in verse #57 : Up close and personal

Had Emily Dickinson not been so persnickety about the idea of publication, she might have smothered an entire literary industry in its cradle. In 1955, having been industriously engaged in his efforts, Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson[i]; the first variorum Harvard Edition; in 1962, he published Final harvest[ii], a paperback selection from the 1955 edition offering roughly one-third[iii] of the poems from the “Variorum Edition” to the vast reading public.  The reading public for Emily Dickinson had never let her poems go out of print since the first edition of Poems, published in 1890 after her death in 1886.  This selection from her manuscripts was “edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson,” and published by Roberts Brothers in Boston.

That goes some distance towards explaining the copyright notice for Final harvest (and again, I urge you to bear with me; this is not a reprise of last month’s post):

Copyright 1890, 1891, 1896, by Roberts Brothers [the first publishers]. Copyright 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi [Emily’s niece]. © Copyright, 1951, 1955, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright, 1952, by Alfred Leete hampson [who’s he?]. Copyright, ©, 1957, 1958, 1960, by Mary L. Hampson [who’s she?]. Copyright © 1961 by Little, Brown & Company (Inc.).[iv]

The mysteries I have been so bold as to highlight above are further limned in part in Johnson’s Acknowledgments in Final harvest[v]:

The Poems of Emily Dickinson, from which this text derives, was made possible, first, by the gift of Gilbert H. Montague to Harvard University Library of funds for the purchase of the poet’s manuscripts and other papers from the heirs to the literary estate, the late Alfred Leete Hampson and his wife Mary Landis Hampson; and second, by the courtesy of Millicent Todd Bingham in making available for study all of the large number of Dickinson manuscripts in her possession, later transferred by her to Amherst College.
This edition makes grateful and general acknowledgment to Harvard University Press and to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to print here the Dickinson poems which are under copyright and have been published by them. The text is that of the variorium Harvard Edition (1955), as standardized in The complete poems of Emily Dickinson (Little, Brown and Company, 1960).

What the acknowledgements don’t tell you, however, is who the Hampsons are, and what their claim to copyright is. They are the heirs to Martha Dickinson Bianchi, which is how they had some manuscripts to sell — in the words of Wikipedia, they are Bianchi’s “co-editor Alfred Leete Hampson, and later his widow, Mary Landis Hampson.”[vi]  My guess is that the Hampsons secured their claim by publishing some selection or other after Bianchi died in 1943, a year after her last copyright was granted.  Look at how many other people and institutions are thanked who have not registered a copyright at some point — two, by my count: Millicent Todd Bingham, and Amherst College, to whom she donated her Dickinson mss.  She may not have felt she had a moral ground to assert copyright (as the Brits now phrase it), for reasons we will come to shortly.

The brothers Roberts, who asserted the earliest copyright, posted this notice in their 1892 edition:

The brothers Roberts do not indicate whether this 1892 edition is a reprint of one or both of those series of her poems; but, since it bears the notice “Copyright, 1890, by Roberts Brothers” on the verso, I would guess that it is not.[vii]  But I note that the editors, Todd and Higginson, did not assert copyright. Was that because they are “two of her friends”?  Todd was the primary editor; Higginson was a correspondent of long standing with Dickinson — from April 15, 1862, in fact.[viii]  For the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly he had written the lead article, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which Dickinson had read. As Johnson summarizes it:

It was practical advice for beginners, with emphasis on smoothness of style, and avoidance of prolixity and high-flown language. “Charge your style with life,” he said, and the remark is one she echoed back to him in her first letter: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”[ix]

He judged her poetry unfit for publication, like all the other verse he received in response to his article — but asked her to send more, and thus initiated a correspondence, and then a friendship, that lasted until her death in 1886.

Incidentally, despite Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which sets forth the purpose of copyright in this phrase “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,”[x] copyright was often exercised by publishers primarily for their own benefit — kind of like Buck Owens in country music.  That may be why Joseph Smith asserted his copyright to the Book of Mormon by listing himself as “Author and Proprietor” on the title page, and, on the verso, quoting the Court Clerk’s notice of his deposit of the claim of copyright (on 11 June 1829) and using the legal language of the notice.[xi]  The publication data on the title-page read “Palmyra: Printed by E. B. Grandin, for the author. 1830,” as if to assert again that Grandin did not hold copyright [although Grandin might not have wanted to be identified so closely with the book].  By the third edition, in 1840, the statement of his responsibility read merely “Translated by Joseph Smith, Jr. Third edition, carefully revised by the translator,”[xii] perhaps in light of better legal advice, or a changing understanding of copyright.

