Guest post: Birth of Higginson

American literary history doesn’t feature too many significant villains, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson would certainly seem to qualify. Higginson, who was born on December 22, 1823, has come to be known principally for two destructive roles in relationship to Emily Dickinson: his editorial critiques of her poetry in her lifetime (which, the accounts often go, discouraged her even further from seeking publication or audience); and his editorial revisions of her poetry after her death (which led to the standardized versions of her works that first gained national prominence in the late 19th century and were only challenged many decades later).

While Higginson did contribute to some of those posthumous revisions (such as insisting that each poem have a title), it seems clear that most were due instead to Mabel Loomis Todd; Higginson himself expressed strong reservations about what was being lost in the process. Moreover, and to my mind even more importantly, Higginson's evolving editorial relationship to Dickinson while she was alive was far more complex, and more meaningful to the poet, than the standard narrative suggests. Higginson wrote with sensitivity and candor about the stages, limits, and possibilities of that relationship, through the specific lens of Dickinson's challenging and compelling letters to him (which constitute, as do all of her letters, poems in their own right), in an 1891 essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Emily Dickinson's Letters."

If the standard narratives of Higginson's roles and relationship with Dickinson are thus frustratingly simplistic and inaccurate on their own terms, the focus on them also obscures his hugely meaningful contributions to American literature, culture, and society throughout the second half of the 19th century. Perhaps one reason why Higginson and Dickinson could not quite understand each other was that for Higginson, the social and political realms were apparently entirely inseparable from the literary; virtually all of his published works engage directly with his activist and progressive goals and efforts. A dedicated abolitionist and the Colonel of the first authorized regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War (the First South Carolina Volunteers), Higginson later wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) about those experiences. A lifelong advocate for women’s rights, he published readable arguments for those ideas in works such as Common Sense about Women (1881) and Women and Men (1888). And when he turned in his final decade to biographies and anthologies of American literature, such as the lectures collected in A Readers History of American Literature (1903), he not only helped define our literary tradition for a new century, but illustrated his own prominent place in that tradition.

For all those reasons, we would do well to afford Higginson that place as we continue to redefine our literary and cultural heritage.

*Ben Railton is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He has previously served as President of the New England American Studies Association and currently maintains the AmericanStudies blog. His most recent book, Redefining American Identity, was published by Macmillan in March 2011.

Howells and Higginson: hitherto unbroken

William Dean Howells was just 30 years old when he became editor of The Atlantic Monthly and, immediately upon taking the role, found the pressures of the role at the distinguished magazine. For one, he often received contributions from friends and had the difficult task of deciding their merit as objectively as possible. Further, Howells was a westerner (from Ohio) who suddenly found himself among the New England literary elite. Five years into his editorship, he was still fighting for respect from some.

Such was the case with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been a regular contributor for years. When Howells hesitated on accepting one of his submissions, Higginson fired back in an angry letter dated September 30, 1871:

I would not on any account have you print anything of mine which you thought "well enough," so I have arranged for it elsewhere — with a regret you can hardly understand, as you have not, like me, written for but one literary magazine for thirteen years & felt identified with it.

Higginson also noted he had already "foolishly" withdrawn his payment for the article before it was even accepted, "relying on an experience hitherto unbroken." He went on: "I shall not make such a mistake again, & shall in the future count on merely business relation with the Atlantic." Further, he threatened, he would happily offer his writings elsewhere.

*Information from this post comes from William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist (1959) by George N. Bennett.

In glided a little plain woman

"This is a lovely place," wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson to his wife on August 17, 1870 from Amherst, Massachusetts. Earlier that day, he had met his "hitherto unseen correspondent," a somewhat reclusive woman named Emily Dickinson, who had invited him to her family's home.

 Eight years earlier, Higginson had written an article which encouraged new writers. Dickinson was inspired to contact him, including a few of her poems, and ask for his advice. "Mr Higginson," she wrote, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Higginson and Dickinson (who had already published some of her poems) became friends by correspondence for the next few years. It was not until that August day in 1870 that they met face to face; Higginson recorded that moment in his letter:

A step like a pattering child's in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face... with no good feature — in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said "These are my introduction" in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice — & added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say — but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously... sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing.

Though he noted "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much," Higginson noted he was glad he did not live near her. His wife joked, "Oh why do the insane cling to you?" Nevertheless, Higginson maintained his correspondence and even spoke at Dickinson's funeral years later. It was after her death that the controversy started. This short poem was dated to 1870, the year the two met:

Some Days retired from the rest
In soft distinction lie
The Day that a Companion came
Or was obliged to die

*Information from this post can be found in The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (2005) by Judith Farr and A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2009) by Christopher Benfey.

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

Thomas Wentworth Higginson published an article titled "Letter to a Young Contributor" in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he talked to a hypothetical up-and-coming writer in the form of a letter addressed "my dear young gentleman or young lady." The conversational article discusses the relationship between editors and wannabe writers, noting that there is no antagonism between the two. Their goals, he writes, are one and the same: "No editor can ever afford the rejection of a good thing, and no author the publication of a bad one." The editor is challenged to find the line between good and bad manuscripts for publication — or, more accurately, judging the levels of mediocrity. Higginson does not want to discourage writers, however, and instead offers hints and suggestions: "Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language," for example, "the one fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang."

