After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  In notes she dictated to Millicent in the early 1930s, Mabel said that Vinnie “always wished to do everything in secret—the checks she received from Roberts Brothers she asked her brother to cash in Boston so that the Amherst bank might not know how much she was getting for the poems, and she did not wish to examine the land in daytime, but came across by moonlight and walked all over it.”7 When it came time to sign the deed, Vinnie similarly insisted to Mabel that she bring the attorney Timothy Spaulding to witness the signing after dark. Mabel wrote in her diary that they went to The Homestead on the evening of February 7, 1896, and Vinnie signed the paper. “A great weight is off my mind, to have even that, which Austin had given me, but had not finished the deed.”8 But the deed was not finished. Not wishing to arouse Sue’s suspicion or make things worse with Dickinson relations, Mabel asked Spaulding to defer recording it until he heard from her.

  Weeks went by, until just before Mabel and David were to leave for Japan in April of 1896. Finally, Mabel felt the time was right to have the deed officially recorded on April 1—probably because she would be out of the country for many months. When Dwight Hills discovered that Vinnie had made a business transaction without his knowledge, he found himself in a compromised position and declined to advise her further.

  Longsworth writes, “Caught doing what she had promised Mr. Hills she wouldn’t do, caught doing what she knew Sue would kill her for, Vinnie reacted like a child with her hand in the cookie jar. She said she hadn’t done it, which immediately got her into deeper trouble . . . while Susan cleverly decided to hold Vinnie to her lie and insist she get the land back.”9 Whether or not Sue Dickinson was the behind-the-scenes force in getting Vinnie to file suit against the Todds (Longsworth and Sewall suggest she was, based at least in part upon statements from Mabel; Dickinson biographer Lyndall Gordon suggests otherwise), Mabel and David were served with papers in November of 1896.

  In the months leading up to the trial, Mabel sought advice and assembled a legal team to defend herself and David. Part of their strategy was to file a countersuit, clarifying that Austin had wanted to deed the Todds this land as partial compensation for her work—and David’s assistance—in the preparation and publication of Emily’s poetry, work for which she had received exceedingly little money. The countersuit accused Lavinia of slander, and sued her for $25,000. But when the Todds’ answer to Vinnie’s lawsuit and their own countersuit were filed, Lavinia immediately disputed them, and both cases were placed on the docket for the district Superior Court for February 1897, but then continued to the following fall.

  Attorneys for Mabel and David, and for Vinnie, took depositions from potential witnesses. One deposition, in particular, caused Mabel and her team great concern. Dickinson family servant, Maggie Maher, told of the many times she had observed Mabel and Austin meeting alone at The Homestead, at The Dell—and even on one occasion—at The Evergreens. She described how their meetings took place behind closed doors, and how their carriage rides would sometimes take up an entire day. Maggie’s testimony would have been a great embarrassment to the living members of the Dickinson family, as well.10

  Maggie’s deposition was never used in court, but attorneys on both sides were keenly aware of its explosive potential. Judge Everett Bumpus, a friend of Mabel’s who had been part of her legal team, recused himself. Dwight Hills, who had been scheduled to testify on behalf of the Todds, apparently lost his nerve upon learning of the evidence Maggie provided. According to Longsworth, he “became more cautious, [and] eventually took to his bed through the trial.”11 Perhaps both Bumpus and Hills realized that the trial was likely to hinge on the question of reputation, and that a close alliance to Mabel Loomis Todd was something that could damage their own standing.

