by Julie Dobrow
When Sue married Austin, the two considered moving west either to Chicago or Michigan. But Austin’s father, Edward, enticed them to stay in Amherst by making Austin a partner in his law firm and by building the couple an elegant home on a plot of land next door to his own. The house, designed by the well-known architect from nearby Northampton, William Fenno Pratt, was “unlike any other house in Amherst,” writes Polly Longsworth. “Its flat, projecting roofs, arched windows, wide verandas, and central tower stood out like a foreign accent among the Greek Revival facades and plain, pitched-roof farmhouses of the village.”4
Ensconced in The Evergreens, as she chose to name the house, and now part of what was arguably Amherst’s leading family, Sue sought to cement her position by decorating her home with fine artwork and installing all the latest fashions in interior home architecture and technology. These included a green marble fireplace, a mechanical call bell system and an early centralized heating system from the coal-fired furnace. Innovative home trends continued to be important to Sue: by the mid-1890s she owned one of the first indoor ice chests in town.
THE TWO DICKINSON FAMILY HOUSES: THE HOMESTEAD, HOME OF EMILY AND LAVINIA DICKINSON (TOP), AND THE EVERGREENS, HOME OF AUSTIN AND SUSAN DICKINSON (BOTTOM).
Sue also made her home the center of Amherst social and artistic activity, inviting Amherst College faculty members and luminaries who came to visit the town into her home. Among the guests who graced Sue’s dining table were philosopher and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, celebrated children’s author Frances Hodgson Burnett, editor Samuel Bowles, writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, celebrity firebrand minister Henry Ward Beecher and writer/poet Helen Hunt Jackson. Years later, in her obituary in the Springfield Republican, Sue was heralded as “a woman of rare quality and truly a distinguished citizen of the town, who had made her home for many years one of the notable features of the community. She had undoubtedly entertained at her board more men and women of distinction in the world of literature and affairs than any other householder in the place.”5
Mabel was awestruck. “I have been entertained with a great deal of quiet elegance here, and I have had a really very brilliant experience,” she recorded. “I was ‘taken in’ at once, and I have been constantly invited, for weeks.” She later suggested that Sue “took an immediate fancy to me and to my experiences of life, and she followed me up with invitations until life began to take on a glamorous tint and to glow with colours beyond this existence.”6 To her mother Mabel wrote of her first impressions of Sue: “her presence filled the room with an ineffable grace and elegance,” and of her lifestyle, with a lovely home, a “handsome double carriage & pair, and coloured driver” and a “beautiful new upright piano.”7
It was not only Sue Dickinson, who at age fifty-one was actually one year older than Mabel’s mother, who befriended Mabel. Her two older children, Ned (age twenty) and Mattie (age fifteen), seemed equally entranced. “Spent the morning with Mattie Dickinson” or “Ned Dickinson came in for a moment” or “went out in the carriage with Mattie,” Mabel wrote in her diary. By mid-October through the time she left for Washington in mid-December, Mabel spent at least part of three or four days of each week doing something with some member of the Dickinson family, sometimes more than once a day.
During the fall of 1881, Mabel spent the most time with Sue and with Mattie. But toward the end of the fall she began to spend more time with Ned. This was something his mother encouraged, believing that the charming Mrs. Todd would exert a positive influence on her shy young son. And although Mabel noticed and admired the elder Mr. Dickinson greatly, in those first few months it was mostly from a distance. While Austin was certainly present at some of the events that took place in his home, he participated little in the increasing social exchanges between Mabel and the rest of his family.
Despite all of her social engagements, as well as numbers of musical commitments to play or sing around town, Mabel maintained a close, loving and supportive relationship with David. In her journals she wrote of how David babied her and took care of her. In tender detail, she described how each night he would undress her before the fire in their room, warm their bed with hot bricks, and then hold her close and kiss her, and how each morning he would warm her clothes and bring her figs and grapes and feed them to her.
