sawyer and “The Story of the Good Little Boy” (he dies) were among the results.
*23. Mrs. Dickinson’s uncertain health and the cramped living quarters may explain why she and her husband had no more children after Lavinia. Statistics for the time and place suggest that birth control was becoming the norm. According to Christopher Clark’s economic study of Amherst and five other towns in Franklin and Hampshire Counties, the mean number of children born to women who married in the second, third, and fourth decades of the nineteenth century was 7.03, 6.22, and 4.47 respectively. The Dickinsons were part of this declining trend.
*24. Two months later David Mack, Jr., bought the prime commercial lot north of the Common on which he erected Phoenix Row, seen in the foreground of the lithograph reproduced on page
*25. If Lucretia Gunn Dickinson indulged in such tirades in her earlier years, as one of her 1821 letters suggests, this might help explain why Edward’s 1822 colloquy and 1827 Coelebs papers showed a pronounced aversion to women who lectured men.
*26. Note should be taken of the mother’s usage here, with its groping pidgin effect. Should we label “hope” an overscrupulous or archaic subjunctive, or do we call it uninflected? Could the passage have been dictated by her daughter, making “hope” her word? Whatever the answers, Dickinson’s poetry would make flagrant use of this unusual verb-form:
The General Rose – decay –
But this – in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer – When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary –
Fr772B
For two illuminating discussions of the practice, see Lindberg-Seyersted, pp. 243–52, and Miller, pp. 2–5, 63–69.
*27. This may be the place to note that the doctor’s record of Elizabeth’s birth on May 29, 1823, identifies her as male, and also that she married at age forty-three, had no children, and is referred to in a letter by the poet as “‘the only male Dickinson on the female side.’” The explanation that irresistibly comes to mind is: born genitally ambiguous. Another explanation is that the busy doctor made a mistake. As Dickinson’s quotation marks hint, Elizabeth was the original speaker of the mot. Indeed, an early letter by the poet’s niece reports a visit to “the Aunts yesterday” during which “Aunt Emily [said] she is always reminded by a Aunt Elizabeth of the ancient drama, which I will narrate. ‘Little boy, I am your Aunt Eliza, the only surviving male relative on the female side!!’” Elizabeth could have been referring to the doctor’s classification, or her own unusually brisk and managerial ways, or both.
*28. An extant report, possibly from Austin’s fall 1844 term at Williston, shows higher marks for academic work than for conduct. In recitation he was “perfect” on 152 occasions, “imperfect” on 60, “bad” on 5. His deportment was judged “unexceptionable” 34 times and “exceptionable” 20 times.
*29. Since it is sometimes claimed that Emily Norcross Dickinson didn’t love her children and never opposed her husband’s will, a couple of commonplace details in Elizabeth’s letters should be noted. That for April 21 ends, “Mother especially sends much love.” That for May 10, read in conjunction with Emily’s letter to Jane, shows that Mother went to Easthampton against Father’s wishes after his sudden illness caused a change in arrangements.
In September 1841 and 1842 Mrs. Dickinson made visits to Boston, no doubt to her sister’s family. A Fiske family letter of 1842 drops the fact that Lavinia was boarding out in her mother’s absence but says nothing about Emily, who may have been in Boston at the time.
*30. Exemplifying the family’s delight in quoting Emily, Elizabeth wrote Austin, “we are very lonesome without you—one reason as Emily says, is ‘because you always make such a hurra.’”
*31. The annual catalogs published at the end of the school year listed all students enrolled without specifying which terms or how many they had attended.
*32. Andrews seems to have become a sort of last-ditch hope for foundering schools. Turning up in north Mississippi in 1871, he undertook a rescue operation at Jefferson College, where, for $100 a month, he contracted to teach Latin and Greek and “all English branches usually taught in a preparatory School.”
*33. Like Jeremiah Taylor, Fiske went on to Andover Theological Seminary, became an ordained minister, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of divinity by Amherst College. Serving a Newburyport church for forty years, he wrote a number of scholarly reviews and articles. He lived to be eighty-three.
*34. As Robert L. Gonsor has pointed out, Dickinson described this flower’s spectacular action in her lines “Bright Flowers slit a Calyx/And soared opon a stem” (Fr523). This dramatic effloration served as an image of a painful female splitting for the sake of a higher-order existence. The image may inform her mysterious breakout poem, “I saw no way – The heavens were stitched” (Fr633).
*35. Because Hitchcock wrote nothing by this title, Thomas H. Johnson proposed the poet had in mind his Catalogue of Plants Growing without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Amherst College. This work, a list of species, would not be likely to assure anyone, even Emily Dickinson, that plants “lived.” A more plausible explanation is that she mistook the author rather than the title and was thinking of Eaton’s Manual of Botany, for North America.
*36. “In collecting flowers, you should be cautious with respect to poisonous plants. Such as have five stamens and one pistil . . . are usually poisonous.” Lincoln, Familiar Lectures, 31.
*37. Dickinson’s earliest approach to this usage, at age twenty-three—“Well – we were all boys once, as Mrs. Partington says”—suggests a connection with Benjamin P. Shillaber’s humorous and popular sketches of a New England Mrs. Malaprop.
