Samuel was a generous, idealistic, and prominent attorney with a flair for civil service, Calvinism, windy speeches, and debt. Educated at Dartmouth, admitted to the Massachusetts bar, a member of the legislature (both branches), he was also ordained a deacon and remained a deacon for forty years, his deeply religious vision woven into the founding of Amherst College. For without an orthodox institution of higher education in their own backyard, he and his cohorts fretted lest their children slide into that pool of watery theology preached at Harvard and known as Unitarianism.
And with Harvard Unitarians disdaining what they called a new “priest factory,” Squire Dickinson redoubled his efforts. Lobbying to win a charter from the Massachusetts legislature—the same charter that, decreasing Harvard’s stipend, precipitated the ignominious fall of Higginson’s father—Dickinson argued that the new college be located in Amherst. To this end he pledged his own property to defray costs, and paying out of pocket, he depleted so much of his savings that, as his wife reported, “they have compleated the College our affairs are still in a crazy situation.”
But it wasn’t the college that ruined Dickinson. A litigious man, he sued far too often, liquefying great sums; crisis followed financial crisis. Yanked out of Yale, his eldest son, Edward (Emily’s father), was forced to take classes at the Amherst Collegiate Charity Institution, as the college was at first known, until he could go back to New Haven. Then his father hauled him out again. It could not have been easy. Edward, managing finally to graduate from Yale in 1823, desired above all to be free of his father’s embarrassing affairs. “My life,” he sternly warned the woman he loved, “must be a life of business—of laborious application to the study of my profession.”
After studying law in his father’s office and at the Northampton Law School, Edward opened his own practice in Amherst in 1826, the very same year he proposed marriage by mail to Emily Norcross, whom he met in nearby Monson during a lecture on chemistry. But though he plotted his romantic course with the precision of a watchmaker, the two-year courtship lasted far longer than he intended, and despite her poet-daughter’s later characterization of her mother as possessing “unobtrusive faculties,” Emily Norcross was as stubborn as Edward, pulling when he pushed. If he pelted her with letters, she replied infrequently, sometimes not at all. “There is a vast field for enterprise open before us, and all that can excite the ambitious—kindle the zeal—rouse to emulation, & urge us on to glorious deeds is presented to view,” he tried wooing her with his prospects. “A man’s success must depend on himself,” he said over and over, trotting out his attributes—diligence, industry, loyalty, rectitude—so regularly one wonders about the untold depth of the man’s insecurities. And flinging out the last arrow in his odd quiver, he suggested Norcross examine his references.
Norcross delayed answering Edward’s offer of marriage with her roundabout reply: “Your proposals are what I would wish to comply with, but without the advise and consent of my father I cannot consistantly [sic] do it.” Edward duly wrote to her father, a prosperous farmer and entrepreneur in Monson. Again he heard nothing. Ambivalent about marriage, about Edward, about leaving her home, the poet’s mother exercised power in refusal, as her daughter later would; she hardly visited Amherst and did not explain her behavior or her silences. That, too, would become a family trait.
As for Edward, his references were good. A chip off the Puritan block, he neither drank nor smoked nor swore but beat his horse when it displeased him; daughter Emily screamed in protest. Yet he rang the village bell so everyone in town might see the northern lights, and though he read the Bible every morning to his assembled family, he easily laughed at the tedious sermon. Still, he was exacting and cranky, and he typically exempted himself from the rules he made, whether at home or in government. A good temperance man, he backed strict prohibitions against the sale of liquor, but when he asked the apothecary to fill his flask with brandy—though he didn’t have the necessary prescription for it—the shopkeeper reminded him of the regulation. “That rule was not made for me,” Dickinson presumably thundered, adding that he would send to Northampton for his drink.
Edward Dickinson, 1853. “His Heart was pure and terrible.”
Emily Norcross Dickinson. “We were never intimate Mother and Children.”
