My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  When Emily got pregnant at the beginning of summer, the pressure on the Dickinsons became just so much greater. Two months before she was due, sister Lavinia tried to anticipate the coming emergencies and declared her own availability: “Now if you cant get any [help] & you are unwell dont fail to let me know—dont suffer—for if it is necessary I can come & assist you.” At the last minute, on top of everything else, came the old familiar domiciliary threat: on February 27 the Hampshire Gazette ran a notice by John Leland and Nathan Dickinson that the east half of the Dickinson Homestead—the part occupied by Squire Dickinson and his family—was to be sold at auction. It was a repetition of what had occurred twice before, the variation being that now there was to be an unpredictable public sale. There seemed no end to the aftershocks of the Squire’s insolvency.

  The day after this announcement, Dr. Isaac G. Cutler added a line to his record of births:

  Edward Dickinson Esq. February 28 G

  Opening his wife’s Bible between the Old and New Testaments, the father inked in the vital facts:

  Lavinia Norcross, their third

  child, was born Feb y. 28 t h. 1833.

  at 9. o’clock A.M.—

  For reasons the record does not explain, Mrs. Dickinson took an unusually long time to recover. On May 29, three months after the delivery (her last), she was so unwell her sister tried to console her with someone else’s hard luck: “There is a woman in [Monson] that has a child nearly 6 months old & now she cant walk a step without a crutch—so take courage some are worse than you & some better.” Making matters worse, the infant proved much more troublesome than little Emily had been. Everyone hoped the baby would grow “more quiet,” but at three months she was said to be “no better.”

  Once again, the growing family was going down the rapids with everything at risk. Caught between his reduced income and a large mortgage, Edward sold his half of the house back to Leland and Nathan on May 13. Nine days later the partners made the entire place over to General David Mack, Jr., the two deals no doubt being coordinated. Mack came from a rich and benevolent family in the western part of the county: his father contributed lavishly to educational and evangelical causes and became the subject of a pious tract, and he himself donated his $2,500 house in Middlefield to the local church. Chances are, the buyer regarded the Dickinsons as a fine family ruined in a good cause. The reverse of harsh, he allowed a year’s grace before assuming possession; perhaps this was part of the deal. Still, Edward could hardly have been satisfied, occupying his own home at another man’s pleasure.

  Under these trying circumstances, with the mother sick and the baby crying and the big deal pending, it was decided to ease the situation by sending little Emily away. *17 A few days before Edward disposed of the Homestead’s west half, Lavinia Norcross drove to Amherst to pick up her two-and-a-half-year-old niece and then took her back to Monson in a spring thunderstorm.

  Thanks to all these contributing causes and the timely and alert presence of Aunt Lavinia, we now get our first detailed report of Emily’s early speech, temperament, behavior.

  Passionate Aunt, Contented Child

  From the beginning, Lavinia had been tremendously interested in her sister’s children. “I want to see little Elizabeth very much, Austin likewise,” she wrote in 1831 (using Emily’s middle name to differentiate her from her mother). She worked on a blue bonnet for the child and eagerly anticipated seeing her or Austin in Monson in spring 1833—“if I am spared.”

  Lavinia added this proviso because of her tormented love of Loring Norcross. This young man was not only a first cousin but a quasi-brother, having been her father’s ward from age five and living in the Norcross home for extended periods. A headstrong and rebellious teenager, in 1828 Loring admitted that since he had been “under the immediate Controll” of Joel Norcross, he had not acted “so as to merit & gain his respect.” Now he was just beginning his long and unsuccessful effort to establish himself in business in Boston.

  Uncertain it was “right for cousins to marry,” Lavinia had spent “many sorrowful hours” worrying about the fact that she and Loring were “connected & . . . have been brought up together.” She finally resolved to override these misgivings—just before picking up her niece in Amherst, where she revealed her intentions to her astonished sister. It isn’t known what Emily thought of the match, but others took for granted the Norcrosses disliked “seeing so near a brother and sister made nearer.” For some reason, this marriage made more talk than the truly incestuous 1838 union between Edward’s younger brother Timothy and a double first cousin.