*38. Set to music, the popular “Are We Almost There?” tells of a girl who dies on her return journey to the home she yearns for:
Then she talked of her flowers, and she thought of the wellWhere the cool waters dashed o’er the large white stone . . .
*39. But this witness tends to garble dates and sequences. Her claim that one of Dickinson’s pieces in Forest Leaves was “stolen by a roguish editor for the College paper” refers to a prose valentine written in 1850.
*40. We can gauge the pressure Emily was subjected to from an 1844 book by Heman Humphrey, the president of Amherst College. Revival Conversations consists of sample dialogues between a pastor and various types named Inquirer, Dissembler, Caviler, and so forth. A striking feature is the forcefulness with which the pastor overcomes every plea: “The question is not . . . how you feel, but how you ought to feel.” “Just stop and consider into what a maze of contradictions your dece
itful heart is leading you.” “You want more time! What if you should die in a fit, before you get home?”
*41. A draft of a poem also assigned to 1877 begins, “What mystery pervades a well!” and ends with an impressive statement on the unknowability of nature: “. . . those who know her, know her less/The nearer her they get” (Fr1433[A]).
*42. A letter Dickinson wrote about the same time personified the earth in springtime as a woman arrayed in new foliage and flowers: “Then her hair, Jennie, perfectly crowned with flowers – Oh she’ll be a comely maid, by May Day, and she shall be queen, if she can!”
*43. A family letter of June 4, 1844, shows that Emily was expected home any day. Amherst Academy was then two weeks into its summer session, which began May 22 and ran for eleven weeks. If she did as in 1846, when she sat out a full term after missing the first couple of weeks, she waited to re-enroll till August 28, 1844, the first day of fall term. That was Abiah’s last term in Amherst.
*44. Meanwhile, it looks as if Emily’s mother was excluded from the literate group of women associated with the college. Perhaps her stiffness as a writer kept her from contributing to the notes Mrs. Fiske, Mrs. Fowler, and others were constantly circulating (many of them preserved in the Helen Hunt Jackson Papers at Colorado College and the Emily Fowler Ford and Ford Family Papers at the New York Public Library). In 1843 Mary Shepard, a member of the Boltwood clan, called on Mrs. Dickinson and, finding her “as usual full of plaintive talk,” undertook the delicate task of explaining why Hannah Terry, wife of a Hartford judge, “did not now visit her.” That Mrs. Terry was the person Mrs. Dickinson had looked up in Boston in 1835 (after calling hours) adds to the general picture of a respectable woman who feels neglected and isolated, and increasingly melancholic.
*45. Dickinson’s earliest known poem, a valentine from 1850, names a “Sarah” and a “Harriet.” Standard editions identify them as Sarah S. Tracy and Harriet Merrill, even though both had been out of the picture for nearly four years. The poet probably had in mind Sarah Porter Ferry, who helped her mother run a boardinghouse on Amity Street, and Harriet Austin Dickinson, sister of William Cowper and daughter of Reverend Baxter. Harriet attended Amherst Academy in 1848–1849 and became friends with Vinnie.
*46. An odd consequence of all this obsessive guarding was the poet’s fondness for a phrase from Psalms 91:11: “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Tempter quotes this verse to Jesus in urging him to leap from a Temple pinnacle. Taking the devil’s hint, Dickinson would again and again “give his angels charge,” demanding that her friends be preserved.
*47. Does the plural imply she had undergone the process more than once, and had been satisfied by none of the results? There is no doubt she cherished others’ images, owning three portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as of August 1862.
*48. Defined as follows in Webster’s 1844 American Dictionary: “In grammar, a change of the natural order of words in a sentence. The Latin and Greek languages admit transposition without inconvenience, to a much greater extent than the English.”
*49. Lavinia Norcross once wrote her sister in Amherst, “I tho’t of you to-day in church—How I wished you was here I wanted to have you hear our singing—I almost weep every Sabbath—it is so beautiful—It completely melts me down.”
*50. As in many New England academies at this time, there was no Christmas vacation. When a student wished teacher Mary C. Whitman a merry Christmas in 1845, “she looked up with surprise, ‘Why is to day Christmas?’” In 1847 a teacher reported with satisfaction that she “hardly heard one ‘Merry Christmas’ this morning.” By contrast, when Emily was home she hung a stocking on her bedpost and received “a great many presents” from Santa Claus.
*51. Though remaining silent on Lyon’s frequent talks, Dickinson responded with prompt enthusiasm to the Reverend Henry Boynton Smith: “such sermons I never heard in my life. We were all charmed with him, & dreaded to have him close.” Mary C. Whitman also admired his “piety and talents.”
*52. The other, on the back of poem Fr1333 and dating from the time of his death, reads in its entirety, “Dear Father – [large blank space] Emily – ”
*53. “The young ladies do not make or receive calls on the Sabbath. Neither should they spend a single Sabbath from the Seminary during term time. . . . The excitement of visiting, of meeting friends and of home scenes, will prevent in a great measure the improvement [sic]. The place of weekly labors is the most favorable spot for the scenes of the Sabbath.” Jane Humphrey, expecting to graduate, was told it would “lower her classification” if she accepted an invitation to the Dickinsons’. Even Rebecca W. Fiske, a teacher, was obliged to decline.