  Mabel wrote of Maggie’s deposition, “It is nearly all false, the bits of truth interwoven to make different meanings from the real, and only one or two unimportant facts. She has been very skillfully coached and manipulated.” She added, “I am too angry to sleep—only she is such a cowardly traitor she is not worth my wrath. It is cheap and low beyond even the imagination of Maggie’s measurement.”12

  Before the trial commenced it was clear that friends, relatives and neighbors were taking sides. Millicent later suggested, “The area of the feud had spread. The town had taken sides. . . . Partisans took their stand: on one side, those who held that the elderly Squire Dickinson had been too fond of Mrs. Todd—for had they not been seen more than once buggy-riding through the autumn woods together—and, on the other side, those who maintained with equal vehemence that the close relations known to exist had been purely platonic. Excitement was growing day by day. Loyalties were intensified. Families were divided.”13

  Mabel continued to puzzle over Vinnie’s behavior, reinforced by her conviction that she had simply been following Austin’s wishes to procure for her what she deserved. “Darling Austin, what WOULD you say if only you had not put things off so long!” she lamented. In the spring of 1897 she summarized her feelings ahead of the trial: “What a beautiful world to look at, and what a heartbreaking one to live in.”14

  Adding to the anxiety Mabel felt ahead of the trial was something she recognized as perhaps one of the greatest ironies of her life. At the same time as she was being sued by Lavinia for the strip of land between The Homestead and The Dell, Mabel was busily packing up all their belongings to leave it. She and David moved one mile away into Amherst College–owned Observatory House. She wrote in her diary, “In a way it breaks my heart to leave my beloved little Dell. In another way I feel infinitely relieved to have new surroundings. I have suffered so much in the little red house! Dear Austin, I love every tree and shrub, but I have been too much cut to bear it here.”15

  The presiding judge dropped Mabel and David’s slander countersuit due to scheduling disagreements, but Lavinia N. Dickinson v. Mabel L. Todd & Another was called to order in the Northampton Courthouse on March 1, 1898. One of Vinnie’s attorneys, William Hammond, gave an opening statement in which he articulated the long-standing importance of the Dickinson family to Amherst’s community and institutions. He gave a summary of Lavinia’s main arguments: that she had been tricked into signing a deed when she thought she was simply agreeing that no house should be placed on that land, that the land had significant monetary value and that the deed to the Todds should be set aside since it had been procured with misrepresentation.

  LAVINIA DICKINSON, KNOWN TO ALL FOR HER MANY ECCENTRICITIES—AND HER MANY CATS.

  Vinnie took the stand as the first witness. She testified, “I never had any talk with Mrs. Todd subsequent to the death of my brother which referred to the land near her house . . . I never had in mind an intention to deed this lot to Mrs. Todd.” Vinnie also spun a very different story about Mabel’s work on Emily’s poetry than the one that Mabel would later tell. “I intended to have them published, and had been urged very much to have it done by very distinguished people, and my wishes were to have it done,” she said. However, she claimed, “I did not make appeal to any other parties. I did not make appeal to any one. Not to my niece nor to any person. Mrs. Todd asked for the privilege of doing it . . . I wished them copied. Mrs. Todd copied them.” Furthermore, Vinnie claimed that Mabel’s work on Emily’s letters emanated from her own desire to have them published—not Vinnie’s. “Mrs. Todd asked to do it. I knew that she thought it would be for her literary reputation to do it, and it made her reputation.”

  Vinnie went on, “There had been no conversation nor arrangement nor agreement between Mrs. Todd and me.” She claimed that attorney Spaulding had not witnessed the signing of any documents—that he had been in the dining room looking at her china when Mabel asked her to sign. “He did not say anything to me at all. I did not see him take the paper at all. I do not remember he made any remark about it . . . I do not recall Mr. Spaulding’s speaking to me on the subject.”16

  Vinnie also claimed not to have sent Mabel any notes about the land transaction, and when on cross-exami
nation she was shown notes she had sent Mabel, only said she didn’t recall sending them—though she admitted that indeed, the notes were written in her handwriting. She claimed not to have surveyed the land, nor to have made any late-night visits to the Todds, at all.

  Local businessman and executor of Austin’s estate Dwight Palmer next testified as to the value of the land. Though a witness for the plaintiff (the only other one), his testimony contradicted Vinnie’s. His estimate of the land’s worth was not nearly as high as Lavinia asserted.