  Lavinia took another chance halfway to Monson when she chose to outrun an approaching storm rather than sit it out in a tavern. The lightning approached more rapidly than she had anticipated, and as the travelers passed through the pine woods southeast of Belchertown, “the rain wind and darkness came . . . the thunder echoed.” Fortunately, the horse merely “shook his head & galloped on.” The intrepid aunt felt “wonderfully supported.” Emily called the lightning “the fire”—the fire-stealer’s first recorded words. At first the child “felt inclined to be frightened some—she said ‘Do take me to my mother’ *18 But I covered her face all under my cloack to protect her & took care that she sh[oul]d not get wet much.” What chiefly worried Lavinia, as she later admitted to her sister, was knowing “you would feel so anxious about us.”

  Emily quickly learned to play the Norcrosses’ piano, probably the first she had seen; she called it “the moosic.” Grandfather Joel was “much amused by her sports,” and when she was taken to Betsey Fay’s ancient mother, still living, it was decided the little girl resembled her dead uncle Austin. At church she behaved well for a two-year-old; the few times she happened to “speak loud,” Joel would “pat” her—though not, Lavinia specified, “to hurt her or make her cry.” (“Pat” has entered the record badly misread as “slap.”) The fond aunt sewed a tiny gingham apron for her niece and in other ways lavished time and attention on her, remarking again and again in letters how happy and good she was and how much pleasure she gave her caretakers and how well she ate and slept. Twice the parents were assured the child was “perfectly contented.” *19 “She speaks of her father & mother occasionly & little Austin but does not express a wish to see you—Hope this wont make you feel bad.” The underlined phrase again shows Emily picking up the grown-ups’ designation for her older and larger brother.

  Some years later, after the birth of Lavinia’s first girl, Edward reported that she was “fond of her child, & appears quite motherly.” In her daguerreotype she is holding a later daughter and looking like an icon of fulfilled (but inwardly grieving) Victorian motherhood. “There never was a better child,” Lavinia wrote the Dickinsons at the end of May, clearly hoping to keep little Emily as long as possible. “She is very affectionate & we all love her very much—She dont appear at all as she did at home—& she does not make but very little trouble.” This is the one and only hint in Lavinia’s letters that her niece had been unhappy or troublesome in Amherst—as well she might, given the difficult new baby, the mother’s illness, and other problems.

  Emily stayed with Lavinia about a month before her father took her back to Amherst. It was early June. The next morning the aunt came upon the little apron, left behind. “You cant think how I felt,” she wrote her sister. “I cant tell you how lowly I was . . . I wanted to weep all the time.”

  In fall Lavinia wished “very much to see the children particularly Emily.” The next year she peremptorily advised Edward, “You may expect to lose Emily Elizabeth some part of the summer if all things go right.” The child was very attaching.

  Half a House Won’t Answer My Turn

  On August 4, when baby Lavinia was five months old, she was well enough to be taken to her parents’ church and baptized. Although Congregationalists did not consider baptism necessary for salvation and sometimes ignored it, the rite still counted for something in Amherst, where it was reserved for the offspring of parents
“in full Church fellowship.” This provision explains why Austin and Emily were not subjected to the rite, neither being eligible prior to Mrs. Dickinson’s profession of faith in July 1831. But why not afterward? Though the picture is murky, the poet does seem to have remained unbaptized. The reason for being clear about this is to discern the freedom she took with the facts in her great poem, “I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being theirs,” where the speaker abandons “The name They dropped opon my face/With water, in the country church” (Fr353). (For most of her life Dickinson spelled “upon” with two “o”’s.)

