University of Virginia Library

Authenticity, Construction, and Extent

One may wonder whether the fascicles were Emily Dickinson's. The authenticity of the handwriting is really not in question, but one may ask, with good reason, given the extraordinary manuscript history that followed the poet's death, whether the bound structures were hers—or an editorial construction. Since Dickinson left no statement that establishes their authenticity, her record must be the fascicles themselves.[5] Within each unit, uniformity of paper obtains or, in lieu of that, similarity of embossed design or other characteristics. Because of the quantity of sheets involved (over two hundred in bound volumes; nearly one hundred unbound) and the complexity of matching them appropriately, an editor is not likely to have assembled them. The complexity derives in part from Dickinson's patterns of copying in which certain pieces must be next to others. At times, for example, she used a separate leaf to finish a poem when she ran out of space on the sheet she was using. Such division of poems would have required her binding to maintain the proper association of the pieces.

Authenticity is corroborated by others who saw the manuscripts in the first years after Dickinson's death.[6] Mabel Loomis Todd, who copied

bound volumes in the late 1880s and indexed them in 1891, referred to "volumes" several times in her diary during this time, with explicit attribution in 1891: "David and I at work the entire morning on indexing Emily's original manuscripts—four hours, and did fourteen of her little tied up volumes."[7] In the preface to the second series of poems (1891), she explained that, when found, "most of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets."[8] A few years later, during a lawsuit between Lavinia Dickinson and the Todds, the witnesses disagreed about many things relating to this poet, but the authenticity of the little volumes, attested to in several sworn statements, was never contradicted.[9]

In preparing a fascicle Emily Dickinson first copied poems onto sheets of stationery. The copying occurred before assembly or binding. Bibliographically, the fascicles may be described as folio in 2's in format, for the sheets, folded by the manufacturer to form two leaves, remained independent, not inserted inside each other. In an important sense, Dickinson's unit was the sheet. No doubt, as we have seen, she intended to bind these manuscripts—on several occasions running a poem over onto a separate leaf (twice onto the next full sheet). Such leaves (and sheets) required binding to maintain the association, as did a slip bound, not pinned, in place in one early fascicle. But whether she bound slips or pinned them, they were only an extension of a particular sheet. So also were the leaves used for overflow. Although of full size and physically separate, they carried only the additional lines, with the remainder of the recto and all of the verso blank. Even though the fascicle would be bound, the next poem began on another sheet.

To bind, Dickinson arranged several copied sheets, one atop another, with the single leaves included in the appropriate places.[10] She stab-bound the stacked sheets, punching two holes through their sides, from

front to back, and threading them once through with string, which she tied on the front. "Sewing" may not be a good term for what she did. It suggests an in-and-out motion, with the thread or string carried in a needle, whereas Dickinson made two holes from the same direction, inserted string through them, and tied it.

This procedure completed preparation of a fascicle. The poet did not provide her manuscript books with title pages, or even titles, did not put her name on them, and did not label, number, or otherwise identify them. They are without pagination or signature markings for binding. The poems are not alphabetical, and there are no contents lists, indexes, or other means of finding a specific one. It would appear that she did not maintain them in an order and that browsing was the chief means of dealing with them. There is, in addition, no indication that they were intended, as the name fascicle implies, to be installments of a larger book, issued, as it were, in parts. Because they form a nearly complete record of Dickinson's poetic activity for the years continuously covered by them, they might be seen as de facto installments of the larger work that is her opus for those years, but the term fascicle, of course, was not hers: Mabel Todd introduced it in Poems (1891). Given the variation among the fascicles, there is no physical indication, even in the recurrence of papers, that they were so intended. The fascicles are, simply, poems copied onto sheets of stationery and, without elaboration, bound together: individual manuscript books of simple construction.

In all, Lavinia Dickinson found forty fascicles and enough unbound sheets for several others. The manuscripts also included some miscellaneous semifinal and fair copies and what Mabel Todd called "scraps" —drafts of poems on odds and ends of paper. There has been a lingering concern that there were more fascicles than the forty that have survived, a concern arising from irregularities in the Todd numbering of the manuscripts: 1-38, 40, 80-112. The gaps, especially the large one between 40 and 80, have seemed to suggest missing manuscripts. Yet the notebook survives in which in 1891 Todd indexed all the poems she knew about (still unpublished) in her numbers through 98. There were no entries for 39, 41-79, or, for that matter, 96.[11] We may be confident that the numbering does not represent lost manuscripts, but the irregularity has not heretofore been explained.

The explanation, while complex, is also simple: Mabel Todd created two sequences of numbers—one below 40, the other above 80—with some of the manuscripts in the higher sequence coming from the lower one.