However, Mabel also continued to have some concerns about her husband. They were living in rented rooms, with no real prospect for owning their own house. Like her mother and her grandmother before her, Mabel often worried that her husband was not making enough money to support her in the style to which she greatly wanted to become accustomed. Quite soon after their arrival in Amherst, Mabel began to write in her journal with growing urgency about how the college needed to procure a bequest to build and support a new observatory that David could direct. Mabel desperately wished for David to be successful. Perhaps given the contrast between the Dickinsons’ lifestyle and her own, she saw that unless David ascended in his profession, their lives would suffer the same kind of constant economizing and scrambling for funds that her parents—and her grandparents—had endured.
Mabel and David returned to visit Washington just ahead of Christmas 1881. Her reunion with Millicent, whom she’d not seen for months, at first merited surprisingly little discussion in her journal or diary. Mabel marginally remarked on how much her daughter had grown: “her teeth are pretty, even and white but she shows them very little,” and her concern that Millicent seemed to be a “very cautious child.” She wrote glowingly about Millicent’s incipient musicality, even transcribing in her journal musical notation of the tunes her daughter made up. “It is certainly remarkable that a little child . . . should have so accurate an idea of pitch and time. Of course I am delighted.”8
While in Washington, Mabel resumed writing in “Millicent’s Life” in mid-January of 1882. She recorded breaking Millicent of her habit of sucking her thumb, giving Millicent baths, counting her new teeth, singing her to sleep. She wrote at length about her daughter’s initial efforts to walk, about her first words, about her continuing interest in books and singing, and also about her own artistic and social activities during her time in D.C.
Marriage and motherhood had not at all changed Mabel’s joy in her ability to attract men. In one journal entry she wrote of a New Year’s Eve party she attended, at which “I have flirted outrageously with every man I have seen—but in a way which David likes to share me, too. I have simply felt as if I could attract any man to any amount.”9
Historian Peter Gay, who extensively studied “bourgeois sexuality” in Victorian America, argued that although the prevailing twentieth-century view of the period was one of a strict and repressive moral code, in fact nineteenth-century documents demonstrate that the reality of middle-class female sexuality was often far from the stereotype. One of the chapters in Gay’s Education of the Senses focuses on Mabel Loomis Todd’s discussions of sexuality. Gay notes that Mabel’s “blessed precision, engaging garrulity and never-flagging interest in herself are not Mabel Todd’s only charms for the student of nineteenth-century middle-class culture,” but in fact, “the stream of her autobiographical musings and . . . their introspective candor and their fine lucidity set her apart, memorably.” Gay speculates that Mabel’s open flirtations with many men were in some way sanctioned by the middle-class bourgeois society in which a public standard of repressed sexuality found relief in such “safe” expressions as explicit flirtation by a married woman.10
But perhaps another explanation for David’s seeming benevolence (if not actual encouragement) of his wife’s flirtations is that they provided an opening and an excuse for his own ongoing dalliances. David’s premarital promises about putting his past behind him were not borne out. In an unpublished dissertation, historian Sharon Nancy White speculates that Mabel was all too well aware of her young husband’s past history of sexual involvements, and indeed, that at least some of these continued even shortly after their marriage. White cites Mabel’s complicated sy
stem of recording sexual activity in her diaries and journals that seemed to mark whether it was “full intercourse” (“f.m.”) coitus interruptus (“o”), sexual activity of another kind (“#”) and her own orgasms (“—”), but she also seems to have used these notations to record some of David’s sexual activities outside of their relationship. For example, on January 11, 1882, when he had returned to Amherst ahead of Mabel, David wrote her, “you must mark another # (no. 2) for January 10, but I shall do my best that there may be as few as possible.” White postulates that some of the alluded-to but not fully discussed “issues” in Mabel’s journals and diaries, as well as these symbolic notations, refer to David’s past history, masturbation and affairs with women, including some “lower class liaisons.” These would have particularly distressed Mabel, given her beliefs about the importance of associating only with those of social standing.11
Perhaps for David, Mabel’s flirtations with men seemed harmless within the overall context of Victorian society and he quite possibly found Mabel’s flirtations to be affirmations of his wife’s attractiveness to others. Mabel’s easy ability to attract and charm successful men was also something David viewed as potentially advantageous as he began to build a career that would require contacts who could invest large sums to support his acquisitions of expensive astronomical and photographic equipment and his travels around the world to document eclipses. But he would not always find other men’s romantic behavior toward his wife as acceptable as he did in the waning days of 1881.