  Meanwhile, Samuel Fowler Dickinson had not recovered from his financial collapse. When his daughter Lucretia married Asa Bullard, the old man’s blessing to his son-in-law began with a statement of regret: “I wish I was able to give a fortune with my daughter.” Although he headed the committee that enlarged the burial ground in 1832, the Squire could not regain his position in Amherst, and the next year he did what his son Edward merely contemplated: found a place elsewhere. Lane Seminary, a manual-labor school in the hills above Cincinnati, had recently been established by a group of militant evangelicals. Its mission, similar to that of Amherst College, was to train an orthodox clergy for the western states and territories. Appointed as steward, Samuel was to superintend the farming, printing, and mechanical enterprises by which students earned their keep. What he didn’t know was that a charismatic young abolitionist named Theodore Weld was about to touch off one of the most remarkable student revolts in American reform history. On December 16, 1833, traveling by himself (his wife and younger children staying behind for the time being) the Squire left New England. Little Emily, three years old, never saw him again.

  Soon, it was time for the Homestead’s new owner to move in and for the Dickinsons to reshuffle themselves yet again. Having got wind of the coming changes, Lavinia wanted to know what the “arrangements [were] for the spring—What part of the house you occupy.” About May first, Grandmother Lucretia and her daughters Catharine and Elizabeth vacated the east side and set off for Ohio. Edward and Emily and their three children moved across the hallways into the east half, and General Mack and his family took possession of the west half; in the process, the General indelibly impressed little Austin as “a man to command attention anywhere, tall, erect, of powerful build, with a head finely set, clear, exact, just, a believer in law and penalty for its breach. . . . I remember my first sight of him—I was four years old—I thought I had seen God.” For the next six years the future poet and this Jehovah-like landlord shared the same roof.

  As a structural investigation has shown, Mack enlarged the attic space by replacing the hip roof with gables, raised the roof line on the north and south sides, and added a second story to the wooden “office” on the west. The latter structure, long gone, can just be discerned on a letterhead lithograph of Mack’s downtown straw hat factory and distant home. But as the new owners expanded their living space, the old ones, losing the office, became more cramped. Since the household well apparently went with the Macks’ part of the house, the Dickinsons’ domestic routines became more exacting. Now, when the family ran out of soft water from the roof-fed barrels, they had to resort to the less convenient barnyard well. Judging from Edward’s urgent orders from Boston in winter 1838, carrying water in from the barn must have been one of the more demanding chores:

  When [Catharine, the hired girl] & Austin go after water, at the barn—tell them to be careful about the cattle hooking or hurting them. You must not go into the yard, yourself, on any account—there is no necessity for it, and you must not do it.

  Primitive and unhealthy as it sounds, the arrangement was not out of line with contemporary standards.

  Judging from a startlingly frank assessment Edward sent his father-in-law soon after Samuel left for Ohio—“I have always thought that such a change in relation to my father would prove for my advantage here, and be an additional reason for my remaining”—the son regarded the old Squire as something of an incubus. And in fact, with one less lawyer in town, Edward’s business picked up. This proved to be the turning point in his fortunes; at last he was on the path to prosperity. Appointed to the town’s school committee in 1832, he became a trustee of Amherst Academy in 1835 and in August of that year succeeded John Leland as treasurer of Amherst College. This position brought a salary of $300 and, more important, recognition as a trusted fiduciary officer—a major achievement for an attorney recently under the pall of his father’s bankruptcy.

  One month after this appointment, Edward complained to his wife, visiting in Boston, about their cramped living quarters: “I must spread myself over more ground—half a house, & a rod square for a garden, won’t answer my turn.” There is no doubt the young lawyer was in a phase of rising expectation, driven partly by success and partly by the dramatic economic boom of the mid-1830s. Land speculation was taking real estate values to unheard-of levels, and Edward, a renter with little capital, could not help fearing that he was missing out. As before, he turned for advice to his canny father-in-law, who chose this time to sell some valuable factory shares, dispose of his needlessly large dwelling place, start building a Greek Revival house, and do some speculative buying. As Joel set off on an investment trip to Maine, Edward wanted Emily to get him to “speculate a little for me in ‘Maine land.’” It was time to make some real money: “if I don’t speculate in the lands, at the ‘East,’ I must at the ‘West.’ . . . To be shut up forever ‘under a bushel’ while hundreds of mere Jacanapes, are getting their tens of thousands & hundreds of thousands, is rather too much for my spirit.” “Don’t think me deranged,” he added, knowing his wife would wonder.