There appears originally to have been a single sequence for the bound fascicles, 1-40, marked perhaps on envelopes but not on manuscripts (not marked until 1891). The forty were in Lavinia Dickinson's possession. From them, as has been demonstrated elsewhere,[12] number 39 became 80 and was transferred to Mabel Todd's possession, leaving a permanent gap at 39. In similar fashion, Todd had earlier organized manuscripts into a sequence beginning at 81. So 39, one of the bound fascicles, became 80 and sat next to five other bound fascicles, 81-85, that she had already transferred. These had previously been numbers 14, 33, 35, 36, and 38. Unlike 39, these transfers had come when it was still convenient to fill the gaps with loose manuscripts: in 14 she gathered fascicle sheets that had become dislocated from their bindings, and in the other four she grouped fascicle sheets that had never been bound and a few other loose manuscripts.[13] These replacements may have been organized at the same time as the packets of loose manuscripts in her own possession, for the organization was the same—by decade, with the 1860s (33, 35; 86-92) preceding the 1870s (36, 38; 93-95).

What the irregularities in the Todd numbering represent is not lost manuscripts but the process of creating a separate collection whose numbering, by doubling the tens digit, was also separate.[14] In The Editing of Emily Dickinson I had been puzzled: "It is difficult to explain why the gap between 40 and 80, already there in 1891, should mark the division in manuscripts between those Lavinia had and those Mrs. Todd retained, since the split between the women did not come until 1896. But that is the way the manuscripts divided" (p. 37). The gap between 40 and 80 marked the division of manuscripts because Mabel Todd created it to do so. In 1891, four years before Austin Dickinson's death and five before Lavinia Dickinson filed suit to recover a piece of land, at a time when the two women were on good terms, Mabel Todd created a second collection and considered it to belong in her possession. Her unpublished diary for August 3, 1891, the year when she indexed the manuscripts, distinguished between collections: "I worked on the Index until I finished everything of Vinnie's except the Scraps, & Everything so far copied." There followed another week of indexing—as well as

further copying and classifying of poems—before she could record on August 10 that the index was done (Bingham, p. 155, n. 7). And in the index itself, which was the record of a thousand still unpublished poems, Mabel Todd wrote, "V. has 495 still unpublished."[15] The quarrel that erupted in 1896 between the Dickinsons and the Todds sealed a division of the manuscripts that had existed for five years.

One may wonder why Mabel Todd's original estimate for the number of poems, exclusive of "scraps," was seven hundred, when there are several hundred more, and why, although we know of only forty fascicles, she spoke of "over sixty little manuscript volumes." The estimate of seven hundred was recorded in her journal, November 30, 1890, shortly after the publication of the first series of poems (Bingham, pp. 401-405). The number was probably accurate, for it was based on only one box of manuscripts, containing bound fascicles and some unbound sheets. In her journal she described this as "the first box submitted to me" and referred to a second that contained "scraps." The contents of the first box may be inferred from the Todd transcript patterns and from various lists that indicate poems known to her before she wrote this journal entry in November 1890.[16] The quantity implied by these records is about the same as the Todd estimate.

Of the second box she wrote: "In addition to the original seven hundred, I have also about three hundred more in scraps—written on the backs of envelopes and bits here and there which are wonderful."[17] More manuscripts were to come. On February 1, 1891, her diary records that she was "looking over further MSS of Emily's" (Bingham, p. 106, n. 5). The next day she "found 'The Snake'" ("A narrow Fellow in the Grass"), a poem appearing on one of Dickinson's unbound fascicle sheets.[18] These "further MSS" must have been a third set, given Todd's explicit descriptions of the "scraps" in the second box and the completed

transcription of the first. She transcribed these later manuscripts, perhaps a small group of unbound fascicle sheets, during 1891, not during the initial copying in 1887-1889. They were not part of the initial seven hundred.[19] As of May 1891 she spoke of a total of only eight hundred poems, exclusive of "scraps," but about June she apparently received another group (her journal reports her to have "looked over some more of Emily's poems.")[20] These she hurried to copy before completion of the index in early August. She was to receive yet more manuscripts—in her words to T. W. Higginson (August 24, 1891): "a fresh box of Emily's 'scraps'" (Bingham, p. 160). These were more of a class of manuscripts that on August 3, in the diary entry we have seen, was regarded as "Vinnie's" but that, in time, ended up in Todd's possession.

When Mabel Todd stopped working on the poems, her numbers stood as 1-38, 40, 80-95, 97-98, with additional envelopes unnumbered.[21] In all, over sixty units. During the lawsuit she referred to them as "over sixty little manuscript volumes."[22] Like other testimony in this suit, hers was not always accurate. In this instance she generalized loosely, citing the part for the whole. There were only forty fascicles that Dickinson had bound, but, in addition, there were more than twenty editorial groups that included unbound fascicle sheets, worksheets, and miscellaneous copies.