*54. Three years later, when Austin had one of his bouts of facial “neuralgia,” Emily sensibly advised “warmth and rest, cold water and care” as “the best medicines for it.” By the 1890s her brother realized the Dickinsons’ worries about sickness had been excessive, and he asked Mabel Loomis Todd to edit the “frequent references to the family’s ill-health” out of Emily’s letters.
*55. A short list over the years would include, in addition to Spencer and Gould, Samuel Julius Learned, Francis Andrew March, Leonard Humphrey, William Cowper Dickinson, John Milton Emerson, Edward Hitchcock, Jr., George Howland, John Howland Thompson (Austin’s Sophomore and Junior roommate), John Elliot Sanford, Brainard Timothy Harrington, Edward Payson Crowell, Henry Vaughan Emmons, John Long Graves. William Gardiner Hammond, a prominent student who called on young townswomen but whose student diary doesn’t mention Dickinson, belonged to the rival Psi Upsilon.
*56. “It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.” “That could not be fashioned into words, which was not yet fashioned into thoughts, but was still floating, vague and formless, through the mind.” “Many have genius, but, wanting art, are for ever dumb.”
*57. Bowdoin, a fairly inexpressive man by all accounts, seems to have struck Dickinson as an irresistible target. The following year, having read Reveries of a Bachelor, she once again pretended to have the answer to his secret romantic dreams: “I know of a shuttle swift – I know of a fairy gift – mat for the ‘Lamp of Life’ – the little Bachelor’s wife!!” Judging by the handmade lamp-mat William Gardiner Hammond received from a young woman four years earlier, this was a conventional gift at the time.
*58. Is it owing to the family’s conservatism or the accidents of historic preservation that no letter mentions the Northampton Association of Education and Industry? David Mack III (son of the General David Mack, Jr., who bought the Dickinson Homestead) and his wife, Lucy, were resident members of this utopian commune, along with Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. As at the more famous Brook Farm, simplicity and social equality were communal ideals, so that Lucy “scrubbed floors.” The Macks left in summer 1845, after David’s health broke. Given that he and Edward were Yale classmates and had corresponded, the Dickinsons must have known about this social experiment.
*59. Conservative writers on women’s issues often glanced with alarm at the wild woman speaker who doesn’t know her place. As one among thousands of instances, Loring and Lavinia Norcross’s pastor invoked the woman who “steps forth to assume the duties of the man” and whose “voice is heard from house to house . . . rising in harsh unnatural tones of denunciation against civil laws and rulers . . . expecting to reform politics and churches, and to put down every real and supposed evil in them, by the right arm of female power.”
*60. The fervid stories Mary Lee Hall gathered from Vinnie cannot be reconciled with the latter’s statement to Caroline H. Dall that “Emily never had any love disaster.” After the poet’s death, her sister reportedly confided, “many times when desirable offers of marriage have been made to Emily she has said—I have never seen anyone that I cared for as much as you Vinnie.”
*61. Shipley’s moment of fame came four years later,
when, as a newspaper editor, he was horsewhipped by the celebrated dancer Lola Montez for his insinuations on her character. A severe injury caused by a later fall from a horse led to his suicide in a California hotel in November 1859, when he took strychnine and died in agony. The Amherst paper reprinted a report of the tragedy. Dickinson’s extant letters do not allude to it.
*62. According to Jay Leyda, a quarter-century later George Gould wrote in his notebook that Edward had been admonished by his pastor, “You want to come to Christ as a lawyer—but you must come to him as a poor sinner.” One problem with this gossipy story is that it’s hard to imagine either participant as divulging it. More troubling, Leyda provides no context for Gould’s anecdote and no location for the notebook. Until these are established, the story should be considered apocryphal. In 1930 a relative knew of no “mss or diaries of Gould.”
*63. However, in 1852 she wrote a Valentine poem for her sister’s beau, William Howland, that included the lines, “Mortality is fatal – / Gentility is fine, / Rascality, heroic, / Insolvency, sublime!” (Fr2[B]). The sixty-eight-line extravaganza was sent to the Springfield Republican, which published the “amusing medley” and invited the unknown author to communicate directly in future—which she didn’t.
*64. In Lady-Bird, a later novel by Fullerton focusing on a well-to-do Catholic circle in Lancashire, the mismated heroine embraces a life of painful service. Reading the book while pursuing Susan, Austin vehemently urged her not to read it, as if fearful it might influence her: “’Twas to me a story full of only wretchedness & misery . . . of brightest hopes blasted—of mortal lives wasted—of true hearts seperated [sic].”
*65. Twenty-seven-year-old Thomas H. Leavitt, an accountant and a member of Boston’s Bowdoin Street Church, boarded with Matthew F. Wood, Loring Norcross’s business partner, at 22 McLean Street, across from the Norcross home.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 69