Mabel was back in Amherst by January 26, 1882. Her social activities picked up right where they had left off, and continued to revolve mostly around spending time with members of the Dickinson family. Her diaries depict many days of going over to The Evergreens for piano practice (often for hours at a time), and also for social outings. Mabel wrote, “I have been at Mrs. Dickinson’s a great deal since my return, and she admires me extravagantly and praises me to Ned and Mattie as a sort of model for them. She appreciates me completely, and I love and admire her equally. She is a rare woman, and her home is my haven of pleasure in Amherst.”12
Within the next couple of months two events would prove to be significant turning points in Mabel’s relationship with the Dickinson family, and ultimately, in her life.
The first came on February 8, 1882. A brief entry in Mabel’s diary read, “went in the afternoon to Mrs. Dickinson’s. She read me some strange poems by Emily Dickinson. They are full of power.”13
It is the first mention of Emily or her poetry in any of Mabel’s writings. At the time, fifty-two-year-old Emily Dickinson had already written the majority of her eighteen hundred or so poems; contemporary analysts believe that many of the poems she wrote during this period of her life were less “finished” than earlier ones. Yet despite the prodigious output of poetry, few people were aware of its existence. Mabel became one of the few people outside of Emily’s family and some of her friends who knew that Emily wrote poetry. Sue Dickinson was also aware of her sister-in-law’s talents. During her lifetime, Emily shared at least 250 of her poems with Sue, and Sue offered Emily her comments and editorial suggestions on some of them. It might have been Sue who submitted a number of Emily’s poems to newspapers; between 1850 and 1866, ten of her poems were published anonymously. Three of Emily’s poems were published in 1864 in a short-lived publication called The Drum Beat, edited by Amherst College alumnus Richard S. Storrs, and another appeared in The Round Table, edited by fellow Amherst graduate Charles Sweetser. It is unclear exactly through what networks the poems were contributed and whether Emily knew that they had been published.14
Author and poet Helen Hunt Jackson, who grew up in Amherst and was a childhood acquaintance of Emily’s, was another in the small circle of people who knew that she was a poet. Helen got Emily to agree to contribute one of her poems to a volume of edited but unattributed poetry entitled A Masque of Poets (1876), and subsequently wrote to Emily in a letter that it was wrong for her not to share her great talent with the world. Thomas Niles, who had published the book, attempted to convince Emily to allow him to bring out a collection of her poems but she demurred. And in 1880 some representative of a charity in Amherst, possibly tipped off by Sue Dickinson, tried to persuade Emily to donate some of her poetry to a book whose profits would “aid unfortunate Children”; apparently Emily did submit several poems for consideration but it is not certain whether they were published.15
Mabel’s instant recognition that Emily’s odd poems that defied contemporary poetic conventions were “full of power,” would become a key to one of the most significant endeavors and accomplishments of her own life, as well as the basis for the complex relationships that she—and Millicent—would have with the Dickinson family.
Throughout February into March, Mabel’s diaries continued to note the many times that she spent at the Dickinsons’ home, or went out for moonlit sleigh rides with Ned, or danced with him, or times he came to call on her. She often noted that “we had a jolly time” or “Ned is very lovely to me” or “excellent waltz with Ned.” In mid-March, Mabel was invited to a grand event at the home of Amherst College president Julius Seelye, at which she had been asked to play several piano pieces. Mabel wrote that the prospect of playing in front of a significant audience of “the most important people” made her somewhat nervous and that “I wore Ned’s Alpha Delta pin.”16 For Mabel, Ned became a companion, or as she sometimes referred to him in her diaries, a “knight errant,” who could escort her to social events “whenever David could not attend me.”
