My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Edward maintained amicable relations with Asa and Lucretia Bullard and visited them on his trips to Boston (always seeing much more of Loring and Lavinia, however). In February 1837, writing from this city, he announced he was sending “the Sabbath School Visiter to Austin & Emily—I tho’t it would please them so I subscribed for it.” By this time, Emily, six, must have been literate.

  The January issue featured the true story of “Charles’s Last Sickness,” in which, though little Charles died a painful death, he did not complain and was not afraid. “So you would feel, if you loved Christ as you ought,” the story concluded; “but remember, you must die, whether you love him or not.”

  The next story, “The Stolen Nails; or Little Sins,” told of a “youth, who, when he stood on the gallows with a rope around his neck, wished to speak once more to his mother. She went up to his side before a great multitude of people, and put her face close to his mouth, and he bit off a piece of her ear.” The condemned wretch is then allowed to sum up the moral of the piece: “Mother, if you had reproved me when I at first stole little things, I should not have come to this untimely end.”

  In the February issue the Dickinson children discovered that there was more to “Charles’s Last Sickness.” After “his sight failed,” the four-year-old boy asked his mother where she was “with anxious and imploring tone of voice. . . . ‘Here I am, my child, holding you.’ ‘Why, I can’t see you, mother.’”

  March brought “An Infant Missionary’s Dying Gift,” which told of Frederick Dewey and how he fell into a barrel of boiling water at the age of three and then gave the missionaries all he had, sixty cents, before expiring.

  In April and May there was another two-part story, “The New Year’s Present,” about a pious dying boy who “marked a great many verses” in his Bible for his unconverted brother.

  June and July had the moving tale of Abigail E. Dwight, who loved her Sabbath School lesson but suffered from an enlargement of the heart and when her father came it was too late: she “was a corpse and dressed for the grave.”

  July also told of “An Infant Christian,” Martha Ann Graves, who was a month younger than Emily Dickinson and had serious religious interests from age two. She died, and now “the cheerful bird flits across her narrow house, where her dust sleeps waiting the resurrection morn.” The contributor came from Amherst College.

  In August the future poet probably read an excruciating true-life narrative, “The Lost Finger,” in which twelve-year-old Elizabeth sticks an index finger into a hole in a “revolving card” at a factory and has the flesh torn away up to the first joint, leaving “about an inch of the clean, white, naked bone.” “O!” adds the narrator, “the nerves of that very finger of my own, twitch and tremble as I write it.” One of Dickinson’s poems describes a woman speaker as sadistic as this story’s writer: “She dealt her pretty words like Blades –/How glittering they shone –/And every One unbared a Nerve/Or wantoned with a Bone – ” (Fr458).

  “The Little Girl Who Loved Prayer” was the offering for September (“fell into a full cistern of water and was immediately drowned”), and so on through the last three months of 1837.

  Did Edward realize how graphic and harrowing the reading material was that he had provided his children, and was the subscription renewed? The magazine continued to dwell on the deaths of young children *22 and “the separations death occasions,” and also to vent a resentful illiberality, as when the nation’s youth were assured that at the end of time the writings of Shakespeare, Scott, and Byron would be revealed as “utterly worthless” next to those of John Bunyan and Richard Baxter.

  In the Dickinsons’ commerce with the Bullards, one feels a colorless or perfunctory quality, as if the connection was kept up chiefly for family reasons. An 1839 letter by Edward undergoes a noticeable change in tone in turning from one brother-in-law to another: “Mr. J[oseph]. A. Sweetser came in from N. York today. . . . I was very glad, indeed, to see him, and he seemed as much so, to see me. . . . Mr. Bullard called to see me on Monday, & staid sometime—his family are now well. . . .”

