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Notes
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (1955). References to poems will use the numbering in this edition. The dating of poems also follows this edition, modified as indicated.
Arlo Duane Sletto, Emily Dickinson's Poetry: The Fascicles (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1975); Carmine A. Prioli, "ED's Reading of Francis Quarles," Dickinson Studies, no. 35 (First Half 1979), 3-7; Martha O'Keefe, "Primal Thought," Dickinson Studies, no. 35 (First Half 1979), 8-11; Sharon Hohner Sweeney, The Significance of Emily Dickinson's Fascicles (unpublished M.A. thesis, Drew University, 1979).
Although there are poems about poetry as well as several statements about poetry in her letters, ED left no record about the fascicles beyond a few indefinite, if suggestive, references. "This is my letter to the World" (441) begins a famous poem in one fascicle. Perhaps more suggestive, because Lavinia Dickinson found the poems in her sister's bureau, are lines from another famous fascicle poem (675): "But this—in Lady's Drawer / Make Summer—When the Lady lie / In Ceaseless Rosemary." Such references, however, do not establish the point.
Our earliest glimpse of fascicle structure may come when the manuscripts were still in the hands of her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, to whom Lavinia Dickinson first turned for help in publishing them. In reading through the manuscripts, Susan Dickinson would mark poems with a letter (D, F, L, N, P, S, and W), perhaps a topic indicator. Her markings appear to coincide with fascicle groupings.
Mabel Loomis Todd, unpublished diary, August 2, 1891. The diaries and journals of Mabel Todd are now in the Todd-Bingham Archive at Yale University. Excerpts from them have been published in Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (1945).
Mabel Loomis Todd, "Preface," in Poems by Emily Dickinson, ed. T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, Second Series (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), p. 4.
ED began using four sheets per fascicle in 1858-1859. In 1860-1861 the number increased, somewhat erratically, but about 1862 she arrived at a common pattern of six sheets each. This norm prevailed, with little variation, until she stopped binding about 1864. The smallest number of sheets per fascicle is four, the largest seven and a half.
In The Editing of Emily Dickinson, pp. 79-80, I assumed that, because packet 80 had a split transcript pattern, it had been separated with part considered to be 39 and part 80. Further study indicates that Mabel Todd transcribed packet 80 down to "One Sister have I in the house" (14), to her an objectionable poem, and later, in 1891, completed the transcription of the packet at about the time she transferred it.
To keep them together for Lavinia Dickinson, Mabel Todd may have been the person who bound these artificial groups with a metal fastener.
The vacancy at 96 was probably caused by movement of manuscripts within the Todd portion, for Mabel Todd continued to rearrange them.
These records include publication in Poems (1890), transcripts with particular markings on them by Arlo Bates, T. W. Higginson, and Mabel Todd herself, and an eight-page list she made of poems in 1889. The contents may also be inferred from the list of poems Lavinia Dickinson wanted included in the second series and another list that, along with Lavinia's, Mabel Todd took to Boston on April 8, 1891. These lists are in the Amherst College Library.
Todd, journal, November 30, 1890, quoted in Bingham, p. 405. Mabel Todd kept returning to this box of scraps during preparation of the second series in 1891, writing to Higginson in May that she had recently "begun to arrange and copy" them and would include a few in the new volume, and in July that some of the "box of 'scraps' in pencil" were gems and that a superb poem (664) had been "found only among the rough and penciled scraps—that box is a mine of wealth." See Todd to Higginson, May 18, July 22, and July 24, 1891, quoted in Bingham, pp. 130-131, 143-144, and 145-146 respectively.
Todd, diary, February 3, 1891, quoted in Bingham, p. 106, n. 5. The entry reads: "Yesterday I found 'The Snake.'"
Their transcript patterns match those of other poems known to have been copied in 1891 and their publication differs from the seven hundred. None was in the first series. A few, including "The Snake," Mabel Todd was able to include in the second series, then in progress, but in the main that volume derived from the seven hundred also. The "further MSS" and later manuscripts were heavily used, however, in 1896 in the third series. Most were not published until Millicent Todd Bingham brought out Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1945).
Mabel Todd gave the estimate of eight hundred poems on May 2, 1891, in a lecture that Charles E. L. Wingate reported in The Critic (May 9, 1891); see Bingham, p. 128. The Todd journal entry for June 16, 1891, is quoted in Bingham, p. 131. In it she remarked, "I have looked over some more of Emily's poems, although all the selection has been made for the second volume." She may have been referring to more manuscripts.
Mabel Todd placed the "scraps" in envelopes which her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, numbered 96, 99-112. These envelopes are now in the Todd-Bingham Archive in the Yale University Library.
Superior Court of Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1898, docket no. 125. The defendant's answer, in which this description appeared, was filed December 14, 1896. Mabel Todd repeated the description later; see Bingham, p. 17.
