University of Virginia Library

Reconstruction

From these manuscripts, the facsimile edition reproduces 1147 poems: 814 of them in bound gatherings, 333 on unbound fascicle sheets. Although no fascicles are missing, a few manuscripts are missing

from them,[23] and a leaf was removed by Emily Dickinson from an unbound fascicle sheet. Known to be missing are five leaves and parts of a sixth, together containing part or all of eleven poems. (Typeset texts are included for these in lieu of facsimiles.) The manuscripts missing from the fascicles may yet reappear, but the unbound leaf probably will not. The poem on it, "Now I knew I lost her" (1219), was completed on the leaf remaining. Since Dickinson canceled the final lines, one may conclude that she removed the first leaf, comprised only of the earlier lines of this poem, and discarded it.[24]

In reconstructing the fascicles I studied the holographs, especially characteristics of handwriting, paper, and binding, and a variety of secondary materials—nineteenth-century transcripts of the poems, the type-writers and papers used, and the diaries, journals, and correspondence of the early editors. The notebook in which in 1891 Mabel Todd recorded the first lines of poems and their packet location was valuable in restoring groupings that suffered later dislocation. A few fascicles were already disordered by 1891, and for these the transcripts, made up to four years earlier than the notebook, were particularly helpful. Some distribution problems remained unresolved at the time The Editing of Emily Dickinson was published in 1967, notably the inclusion or exclusion of the sheets comprising packets 10 and 14 at the Houghton Library. Further research resolved these problems and corrected some related misjudgments. The changes have been reported in a series of articles.[25]

The Editing of Emily Dickinson did not address the sequence within a fascicle.[26] Evidence to do so does exist, and for the facsimile edition the internal order of sheets, and thus of poems, was established for each bound fascicle. (The facsimiles appear in this order, independent of the manuscript arrangement in libraries.) The most important secondary evidence was an eight-page list, now in the Amherst College Library, that Mabel Todd prepared in 1889. The list is without heading or explanation, and its purpose is not known, but Todd made it from transcripts in their fascicle order or, alternatively, in reversed order. Considerable evidence exists in the manuscripts themselves. Soiling on first and last pages, for example, often identifies the first and last sheets of a group. Various links between sheets are provided by stains and their offsets onto facing pages, matching smudge patterns, pin impressions, and manufacturing defects like paper wrinkles. Special attention was given to puncture patterns of the binding holes and to stress effects caused by opening a fascicle against the tension of a stabbed binding, for they vary within fascicles: initial sheets differ from subsequent ones in amount of curvature along the fold edge and in the direction and extent of damage to the binding holes. Usually the evidence establishing internal order was substantial, with the Todd list corroborating the physical record of the manuscripts.

Further study of the Todd transcript patterns, scrambled for the packets of unbound sheets, showed Mabel Todd to have assembled these packets after she had copied the manuscripts. The patterns are scrambled because she mixed manuscripts from the first box, transcribed in 1887-1889, with manuscripts from later groups, transcribed in 1891. In arranging them by decade, the 1860s distinct from the 1870s, she also grouped manuscripts copied at different times. Her transcripts, through false starts or parts of two poems on a single transcript, link sheets that Todd subsequently put in different packets. The eight-page list she prepared in 1889, before she assembled the packets of unbound manuscripts, has several of the loose manuscripts on it, and they are separated, although later gathered. Sheets from packet 35, for example, of the same paper but with different transcript patterns, appear at different places on the list. This specific example and, in general, the relation of

transcripts to holographs show the unbound manuscripts to have been disordered when Todd copied them. Packets 33, 35, 36, 38, and 86 onward were editorial groups, not Emily Dickinson's.[27]

In the facsimile edition the unbound fascicle sheets are called sets to distinguish them from the fascicles. They are gathered according to paper and date, a principle prevailing in the fascicles, though in instances Dickinson mixed papers and dates. As of 1862 her practice became regular, and the uniformity carried over into the unbound sheets that followed. She continued to work with large batches of stationery through about 1866, when she stopped copying fascicle sheets for several years. In the sets a number of stains and pin impressions connect sheets that Todd had put into separate editorial groupings.

Within each set no sequence belonging to the poet has been established, or is likely to be. Because she no longer bound the sheets, the physical evidence is insufficient to arrange them in a specific order. (The lack of binding would suggest that none was intended.) The facsimile arrangement is generally by variorum date and, within that, where stains and pin impressions establish links, certain sheets appear together. In one set, where the stain moves progressively through ten sheets, they are arranged in the order of the stain without regard to variorum date.