  Tellingly, Emily was not only very young when she joined the exchanges between her parents and the Bullards but was seemingly unaware of their routine or indoctrinational character. In February 1838, after she and Austin had received the Visiter for a year, her father wanted her mother to “tell Emily that I gave Uncle Bullard her bundle for his little children.” Apparently, the thoughtfulness was Emily’s alone; nothing was said of any gifts from Austin or Lavinia. It wasn’t long before a reciprocal bundle arrived for the Dickinson children, prompting the acknowledgment that they were “much gratified with their little Books which uncle B. sent them.”

  A certain picture, provisional and fragmentary, is coming into focus. It features a young girl, affectionate, generous, responsive, aware of adult concerns and precocious in language, who, once a month, owing in part to her father’s best intentions, gets exposed to an insidiously sadistic version of official and approved reality. She is disturbed, but because she has learned not to run to her mother with her troubles, the matter escapes her parents’ anxious but imperceptive oversight. It may not be major trouble, but it is something.

  The picture shows a seven-year-old compelled to develop a kind of self-reliance, to cultivate her vast powers of creative resistance, to sing her way out of the closet of death.

  Letting Go of Aged Parents

  In the mid-1830s the older Emily seems to have undergone a serious illness. Writing to Edward in May 1835, Loring Norcross was “very sorry indeed to hear that you have had so much affliction in your family.” The next month, when Edward’s sister Catharine arrived in Amherst after a year in Cincinnati, she assured her parents she found mother and children “quite well,” repeating and underlining at letter’s end that Mrs. Dickinson was “perfectly well.” The insinuating emphasis points to something the record fails to clarify. *23 It was that fall she went to Boston for rest and recuperation. When she chose not to sail to Maine with her father and stepmother, the latter was relieved: the rough ocean passage “would have nearly done her up.” By November she was “much afflicted with the rheumatism,” and Edward himself was so unwell a sister urged him to “go South before another winter comes—if you would preserve your health.” No one outside the family knew more about their daily trials than the Macks, one of whom hoped in June 1836 (writing from Michigan) “that health is restored to your family.”

  In the winter of 1837–1838 a catastrophic fire destroyed the heart of Amherst’s business district. *24 As a sign of Edward’s psychic investment in the village, on the night of the disaster, before learning the bad news, he woke up in Boston “from a distressing dream, in which I thought there was a great fire devouring my friends in Amherst.” Having had the same nightmare the previous morning, he naturally wondered “what connection there was between the fire & my mind.” He found he couldn’t stop dwelling on the “awful & sublime” scene: “it haunts me by day & by night.” Clearly, the man was much more than the dry rationalist he liked to impersonate.

  The news from Ohio was no better. Samuel Fowler Dickinson was unhappy at Lane Seminary, feeling his hands were “tied too much.” Following the famous Lane debates of 1834, the fervently abolitionist student body rose up against the faculty and trustees and decamped “almost in a body.” The next year Samuel’s daughter described him as “really sick or unwell a great deal.” Mother Lucretia missed the folks back home and seemed to make no friends in the West, and sister Elizabeth, deprived of the right social training, was becoming “a wild, uneducated, boisterous girl.” It was “wrong for people so old, to go from their first home & find another,” Catharine felt. But Samuel had “determined never to return to the east.” As was said to Edward about brother Timothy, “he is determined and you know enough of your own family to know what that word means with them.”

  In 1836 the former Squire took a job at another fledgling school, this one near Cleveland in northeastern Ohio—
Hudson College, now Western Reserve. His announcement of the move was so incoherent his son in Georgia could not “make it out in his writing.” The old man was more distracted and unmanageable than ever. And then came the news of his death on April 22, 1838, from “lung fever.”

  The shocked responses of Edward’s three married sisters have survived. Lucretia Bullard unctuously reminded Edward, still unsaved, of the eventual family reunion in heaven: “Let us all follow his last, his dying message to us, & then we too shall go where he is.” Catharine, less inclined to smooth matters over (she was the one paternal aunt the poet made friends with), wished Father “had expressed his feelings, as he drew near his end. . . . It would be a great comfort if he had said but [a] few words.” Whereas Lucretia took a rosy view of his “almost uniform good health,” Catharine shrewdly guessed that “his depression of spirits” had brought on his death. Stricken with guilt, she accused herself of having “poorly repaid” his paternal kindness and regretted that the children had not provided a secure home for their aged parents. The third sister, Mary, expressed a mixture of self-satisfaction and reproach: “I have ever been ready to do my full share . . . if some others would do the [same].” Chances are, she was not thinking of Edward so much as of William, the prospering family rebel, who years later erected a large memorial gravestone in Amherst’s West Cemetery, as if to make up for old arrears.

  Samuel’s college accounts were in such a mess he hadn’t been paid his salary. Catharine and Mary urged the widow to stay in Ohio until “you get your dues in the settlement of your affairs,” but this was an evasion of the hard question facing the children: who takes Mother? Not only had Lucretia Gunn Dickinson become more demanding with age, like her husband, but in Catharine’s view she wasn’t capable of being “happy with any child.” And in fact, she couldn’t find a permanent berth after returning to the East. There were brief stays with two children, William and Lucretia, but her main support came from her sisters Hannah Whitmore of Sunderland and Clarissa Underwood of Enfield. Lucretia’s letters from this period complain about boils, dizziness, the ingratitude of children. “Catharine wrote me not long since the reason why she does not make me a Home,” she sourly informed Edward; “it is because her Husband does not like Old Folks it is likely the same reason operates throughout the family.” She added a dire prediction of the neglect awaiting her children in their old age, then capped this with an apology as headlong and intemperate as her accusations: “I did not think of even entering upon this subject when I commenced pardon every thing improper I know I am made up of imperfections.” *25

  “It would be best I do not ask to go to your house,” she wrote Edward in one of her calmer moments, “for I know it is not convenient.” Although he and Emily had taken boarders in recent years—Frederick Dickinson in 1835 and Joel Warren Norcross in spring 1836—these were healthy and adaptable boys who could sleep with the children. A difficult old woman would have been a heavy burden for a daughter-in-law frequently ill and always oppressed by household cares. There simply wasn’t room in the Dickinsons’ half-house for Lucretia. And so it had to be Elizabeth, the youngest and only unmarried daughter, who helped see her mother through her last months of life, and who was not quite seventeen when the old woman died of consumption on May 11, 1840, in the Underwood home in Enfield. The memory of this dismal period may have energized Elizabeth years later when she helped organize Worcester’s innovative Home for Aged Females.

  The Dickinson girls visited their grandmother at least once before her death: in September 1838, when Emily was seven, and she and Lavinia were dropped off at Enfield for a few days while their parents went on to Boston. From this or a later visit, the girl carried away a lasting memory of Lucretia’s outspoken brother-in-law, Kingsley Underwood, a blacksmith incapacitated for work and devoted to reading, writing for the press, and composing satirical verse. Locally, Underwood had quite a name as a homespun wit, “the best read man of his town.” Decades later, in a warm letter to Catharine Dickinson Sweetser, Emily recalled how this aunt had “listened with me to the great wheel, from Uncle Underwood’s ‘study,’ and won me in ‘divers other ways’ too lovely to mention.” “Divers other ways,” a typically sly theft of Scripture, comes from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, which begins, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers . . .” Did Uncle Underwood’s study impress the poet-to-be as a special place for thinking and writing? Were she and Catharine listening to a nearby millwheel as it turned and creaked? Was Catharine on the scene because it was May 1840 and the Dickinson clan had gathered for Grandmother’s funeral?

  Hard Times

  The boom years ended in 1837, making clear to Edward that his Michigan speculations were not going to pay off anytime soon. Spring brought a classic business panic, with banks suspending payment in gold, land plummeting in value, credit vanishing. Surveying the year’s events in a Thanksgiving sermon resolutely titled “Rejoice with Trembling,” Loring and Lavinia’s minister recollected the panic’s effect on commercial and financial circles—“the leaden hearts, the sleepless nights, the dismay of countenance, the fearfulness and trembling.”