  Mabel’s take on this testimony was optimistic. She wrote, “Vinnie appeared and was the first witness. She perjured herself right along for an hour. It was appalling to see a person lie so composedly.”17Millicent’s later rendering from her reconstruction of the written testimony and from what her mother told her, was similar: “Lavinia Dickinson’s testimony was a repetitious fabric of misrepresentations and contradictions. . . . [She] stood alone without support from any quarter.”18

  In the afternoon, Mabel took the stand. Questioned by one of her attorneys, Wolcott Hamlin, Mabel told her side of the story. “I told my straight story,” she recorded in her diary that night, “and was cross-examined for nearly three hours. It was terribly exhausting, but everybody, even the lawyers on the other side, said I was a splendid witness. The papers said my evidence was not shaken in the least.”19

  Mabel’s testimony focused in large part on the story of how Lavinia came to her to ask for help in getting Emily’s poetry to print. Mabel recounted in great detail all of the work she had done to prepare and edit the poetry, the hundreds of hours spent and the great difficulty of deciphering, organizing and editing the poems. She clearly articulated her lack of compensation and Austin’s desire to deed her the land as a way of retroactively acknowledging her work.

  But on cross-examination, Mabel had to admit that she was not certain whether the plot of land on which The Dell stood had been purchased or given to the Todds by Austin, and that Mr. Spaulding had never sent her a bill for witnessing Vinnie’s signature on the deed. Upon intensive questioning from another of Vinnie’s lawyers, Mr. S. S. Taft, Mabel was also forced to admit that although she claimed a close association with the poet whose work she had edited, she had never even seen Emily Dickinson face-to-face. The partial transcript from the trial reads, “I never saw Emily Dickinson except as I saw her flitting through a dark hall. I never spoke to her.”20

  Taft’s argument suggested that though Mabel worked on Emily’s poetry and letters after her death, in life she could not possibly have had a close relationship with her. He implicitly planted doubt about how Mabel’s work could have been so expansive if she had never even met Emily. Through his insinuations about Austin’s other real estate largess to the Todds, he raised the issue of whether Austin would have wanted to leave Mabel his family property as compensation for work on the poetry had it not been for their inappropriate relationship. Mabel’s credibility had been partially—if not irreparably—undermined.

  David was called to testify next. He described Vinnie’s peculiar perusal of the land in question by moonlight, and her late-night visits to the Todds’. David stated, “She remarked that she had been all over the strip of land, and that she understood about it, what its boundaries, in a general way were, and that she was prepared to complete the deed at any time.”21 But Taft’s cross-examination of David revealed that he and Mabel had not paid anything for The Dell, and suggested subtly that Austin’s gifts of land came with strings attached.

  The account of this day’s testimony in the Springfield Republican included Vinnie’s uncorroborated testimony that Dwight Hills had “warned her against deeding the land to the Todds, for, he said, ‘They are leeches, leeches, leeches.’” In fact, this quote was sensationalized because Dwight Hills did not testify in person at the trial and his own testimony offered in writing was entered on behalf of the defendants, not the plaintiff.22

  The Dickinson v. Todds trial resumed on March 3. Attorney Timothy Spaulding testified on behalf of Mabel and David, stating he had been clear with Lavinia that it was a deed she was to sign, indicating that she knew precisely what the deed was for, and concluding that he had witnessed her signature himself. He said that Mabel asked him to delay recording the deed because “Mrs. Austin Dickinson and she were estranged, there was a good deal of feeling between them, and Mrs. Austin Dickinson would make it very uncomfortable for Lavinia; that is the word she used; and that on account she wanted it, the record of it, delayed.”23 This testimony opened the door for Vinnie’s attorney to insinuate that Mrs. Austin Dickinson’s ability to make anything “uncomfortable” for his client had more to do with Mrs. Todd’s relationship with Mr. Austin Dickinson than any concern Mrs. Todd might have had for Miss Lavinia.