  In Amherst, the mania focused on Michigan, and before long a number of prominent citizens were heavily invested there, among them cousin Nathan, who eventually moved to the territory and gained a reputation as “a good judge of Land.” Instead of going West for himself, Edward relied on advice from Nathan and various investment partners in Massachusetts. He took the plunge in 1836 and within a few years owned land in Lapeer and St. Clair Counties on the Lake Huron side, and Ottawa and Kent Counties on the Lake Michigan side. None of it seems to have made much money for him.

  “So your Western speculators have started,” wrote brother-in-law Joseph A. Sweetser (Catharine Dickinson’s husband) early in 1836, not committing himself as to their wisdom. When some of the Macks went out to look things over, they discovered as much fraud as good land. “Many will be disappointed,” they cautioned Edward; “we cannot expect to be made rich by the speculation immediately.” In Boston, Lavinia Norcross’s pastor preached against the “haste to be rich” and recommended steady labor as the one true way to wealth. After the Dickinsons ascended nearby Mount Holyoke, Lavinia teased Edward for trying to “look to the ‘far west’ & . . . get a glance of the silver & gold that grows in that luxuriant soil.” From the sound of this, she, too, doubted the wisdom of buying raw land at a distance during a speculative boom.

  In Amherst, Edward’s land purchases were more prudent. In 1834 he bought three-eighths of an acre carved from the west end of Mack’s Homestead lot. Two years later, in partnership with Mack, Luke Sweetser, and another, he locked up the adjoining “Triangle lot” to the west, the deed stipulating that the premises be “kept as an open park” for the purchasers’ benefit. The first of these acquisitions coincided with what he had once called “the best building lot for sale in our neighborhood.” Edward had plans, and the plans would one day mature. Globally, the rising young attorney couldn’t resist the wild moneymaking schemes of his time. Locally, he had a cool head after all.

  Did She Say Anything About Losing Her Luggage?

  Unlike Edward, whose professional success brought a growing sense of freedom and aspiration, Emily seems to have been racing in place on the domestic treadmill. Except when she enjoyed an occasional respite in Boston or Monson, the advice she got from her sister and husband never varied. Lavinia in 1833: “You must not worry yourself more th
an you can help—for there is nothing so wearing as anxiety.” Edward in 1838, sounding annoyed: “Why won’t you try to avoid getting overdone—Leave undone some little matters which it is not important should be done.”

  In spite of the Dickinsons’ fading economic worries, the problem of finding reliable domestic help was as far from resolution as ever. In January 1836, Edward’s sister Lucretia was afraid that Emily would be “without help . . . [and] alone all this cold weather.” In February, Joel Norcross wanted to know whether a newly hired woman had “arrived at the time—& . . . answers your expectations.” The extremity of the Dickinsons’ need is apparent from a staggering question Lavinia asked that same month: “Is the girl you used to have in prison yet?” Nothing is known about this person except that Lavinia regarded her as “deranged” and “a subject for the Hospital—she looked like a maniac when I saw her.”

  As for the impact of all this on the Dickinson children, it looks as if they were much better shielded from illness, cold weather, and physical labor than from their parents’ protective anxieties. The one marked passage in the Dickinsons’ copy of The Frugal Housewife concerns the amount of work children should be assigned:

  I would not that servile and laborious employment should be forced upon the young. I would merely have each one educated according to his probable situation in life; and be taught that whatever is his duty is honorable; and that no merely external circumstance can in reality injure true dignity of character. I would not cramp a boy’s energies by compelling him always to cut wood, or draw water; but I would teach him not to be ashamed, should his companions happen to find him doing either one or the other.