  The resulting depression, persisting into the early 1840s, did serious damage to the fortunes of Emily Dickinson’s closest relatives. In Boston, where Loring formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Matthew F. Wood (the families sharing houses on Bulfinch, Pinckney, and McLean Streets), the two commission agents had been handling large volumes of raw fiber and textiles, on credit, naturally. In 1838, indiscreet as ever, Lavinia let sister Emily know that “our husbands have felt the pressure of the times very much & have had an extension. . . . [S]till they are not discouraged at all.” Under her signature, her spouse, probably annoyed at her blabbing about his business troubles, penned a short and sardonic postscript: “This letter was written by Mrs Loring Norcross.” But Loring needed his clever wife’s advice. A year later he claimed he and Wood had “paid all our notes” but then admitted that “what we may do hereafter is out of our power to say.” When old Joel Norcross drew up his will in 1842, he left Emily’s share directly to her but placed Lavinia’s in a trust, an arrangement almost certainly intended to shield her large inheritance from her husband’s creditors. That the document is in Edward’s hand suggests the trust was his idea.

  In Brooklyn and New York, Joseph A. Sweetser was also struggling to stay afloat and slowly losing heart. After a succession of partnerships, he fell ill, lost weight, and by November 1839 was sounding quite somber: “My business has been small this year—The times bear hardly upon me and that with family afflictions sometimes give me a heavy heart.” Mary Dickinson’s husband, Mark Haskell Newman, urged the discouraged man to cut his losses and “not be forever sinking . . . Let yr pride and present business go, together—& rubbing all out begin anew.” The advice was taken: Sweetser, Wheelwright, & Lathrop was allowed to die, and Joseph brought his family back to Amherst and took a job as cashier of the Amherst Bank. After a year or two in the village, where the Sweetsers joined the First Church, they returned to Brooklyn. Back on his feet now, on November 4, 1842, Joseph presented Catharine with one of his many anniversary poems celebrating their marriage. The poem was smooth enough, but the man’s real talent was in the dry-goods trade.

  No doubt Emily became better acquainted with the Sweetsers during their 1840–1842 interlude in Amherst. Her uncles included an editor (Bullard), a publisher (Newman), and now a poet who wrote for private consumption. In 1858, when she herself began producing poems in earnest and in volume, she would send Uncle Sweetser one of her more mysterious and important letters.

  Letters from a Legislator

  Another way the hard times had an impact on the girl was through her father’s ties to Amherst College.

  Facing serious shortfalls, the school had been drawing down its sacred Charity Fund to meet annual expenses. Now, with money drying up all over, it was decided to apply for a grant from the same source that had refreshed
Williams and Harvard with large infusions—the General Court.

  Accordingly, in fall 1837 Edward Dickinson was asked to run for a seat in Massachusetts’ lower house and do what he could to secure an appropriation. Since he had no political ambitions as yet and hated to leave his home and office, he accepted with the idea he would be a one-issue representative, free to return to Amherst after the question was settled. The term of office was one year. He served in 1838, and after failing to win passage for the appropriation tried again in 1839.

  At this period the Massachusetts House was hardly a place of luxury or comfort. There were over five hundred members, and they sat on uncushioned benches in a large hall heated by wood stoves in the corners—sat mainly “in their overcoats and hats,” as one of them recalled. Edward’s letters home show that he was focused and diligent, made friends and allies, and slowly began to enjoy himself. Once, the speaker of the House invited him to a casual meal at home, no one else being asked. The representative from Amherst was a skillful political worker, but the times were unpropitious and there was a lingering feeling that the college was too sectarian. In the end, though the school’s petition got good committee support, it was voted down by the House. The following year, sentiment was more favorable, but now there was no money and the petition could only be “referred” to the next legislature. The official record shows Edward making a last-ditch effort on the floor, trying to get the bill sent back to committee “with instructions to report a resolve thereon.” His motion was defeated.