  Following Attorney Spaulding, Dickinson family friend Frances Seelye testified as to her knowledge that Austin had intended the land to be deeded to the Todds as partial compensation for their work on Emily’s poetry, and that Lavinia had told her that she would, indeed, honor Austin’s intent. Next, Dwight Hills’s deposition was read. He stated Vinnie had “repeatedly talked over with him the matter of deeding the land to the Todds.”24

  Mabel’s recounting of the day concluded that her own case “had all the law points, theirs took it out in personal abuse of me and for an hour I was hit in the face and pounded. It exhausted me terribly. The little judge looked rather tired of it all and I came away feeling black and blue.”25

  In his summation for the plaintiff, Attorney Taft emphasized that Vinnie was the elderly surviving member of the honorable Dickinson family. She “knew little of the world and nothing of business.” He argued Vinnie’s lack of worldliness sharply contrasted Mabel’s, who had “business experience which one necessarily derives from extensive travel and the occupation of a public lecturer.” This acumen, he concluded, enabled Mabel to deceive Vinnie easily into signing over her ancestral land.26

  In the Springfield Republican’s final accounting of the trial, the unbylined reporter suggested Lavinia’s attorney gave “one of the most lucid and forceful arguments that has been heard in a Northampton courtroom in some time.” Attorney Taft asked the judge to set aside the Todds’ claim on the land because, apart from any issue of fraud, the two parties were of such different minds about it.27 Another contemporary newspaper reported, “The Connecticut valley was divided into two hostile camps—the Toddites and the Dickinsonites.”28

  Those who observed the trial were equally partisan. Millicent recounted a conversation with Smith College professor Mary Jordan, who sat through the entire trial. She told Millicent: “It was generally recognized that Lavinia was putting up a ludicrous testimony. But the onlookers enjoyed it. It was very amusing. It was in fact opera bouffe. For instance, when the question was raised as to whether she had signed the deed, and she was asked, ‘Is this not your signature?’ she replied, ‘Yes, that is to say, that is my autograph. I understood that someone in Boston wanted my autograph. I thought that was what I was doing when I wrote that.’ No one thought for an instant that Mrs. Todd had deceived Lavinia about that strip of land.”29

  Twentieth-century assessments of the trial help to contextualize it. Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall points out ways in which the trial demonstrated the deep tensions among members of the Dickinson family, and the ongoing strife between the Dickinsons and the Todds. Speculating that Sue, “who wanted nothing more than Mabel’s public humiliation,” might have encouraged Vinnie to be “disloyal to Austin’s wishes and to her friendship with both the Todds,” Sewall suggests that the trial deepened the rift between the two families.30 Elizabeth Horan’s assertion that “the very facility for promotion that Mabel Todd used on behalf of the Poems undid her” in the trial is also worth considering. Horan posits that by setting up Vinnie as a “gentlewoman” versus Mabel as “a woman of the world,” Taft subtly but powerfully evoked generational and class differences between the Dickinsons and the Todds.31

  In the end, it seems th
at this trial was less about what was explicitly stated than what was implied. It was about the credibility of the last surviving sibling of a venerable and respected old New England family versus the credibility of a woman who was whispered to have had an inappropriate and immoral relationship with the scion of that family. It didn’t matter that Vinnie contradicted herself on the stand, or that Mabel had more credible witnesses testifying on her behalf. It didn’t matter that Mabel and David had respected careers, or that Mabel had done the great majority of the work to copy, edit and publish Emily’s poems and letters. It seemed to be a trial about preserving the reputation of an esteemed and moneyed family. While Mabel and Austin’s relationship was never mentioned directly, it was almost certainly the subtext that underscored the entire trial. And though she didn’t appear as a witness, it was also a trial about Emily Dickinson—whether the poet and her editor ever could have had much of a relationship and whether Emily’s editor was entitled to more compensation for her work on the poetry.

  On April 3, Judge Hopkins came in with his ruling—for the plaintiff. He ordered Mabel and David to return the land to Vinnie, and to pay her court costs, all $49.55 of them.

  Mabel was stunned. She couldn’t even write of it until weeks later: