University of Virginia Library

Chronology

The chronology of Emily Dickinson's poems may always be troublesome. Since she did not date her manuscripts, it is necessary to base the dating of her poems, to an important degree, on developments in her handwriting. Bench marks for the handwriting must be established from documents outside her poetry, principally from letters, which, although also without a date, may be assigned one because of postmarks or internal evidence of verifiable historical fact. The poems, in contrast, rarely have a historical content that aids dating. There are pitfalls in this method, to be sure. Handwriting may vary with mood and writing implement and with audience, public or private. When an important feature is proportional only—the number of open e's compared to closed ones—single documents may not offer sufficient evidence to conclude with certainty. It is understandable that some imprecision will inhere in even systematic attempts at dating.

In the variorum chronology, based on the only comprehensive study

so far of the handwriting, there are examples of fascicles which, because their sheets were separated, were assigned to more than one year: 1858 and 1859; 1861 and 1862; 1862 and 1863. Problems with the variorum dating are more frequent after Dickinson stopped binding fascicle sheets about 1864. The unbound sheets were dated while in the artificial groups Mabel Todd had assembled, and variant dates, 1864-1866, were assigned to sets of matching sheets of stationery, identical in characteristics of copying and at times linked by stains and pin impressions. By the 1870s the variorum dating of unbound fascicle sheets can be erratic, with dates several years apart assigned to the poems on a single sheet. One sheet has three such dates, in chronology the reverse of their sequence on the sheet: about 1877, early 1876, and about 1873. My research for the facsimile edition, however, suggests that the variorum dating may be accurate in outline, especially before 1864, and I used this dating developed by Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, noting discrepancies and, after 1864, recording a range of dates for manuscripts in the sets.

The fascicles do provide evidence other than handwriting for putting them in sequence. Formal aspects of these manuscript books developed over several years. Among them are the presence and display of alternative readings, underlining and quotation marks, variation in overflow technique, the number of sheets per fascicle, and the use of single leaves. For example, when she began, Emily Dickinson allowed only completed poems into the fascicles. The first unresolved reading does not appear for about a year, and there are only about a half dozen in the first ten fascicles, through about 1860. About 1861, and continuing thereafter, alternative readings became abundant: Dickinson had moved fascicle copying earlier into her poetic process. She copied poems with many alternates, some with so many that Thomas Johnson called them worksheets in effect.

Her method of recording these alternates changed. As they became frequent, she first entered them somewhere near the words to which they related, but without other indication of connection. Then she began to use crosses to indicate the relationship, later dropping the alternates, like footnotes, to the end of the poem following the line she usually drew to indicate termination. Later such footnotes were written before the drawn line. Another formal feature is the use of a single leaf left from an earlier paper type. In several instances the matching leaf is among the earlier fascicles.

In The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson I relinquished the Todd numbering and arranged the units chronologically with a new numbering, Fascicles 1-40, Sets 1-15. The sequence is open to refinement,

notably in the later sets where the variorum dating is erratic, the quantities small, and formal differences less pronounced. In the fascicles themselves, it may be too precise to say that 18 preceded 19, both of which have similar characteristics of paper, display of alternates, and other formal aspects. They must be from about the same time. It may not be too precise, however, to say that Fascicle 17, of different paper and somewhat different characteristics, preceded both 18 and 19, one of which includes a single leaf of 17's paper type.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the forty fascicles and the fifteen sets were sequenced precisely as Dickinson assembled and bound them or, for the sets, just copied them. In the sequence we still would have to identify, say, where 1859 began or 1862 ended. That determination, in large degree, depends upon the uncertain analysis of handwriting. But even if the sequence were correct and the years were precisely calibrated across it, a dating problem would remain, one of central concern to the study of Emily Dickinson and her poetry: the relation of fascicle copying to the composition of poems. Today few worksheets survive for fascicle poems because she usually destroyed the earlier versions. The crucial question is, How close was the fascicle copying to the point of composition?

There are indications that it was often close. Some worksheets that have survived are dated by the variorum as about the same time as the fascicle copy, and there is often a pattern of copies sent to friends at about the same time. That she moved fascicle copying earlier into her poetic process, so that alternates abound as if in a worksheet, might also suggest that the two states were close. Dickinson scholarship has generally assumed they were, though some scholars have questioned the assumption as well as the dating of specific poems.[28]

Certainly some lag is to be expected. Dickinson did not compose onto the fascicle sheets. Even those whose compositional state might be called "worksheet" do not have the physical appearance of one, for, like other fascicle sheets, they were copied with care sometime after the initial act of composition. Seventeen poems were copied twice, ten of them into fascicles or sets of different years. At times the repetition might be ascribed to substantial variation between the two entries: she was still at work on the poem. In other instances there is little or no textual difference despite a lapse of years. Two examples are poems 174 and 259, each copied twice, two years apart but with little or no change.

They suggest that Dickinson worked out of a pool of manuscripts— rather than, at the other extreme, poem after poem onto fascicle sheets —and that the pool included manuscripts from several years.

This inference is supported by a few other poems known to have been in existence years before they were entered into the fascicles. In 1853 Emily Dickinson sent "On this wondrous sea" (4) to Susan Gilbert, then in Manchester, N. H.; five years later she copied it into the first fascicle she constructed. About 1861 she sent a stanza from "It will be Summer—eventually" (342) to Samuel Bowles; the next year she entered the full poem into a fascicle, the particular stanza differing slightly. In 1861 she sent "A Burdock—clawed my Gown" (229) to her brother Austin as political commentary; three years later she copied it with a few changes onto a manuscript in Set 6.

If we had the destroyed versions of Dickinson's poems, we could trace in complete detail the compositional history of the fascicles and, thus, her poetic development. The evidence remaining suggests that the pool of manuscripts was mixed in date, with some close to the time of fascicle construction but others up to several years old. At her death a few manuscripts from these early years, still not copied onto fascicle sheets, remained in her possession: one each from 1859, 1860, and 1861; about six from 1862; a dozen or so from 1864-1866. They are like sediment at the bottom of the pool.

Emily Dickinson's activity relating to the fascicles, 1858-1864, is tabulated in Fig. 1. For each year it shows the number of poems she copied onto fascicle sheets, the number of leaves copied, and the number of fascicles bound.[29] A graph of this activity is provided in Fig. 2.

The number of poems for 1862 is extraordinary. Twenty of the forty fascicles may be assigned to that year alone. Do the fascicles and leaves increase because Dickinson's productivity suddenly increased and she was working hard at fascicle construction to keep up? Or is there a misleading increase in poems because of an increase in copying and binding? There is some difficulty in accepting that even a facile poet suddenly wrote, on the average, a poem a day, not only writing poems but also copying them onto fascicle sheets, and that neither before nor after is there any activity similar in scope.

If the number of poems in 1862 reflects an increase in copying, as distinct from composition, it would suggest that, although Dickinson had been copying fascicle sheets since 1858, there was a new resolve in 1862 to organize her poetry. This activity coincided with her correspondence with Higginson setting up the scholar-preceptor relationship.

Fig. 1: Fascicle Activity, 1858-1864

       

	1858	1859	1860	1861	1862	1863	1864
Poems copied	57	92	67	78	378	134	27
Leaves copied	21	36	29	47	236	79	16
Fascicles bound	2	5	2	4	20	6	1

It also coincided with a new regularity in fascicle construction. Earlier she had organized them in a desultory fashion, mixing papers and dates by using sheets copied previously. In 1858, for example, she made two fascicles and left two additional sheets copied but unbound until 1859, when she bound them with two sheets from the later year. There was a spurt of copying in 1859, and she used a large batch of paper for it. During 1860 she again bound only two fascicles, again leaving additional sheets to be bound with later ones in 1861, when most of the fascicles were mixed in paper and many in date. This pattern could indicate, not insufficient poems, but a slowness in bringing poems to completion (there were no alternative readings in the earliest fascicles and only a few in the next ones) and an indifference as to when fascicles were completed.

If so, by 1862 Emily Dickinson could have had a significant number of poems in her pool and, in that year, perhaps spurred on by the correspondence with Higginson, set in vigorously to organizing them, now letting poems enter the fascicles trailing many alternates. She knew that she would be working in high volume, for she used large batches of stationery, only three or four kinds for most of the activity of 1862. After using four sheets per fascicle in the early ones, followed by an erratic increase, she now settled into a norm of six sheets each. Except for the single leaves used for completion of a poem, she no longer mixed paper types, for she stopped leaving sheets copied but unbound. She did not return to this practice until she approached 1863. As she neared the end of this round of copying and binding, she also returned to smaller groups of stationery: fascicles 38, 39, and 40 have individual paper types unique in the fascicles.

A similar "backlog" of poems may have developed between the end of fascicle binding in 1864 and the copying of the unbound sets that followed (Sets 5-7). During most of 1864 and 1865 Dickinson was in Cambridge under the care of a physician for her eyes. He forbade her to use pen and ink, and she appears to have followed his advice. Her datable documents during this time are in pencil.[30] These sets, however, are in ink and may not have been copied until near the end of the period (1864-1866). Handwriting characteristics appear to bear this out, especially change in the word the which, having been stable for some time, is altered as of Set 5. When she did copy the poems of 1864 and 1865, she obtained large quantities of paper again, using only three kinds before again stopping for several years.

For the sheets copied in the early 1870s, there were no large batches of stationery, sometimes only one sheet of a kind. Some sheets are tablet style, carrying but one poem each. Dickinson's copying appears to have been desultory, as it was before 1862, but she managed to transcribe over sixty poems in the early seventies. Although not copied until then, some of them may have been written during the interval 1867-1870, when there is a decline in datable poems similar to that in 1860-1861 (Poems [1955], III, 1201).

This interpretation of the relation of composition to fascicle copying is not a conclusion, but a hypothesis for explaining the shape of Dickinson's poetic activity. So far, it fits the evidence, some of which points to

fascicle entry close to the time of composition, some to later entry. The exact balance of the two, and how it may apply to specific poems, is not yet known.