Raw emotion displeased him. He rarely smiled, and though he read Shakespeare, he frowned at poetry, preferring, as his daughter Emily noted, actualities. “Fathers real life and mine sometimes come into collision,” she would tell her brother, “but as yet, escape unhurt!” An oft-repeated anecdote (likely apocryphal) reveals his histrionic need for control—and affords a glimpse into his daughter Emily’s equally dramatic response to him. At dinner one day, when Edward sputtered about a nicked plate at his setting, Emily sprang from the table, grabbed the offending dish, and marched to the garden, where she smashed it on a stone, saying she was reminding herself not to give it to her father ever again.
But Higginson would find Edward more remote than harsh, and Emily agreed. “Father was very severe to me,” she would typically chuckle to Austin. “He gave me quite a trimming about ‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘Charles Dickens’ and these ‘modern Literati’ who he says are nothing, compared to past generations, who flourished when he was a boy.” Deftly outmaneuvering him, or so the incident of the plate suggests, she similarly humored him when, deciding she was spiritually deficient, he asked the Reverend Jonathan Jenkins to interview her. Emily was by that time in her early forties, and outwardly compliant, sat in the parlor with the fidgeting reverend, a good friend of Austin’s and not much older than she. “There must have lurked in her expressive face a faint suggestion of amusement at the utter incongruity of the situation,” the reverend’s son recalled many years later, “but she was far too urbane a person to have betrayed it.” Jenkins pronounced her “sound,” and that was the end of that.
Edward also huffed and puffed about the education of women, although, as with many things, his timing was slightly off. While courting his reluctant fiancée, he had unsentimentally pontificated about what sort of education women should have, writing under the pseudonym Coelebs (bachelor) in the New-England Inquirer, a short-lived local newspaper. “They do not need a severe course of mathematical discipline,” he claimed. “They are not improved by a minute acquaintance with foreign languages; it is of no use that they are instructed in the laws of mechanical Philosophy. Their sphere is different. They were intended for wives—for mothers.”
The unsettling prospect of marriage evidently inspired a diatribe so anachronistic even one of Edward’s sisters objected. Still, his fiancée’s grammatical infelicities troubled him. “How does it affect us,” he disingenuously wondered, “to receive an epistle from a valued friend, with half the words mis-spelled—in which capitals & small letters have changed positions—where a plural noun is followed by a singular verb?” (He might have been forecasting his daughter’s orthographic style.) Though Emily Norcross’s father had funded the local academy, where she was educated (she also briefly attended the Reverend Claudius Herrick’s school in New Haven), she remained stubbornly unlettered. Her spelling is atrocious. Edward thus plied his fiancée with copies of The Spectator (on which he based his Coelebs essays), as well as several novels by women, noting he admired America’s female literati even though, of course, education was of no great concern to females. It diverted them from their duties as wives and mothers or, worse yet, made them think such duties didn’t matter.
Stuffy, yes, and thoroughly conservative, the Janus-faced Edward actually did value education—the raison d’être of his own hapless father—and made certain his daughters had one. “We are warranted in presuming that,” he relented, “if they [women] had opportunities equal to their talents, they would not be inferior to our own sex in improving in the sciences.” A literary career was acceptable to him, too, if, that is, women were willing to abjure domestic happiness for the sake of it: “Let them bend all their energies to attain that object,
and when we bid them farewell, on their departure from society, we shall most cheerfully give them a passport to the honors of literary distinction, & joyfully participate with them in the rewards which await their approach to the portals of the temples of Minerva.” He may well have meant what he said.
TODAY LITERARY PILGRIMS by the thousands flock to the hip-roofed house on Amherst’s Main Street, but once there they step into an empty nest. The place familiarly known as the Homestead—reputed to be Amherst’s first brick residence—is spare of furniture; the unhaunted rooms are cold, and though the docents are helpful, the poet has fled.
Yet that the place is a shrine would doubtless strike Emily Dickinson’s grandfather Samuel as vindication, for though built by him in 1813 as a monument to his significance, for many years the Homestead instead memorialized his failure, which loomed very large in the Dickinson psyche.
After Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross married, in 1828, they separated themselves from the Homestead, or thought they had, by moving into the widow Jemima Montague’s place, also owned by Samuel. Edward had overseen everything, even the installation of the window blinds, for his laconic bride; the closets were painted red, the rooms white, the floors slate—or yellow, he nervously added, if she would like that better. She preferred the color of lead. But unbeknownst to Edward, his father’s insolvency would soon necessitate the sale of all his property, including the Montague place and half the Homestead itself. Edward negotiated with the purchasers of the Montague house so he could remain there, but when the arrangement fell apart two years later—one can imagine Edward’s chagrin—he was at least able to put a four-hundred-dollar down payment on the Homestead’s western half.
By then the Mansion, as it was also called, had been partitioned into two dwellings with a common kitchen. Samuel Dickinson, his wife, Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, and their unmarried children were occupying the eastern half when Edward bought the western side. There Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at five in the morning on December 10, 1830; there she later quarantined herself; there she wrote most of her poetry; there she would die.
But living and dying in the family manse was not inevitable. In 1833, the year her sister, Lavinia (called Vinnie), was born, the Homestead, along with eleven acres of land, went on the block. The mortgage on Samuel’s half had been foreclosed, and Edward, whose income was less than he had hoped, had to sell his share of the place. Samuel left Amherst for a position under Lyman Beecher at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where, just five years later, at the age of sixty-three, he died of cholera in what seemed to be the Wild West.
Edward had stayed behind, and though the Homestead’s new proprietor permitted—noblesse oblige—Edward’s family to rent the east side of the house, the transaction dealt another blow to Edward’s fragile pride. Nothing was going well. Weakened by Vinnie’s birth—and, no doubt, her husband’s rage at his father—Mrs. Dickinson dispatched the two-year-old Emily to her sister, Lavinia Norcross, in Monson.
If at this time Emily missed her mother or felt as forsaken and bereft as biographers speculate, or if her childhood curdled into pain from the separation, nothing in her aunt’s letters suggest it. According to Lavinia Norcross, Emily was an affectionate, inquisitive, and happy child with reddish curly hair. “She dont appear at all as she does at home—, & she does not make but very little trouble.” Of course every childhood has its secret sorrows. “They shut me up in Prose—/ ,” she later wrote, “As when a little Girl / They put me in the Closet—/ Because they liked me ‘still’—.”
It’s tempting to read those lines literally: frustrated parents lock their precocious child in the closet; she never forgets and never forgives. But we know little about specific childhood trials, and in any case Dickinson herself warned us not to take her poems autobiographically. Yet we also know that as an adult Dickinson tended to idealize childhood: “Bliss is the sceptre of the child.” When she was but twenty, she would plaintively tell a friend, “I so love to be a child,” and to her brother, Austin, she lamented in 1853—she was then twenty-two—“I wish we were children now. I wish we were always children, how to grow up I don’t know.”
“Two things I have lost with Childhood—,” she once remarked, “the rapture of losing my shoe in the Mud and going Home barefoot, wading for Cardinal flowers and the mothers reproof which was more for my sake than her weary own for she frowned with a smile.” Then, too, there is a late poem:
The Things that never can come back, are several—
Childhood—some forms of Hope—the Dead—
She was not posturing. As an adult, she played games with children in ways only they fathomed; she baked them tasty treats and seemed to participate wholly in their fantasies, lowering down from her room on the second floor baskets of long, oval cakes of gingerbread, decorated with a small flower. One of the young boys in the neighborhood affectionately remembered her as lavish, and her niece idealized her: “The realization of our vivid fancy, the confederate in every contraband desire,” this niece recalled, “the very Spirit of the ‘Never Never Land’…there was nothing forbidden us by her.”