There’s another element that may explain why Todd and Higginson didn’t assert copyright:  Todd. She had been carrying on an affair with Dickinson’s older brother, Austin, a lawyer and the treasurer of Amherst College, who lived next door to Emily. As Alfred Habegger puts it, “Terminally alienated from Sue [his wife], Austin fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd, a young faculty wife who ardently returned his feelings.”[xiii]  Habegger adds, in brief:

In 1890, four years after she [Emily Dickinson] died, a selection of her poems was published to wide acclaim. More compilations followed, including a two-volume edition of letters. All were edited by Austin’s lover [Todd], with Vinnie’s [Lavinia, Emily’s sister] encouragement and Higginson’s strategic assistance; all took editorial liberties with what the poet had written.[xiv]

What Habegger does not describe is the effect of Austin’s affair on publication of Dickinson’s poems and letters. Wikipedia argues, in its anonymous style, that “Mabel Todd never met Emily Dickinson in person, and though the two women exchanged letters, it has been said that ‘Mabel effectively destroyed the Dickinson family’.”[xv]  Habegger indicates, in his cryptic comments, that, while the affair may have ruined Austin’s marriage, both Emily and Lavinia supported their older brother.  Wikipedia goes on to describe Todd and Higginson’s publication of the poems thus:

After Emily’s death in 1886, hundreds of her unpublished poems were discovered and Todd took to herself the task, with Dickinson family consent, to copy and organize the poems. The first volume of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, and included many alterations by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson collaborated with Todd on Poems: Second Series in 1891. Higginson withdrew from further editorial collaboration so Todd edited a two volume set of Dickinson’s letters (1894) and Poems: Third Series (1896) on her own.

What happened next is, rather cryptically, described as if without Dickinson family consent. Austin Dickinson died in 1895. Wikipedia picks up the story:

In 1896, Todd and the Dickinson family had a falling-out over a legal battle regarding property owned by Austin Dickinson. As a result, Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts were split between the two families. In 1945, Todd’s daughter Millicent published some of the poems from Todd’s portion of the manuscripts.[xvi]

I haven’t been able to consult the source of that story, but it seems to explain why Todd and Higginson did not register copyright — Austin, a lawyer, may not have allowed it, or may have sold the copyright to the Roberts Brothers, if he believed Emily’s poems to have any value — but he did allow Todd to work, and to publish her work.  Millicent is, of course, the Millicent Todd Bingham of the acknowledgments in Final harvest.  And from Austin’s family his daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily’s niece, is the one with all the copyrights.

I didn’t know any of this when I set out to write this post. I hope you have been as entertained by this diversion as I have.

But hold on, I hear you say: “Other than as a cautionary tale, what does all this have to do with Dickinson’s verse?”

Your turn.

__________

[i] The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts / edited by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.

[ii] Final harvest : Emily Dickinson’s poems / selection and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. — Little, Brown, c1961.

[iii] At least 576 of at least 1775 poems, using his numbers as used in Final harvest.

[iv] Title page verso.

[v] Following p. 321.

[vi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson_Museum, accessed 23 September 2015, of which they were also curators.

[vii] I have not yet been able to determine that, either; my PDF copy is of an 1892 edition digitized by Google from the Library of the University of Michigan, a duplicate (according to a label on the front cover with what I take to be an accession number, ‘A 62807 4’; Google, at least, does not assert a copyright, but every image of a page sports an electronic watermark — “Digitized by Google” — in the lower-right-hand corner.

[viii] A date that looms large in my legend: Lincoln’s death-day, income-tax day, my birthday, and now “the most significant date in Emily Dickinson’s life,” at least “From a literary point of view,” as Johnson has it. My discussion of Higginson above draws on Johnson’s biography, op. cit., Chapter V, “My Safest Friend: Renunciation” pp. 103-133.

[ix] Op. cit., p. 104.

[x] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States, accessed 24 September 2015.

[xi] As shown in the facsimile published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1980.

[xii] According to the title page of that edition reproduced in The Book of Mormon / translated by Joseph Smith, Jr. — [Penguin Classics ed.] / introduction by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp. — New York : Penguin, 2008 (reproduced following the introduction).

[xiii] My wars are laid away in books : the life of Emily Dickinson / Alfred Habegger. — New York : Random House, c2001, p. 602. Johnson makes no mention of the affair, at least none indexed in his interpretive biography.

[xiv] Ibid., p. 602-3.

[xv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabel_Loomis_Todd , accessed 23 September 2015. Wikipedia’s source for this assertion is cited as “Emily Dickinson, Sweeping up the Heart”. The Economist: 83. 7 August 2010. The citation is followed by the cryptic note |chapter= ignored (help), which would seem to indicate some trouble with the citation. Another source for this article, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. / Polly Longsworth. — Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, supports the tale of the affair, but I don’t know who Polly Longsworth is; presumably not the author of Rubicon : the love story of Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, and Mabel Todd, the woman who saved Emily’s poetry : a novel / by Candace Ridington. — Birmingham, Ala. : Arlington Press, c1998.

[xvi] Ibid. The citation in Wikipedia for this part of the story is Smith, Martha Nell (1998). “Dickinson’s Manuscripts”. In Grabher, Gudrun; Hagenbuchle, Roland; Miller, Cristanne. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. pp. 113–137.