But for Ned, it appeared to have meant much more. At twenty years old, he led a somewhat sheltered existence. He was not as quick-witted as either of his parents or his siblings. Yet as scholar Barton Levi St. Armand points out, Ned was nonetheless clever in his use of language, and absolutely dedicated to his family, especially his beloved mother, two siblings and his aunt Emily.17 Though a sophomore at Amherst College, Ned had a kind of “special student” status in which he did not take a full course of study and received no grades.
THOUGHT TO BE NED DICKINSON, CIRCLED, IN A PHOTO WITH AMHERST COLLEGE CLASSMATES, 1884 (DETAIL).
Ned also had epilepsy. The disease’s onset came when he was fifteen, and both Sue and Austin sought to shield him from it. In the nineteenth century, epilepsy was not well understood and heavily stigmatized. Those with epilepsy were marginalized and feared. Marriage was discouraged for fear of passing the disease along to offspring. The shame associated with epilepsy often caused people with the malady—or their family members—to hide it. (Emily Dickinson biographer Lyndall Gordon asserts that Emily, herself, also suffered from epilepsy. Though it is true that a tendency for epilepsy can be genetically linked and run in families, Gordon’s hypothesis, based both on historical records of doctors’ visits, medications and symptoms, as well as interpretations from Emily’s poetry, is highly controversial among Dickinson scholars. Unlike her nephew, Ned, whose parents left detailed accounts in their diaries delineating his epileptic seizures, there is no similar record for Emily.)18
It was Austin who cared for Ned during his “fits,” which tended to occur at night, and his diaries note the many times he would go to his son’s room after a terrifying scream alerted his parents to another seizure. In Millicent’s readings of Austin’s diaries, entrusted to Mabel and saved after his death, she noted Austin’s descriptions of Ned’s “fits,” how they were often so violent that he described them as “an earthquake that shook the house.”19 Sue, too frightened to be helpful, left Austin to deal with their son. This clearly became a source of tension in the marriage. Neither Austin nor Sue ever told Ned about what occurred, though it is difficult to believe that Ned never realized the issue, himself. Austin believed that his son’s illness emanated from Sue’s several attempts to abort him when she was pregnant—at least, according to what he later told Mabel, who passed this theory along to Millicent, who dutifully recorded it in the notes she took for Mabel.
Perhaps out of
guilt or perhaps out of a sense that she needed to overcompensate for her eldest child who wasn’t quite on par with his peers, Sue Dickinson did all she could to arrange Ned’s social engagements. Part of this included encouraging him to escort Mabel about town. She certainly never imagined that this relationship would be anything other than instructive and convenient for her beloved son.
But Ned fell in love with Mabel. Undeterred by the five-year age difference, unconcerned about the impropriety of it all and indifferent to the fact that she was married and had a young child—to say nothing of the fact that he spent time with and respected David—Ned was soon head over heels. “Dear Madame Valentine,” he wrote her on February 14, 1882, “Would you do me the great honor to drive a little while avec moi this afternoon at half past four. With hope, Sam Weller. p.s.—Never sign a valentine with your own name!”20 (The name Ned penned, in fact, belongs to a character from Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, who sends a valentine to a woman with whom he fell in love at first sight.)
And Ned’s passion for Mabel seemed only to intensify. “My dear Desdemona,” he wrote her two months later. “Now you are gone & Amherst has fallen and great was the fall thereof. No longer shall the sweet tones of your voice be heard in the land; the piano keys are still in mute appeal for the hand that wrought such marvelous melody from them. The sprite has sailed away to warmer climes but she has left something which can never part—abundant food for thought, sweet, sweet thought. . . . Give my love and missing to Mr. Todd . . . I can’t send it to you for you have it all.”21