Perhaps Emily sought to re-create a moment when all Dickinsons seemed happy, even her father, who was still plotting his illustrious career, dreaming not just of his children’s success but of his own, imagining himself idolized for doing good like men no less stalwart than Jefferson and Adams, whose almost simultaneous deaths caused him to cry, “How enviable their fame! To be the authors of happiness to millions—and constantly increasing millions of people! This affords a spectacle at which even fancy wonders—Ambition bows before it!” Himself unbowed, Edward bought a pew in church, earned an appointment as Amherst College’s treasurer, and ran for a seat in the state legislature. Hardworking, reliable, punctilious, he would fulfill his promise to Emily Norcross and install himself in the Amherst constellation of important gentlemen. “What man has done, man can do,” he declared more than once.
In 1840, the year his daughter Emily turned ten, Edward finally managed to quit the cramped scene of Samuel’s disgrace (“half a house, & a rod square for a garden,” he sputtered) and buy a spacious white clapboard place on West Street (now North Pleasant Street), right next to the village cemetery. For though he traveled to New York or Boston or Northampton on business, allegiance to home—for Edward no less than for Emily Norcross and later their children—was ironclad. This was true even when he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1838 and 1839. “It does seem to me,” he assured his wife from Boston, “that if I once more get home, I can not consent ever to leave you & the little children again to spend another winter here. The sacrifice is too much for me to make, & too much for you to suffer…. Home is the place for me—and where my family are, is home.”
North Pleasant Street home, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1840–1855. Photograph ca. 1870.
Had Mrs. Dickinson been willing to relocate, or if he had married a different woman, as it was later said, Edward might have re-created himself elsewhere, but she was not, and he did not, so he packed up his ambition, or so he thought, and made Amherst a bulwark against the miserable world of politics and petty men. He thus strikes us as a disappointed, implacable, and provincial man, dreams denied, who once in a rare moment confessed to daughter Emily that he felt his life had passed in a wilderness or on an island. Perhaps he never truly admitted what he wanted, a friend would write in his obituary. “His failing was he did not understand himself; consequently his misfortune was that others did not understand him.”
His daughter Emily did. When Edward was a delegate to the 1852 Whig convention in Baltimore, she told her brother, Austin, “I think it will do him the very most good of anything in the world, and I do feel happy to have father at last, among men who sympathize with him, and know what he really is.” She was correct. The next year, when he was elected to the United States House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s Tenth Congressional District, he was so pleased with himself that he
strutted down Washington’s muddy streets, a volume from the congressional library under his arm—proof positive that he was the man he thought he was. It did not last.
The American party, or nativist Know-Nothings, put him out of office, not hard to do since he had also lost regional support by insisting the federal armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry (of all places) be staffed with military men and civil servants, not local residents. Yet his last hurrah as congressman was not without its moments of valor: he presented Congress with a petition on behalf of Amherst citizens to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act and in 1854 fought against the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which would allow the inhabitants of the Nebraska and Kansas territories to decide for or against slavery by popular vote. In so doing, the bill would effectively repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 while extending the reach of slavery into territories previously considered untouchable. When it passed at the end of May, Dickinson entertained a group of thirty members of Congress in his Washington rooms to help establish the Republican party, although an old-line Whig to the bitter end, he declined to join it.
But in Amherst, Edward was a very big fish. As patriarch of the town’s first family, he lived in a commodious home with gorgeous gardens satisfyingly admired, particularly when the college commencement festivities took place there. “Our house is crowded daily with the members of this world, the high and the low, the bond and the free, the ‘poor in this world’s goods,’ and the ‘almighty dollar,’” Emily Dickinson sarcastically noted in 1853. Her mother arranged the parties, set out the dark blue china, oversaw the refreshments, made certain that the linens were clean, the tables set, the guests comfortably seated. Vinnie remembered after her mother’s death how fond she was “of every bird & flower & so full of pity for every grief.”
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