Mabel Todd, in charge throughout of an extraordinary sequence of events relating to packet 80, now appears to have been the person who mutilated it in 1891. Other disruption of the manuscripts occurred, without loss, before 1891, but most disorder and most of the manuscript loss occurred later in the portion held successively by Lavinia Dickinson, Susan Dickinson, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Some disruption appears to have been deliberate, as several sheets were cut apart with scissors and one cut leaf was pasted against another piece of paper, as if in a scrap book. But there is little to suggest an attempt at suppressing poems. Martha Dickinson Bianchi found two of the missing poems appropriate enough to publish in 1929. Except possibly for "Rearrange a 'Wife's' affection!" (1737), which contains images of sex change, and "If ever the lid gets off my head" (1727), which alludes to loss of sense, the other missing poems that she did not publish appear unobjectionable in image or reference: "A curious Cloud surprised the Sky" (1710) and "A Pit —but Heaven over it" (1712). Martha Bianchi is known to have sold, or given away, some Dickinson manuscripts during the 1920s and the 1930s. The missing ones may yet reappear.
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, I, 305-306, and II, 949-950, includes two blank leaves, in two of the bound fascicles. Physical characteristics suggest that she copied a full sheet in both instances. The poems on the missing leaves are not known, since Mabel Todd appears not to have transcribed, published, or indexed them. ED may have removed these leaves, but it would have been extraordinary for her to have done so. They may have become accidentally lost before the Todd-Graves transcripts of 1887-1889, an event perhaps even more unusual. Or they may have been suppressed by another person. There is precedence for suppression before 1891, but it, too, was rare.
R. W. Franklin, "Three Additional Dickinson Manuscripts," American Literature, 50 (March 1978), 109-116; "Emily Dickinson's Packet 27 (and 80, 14, and 6)," Harvard Library Bulletin, 27 (July 1979), 342-348; "The Dickinson Packet 14—and 20, 10, and 26," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 73 (1979), 348-355; and "The Houghton Library Dickinson Manuscript 157," Harvard Library Bulletin, 28 (July 1980), 245-257.
Readers have sometimes assumed otherwise. The logic and evidence argued only for a particular group of manuscripts, not their sequence, but the distinction was perhaps not clear enough.
Some manuscript movement among the editorial groups can be charted, as Mabel Todd continued to rearrange manuscripts. She also included in the groups manuscripts that were not fascicle sheets. Some she removed herself; Jay Leyda, who cataloged the Amherst collection, removed others; The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson excludes the remainder.
See, for example, Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (1974), II, 412; Rebecca Patterson, "On Dating Dickinson's Poems," American Notes & Queries, 12 (February 1974), 84-86; and Margaret H. Freeman, "Introduction," in Rebecca Patterson, Emily Dickinson's Imagery (1979), pp. ix-x.
Figs. 1 and 2 are based on Fascicles 1-40 and the related fascicle sheets in Sets 1-4. A graph based on Poems (1955), III, 1200-1201, would have a similar shape.
Thomas H. Johnson, "Establishing a Text: The Emily Dickinson Papers," Studies in Bibliography, 5 (1952-53), 27. Compare The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (1958), II, 429-446.
Jay Leyda has suggested (Amherst College Library, Emily Dickinson Collection) that certain of these manuscripts may be fascicle sheets, written in pencil in the 1880s. However, a study of their paper and of their copying and folding suggests that, while there may be vestiges of the fascicle idea, these manuscripts are closer to working drafts and miscellaneous copies.
David T. Porter, The Art of Emily Dickinson's Early Poetry (1966), pp. 16-17, has stated the problem succinctly: "Thoughtful readers of Emily Dickinson's poetry have pursued a variety of approaches to the body of work in an effort to discover coherence, so that the poetry may be discussed within some sort of rational framework. . . . Whether there is an organizing principle to be found, or whether each poem is a fragment, and the canon a random scattering of fragments out of which one is free to make his own mosaic, constitutes the fundamental problem."
Porter, pp. 16-20, and Sletto, pp. 1-8, survey some of the divergent attempts at coherence. Compare also George Monteiro, "The One and Many Emily Dickinsons," American Literary Realism, 7 (Spring 1974), 137-141.
In the bound fascicles, poems run over between pages 1 and 2 twice as often (131 times) as they do between either pages 2 and 3 (66 times) or pages 3 and 4 (65 times); they overflow from page 4 onto an extra piece of paper only 11 times. ED tried to avoid overflow and fitted poems to space accordingly. As the decline for run-on between pages 2 and 3 suggests, she may also have been affected by the crossing from one leaf to the other— lest they become separated or folded backwards (both events occurred.)
David Higgins, Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose (1967), p. 79, points out that fourteen of the twenty-two poems in packet 82 are about flowers. The fascicle has been discussed in Sletto, pp. 17-44.
In packet 27, in Sletto, pp. 69-129. I am responsible for some of the confusion regarding packets 6 and 27, as I had proposed in The Editing of Emily Dickinson that the two sheets should be shifted. Subsequent resolution of the problems associated with packet 27 indicated that, on the basis of physical characteristics of the holographs, the two sheets should remain in packet 6. See Franklin, "Emily Dickinson's Packet 27 (and 80, 14, and 6), Harvard Library Bulletin, 27 (July 1979), 342-348.
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