Higginson also says that a writer need not defend himself or herself. "If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it," he says. Perhaps it was that notion that inspired Emily Dickinson to respond. Her letter is dated April 15, 1862:

Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself — it cannot see, distinctly — and I have none to ask —
Should you think it breathed — and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude... I enclose my name — asking you, if you please — Sir — to tell me what is true?
That you will not betray me — it is needless to ask — since Honor is it's own pawn — 

With her letter, she included a card with her name and four poems. Higginson did respond; he encouraged her and later assisted in the editing of a posthumous collection of her works, become Dickinson's most important advocate. Among the poems Dickinson sent him in that initial correspondence was "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers":

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone. Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence,—
Ah, what sagacity perished here!

Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

*I am indebted to Michael Ryan's A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing (2000) for the text of this letter, transcribed faithfully using Dickinson's unusual punctuation style.

All o'er the tranquil land on this Memorial Day

Just as in 2011, May 30 was Memorial Day in 1881. A celebration for veterans in Boston included a reading of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Memorial Ode." Colonel Higginson was a veteran of the Civil War, having commanded the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (the first federally authorized black regiment). He describes a gathering of former soldiers:

...All o'er the tranquil land
   On this Memorial Day,
   Coming from near and far,
Men gather in the mimic guise of war.
   They bear no polished steel,
Yet by the elbow's touch they march, they wheel,
   Or side by side they stand.
They now are peaceful men, fair Order's sons;
But as they halt in motionless array,
   Or bow their heads to pray,
   Into their dream intrudes
The swift sharp crack of rifle-shots in woods;
   Into their memory swells
The trumpet's call, the screaming of the shells;
And ever and anon they seem to hear
The far-off thunder of besieging guns, —
All sounds of bygone war, all memories of the ear.

Thoughts of war, Higginson says, seem long past and he optimistically hopes that Peace (with a capital "P") has returned. It is honor of those "million men" who have laid down their arms that Memorial Day is celebrated with cooled blood an "no regretful tears." Though he invokes Massachusetts history for patriotic sentiment — in particular, he mentioned Paul Revere, Robert Gould Shaw, and Charles Sumner — Higginson notes we should not focus on the past but on the future:

They say our city's star begins to wane,
Our heroes pass away, our poets die,
Our passionate ardors mount no more so high.
'T is but an old alarm, the affright of wealth,
The cowardice of culture, wasted pain!
   Freedom is hope and health!
The sea on which yon ocean steamers ride
Is the same sea that rocked the shallops frail
Of the bold Pilgrims; yonder is its tide,
And here are we, their sons; it grows not pale,
Nor we who walk its borders. Never fear!
   Courage and truth are all!
Trust in the great hereafter, and whene'er
   In some high hour of need,
   That tests the heroic breed,
The Boston of the future sounds its call,
Bartletts and Lowells yet shall answer, " Here!"

Death of Higginson

In addition to being an author, he also had been a soldier, a critic, and an editor, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson never stopped writing, right up to his death on May 9, 1911 . Though ill, he traveled to Europe and throughout the east coast of the United States in the decade before his death. For his funeral, an honor guard comprised of black men led him to his final resting place at Cambridge Cemetery. Decades earlier, during the Civil War, Colonel Higginson had led a regiment of black soldiers (the basis of his book Army Life In a Black Regiment).

At the ceremony, a hymn was sung based on one which Higginson had written at the age of 22:

To Thine eternal arms, O God,
Take us, Thine erring children, in:
From dangerous paths too boldly trod,
From wandering thoughts and dreams of sin.

Those arms were round our childish ways,
A guard through helpless years to be;
Oh leave not our maturer days,
We still are helpless without Thee!

We trusted hope and pride and strength:
Our strength proved false, our pride was vain,
Our dreams have faded all at length, —
We come to Thee, O Lord, again!

A guide to trembling steps yet be!
Give us of Thine eternal powers!
So shall our paths all lead to Thee,
And life smile on like childhood's hours.

Higginson and Fuller: born for a literary critic

As he was writing his novel Malbone, Thomas Wentworth Higginson vowed to let nothing distract him: "I know that this Romance is in me like the statue in the marble... were it to be my ruin in fame and fortune I should still wish to keep on." Yet, on March 11, 1869, he acknowledges the one project that would pull him away. After writing four pages of the novel, he recorded in his journal: "I enjoy this extremely and am much encouraged, but cannot afford to reject the offer to write Margaret Fuller's life."

Higginson was asked to write an essay on Fuller, intended for a collection called Eminent Women of the Age (in the same volume, he contributed an essay on Fuller's friend Lydia Maria Child). Fuller's posthumous memoir had been written by her close friends William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Ralph Waldo Emerson but was much maligned for painting her negatively (particularly due to the influence of Emerson). Higginson took a different approach and wrote an essay which showed his adoration for her. It opens:

Travelling by rail in Michigan, some ten years ago, I found myself seated next to a young Western girl, with a very intelligent face, who soon began to talk with me about literary subjects. She afterwards gave me, as a reason for her confidence, that I "looked like one who would enjoy Margaret Fuller's writings,''—these being, as I found, the object of her special admiration. I certainly took the remark for a compliment; and it was, at any rate, a touching tribute to the woman whose intellectual influence thus brought strangers together.

Higginson claims he knew Fuller's family when she lived for a brief period at the Brattle House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his essay, he presents her life and her work, emphasizing particularly her short stints as a teacher before she embarked on a literary career. "Of all Americans thus far, she seems to me to have been born for a literary critic," according to Higginson. Of her now-iconic feminist book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, he notes that it "was noble in tone, enlightened in its statements, and full of suggestion," but criticizes that it "was crude and disconnected in its execution." In fact, Higginson (a bit of a feminist himself who also encouraged Emily Dickinson) determines that her book had significantly less impact than Fuller herself: "Her life thus did more for the intellectual enfranchisement of American women than was done by even her book on the subject."

Higginson's article on Fuller was later expanded to a full-length biography, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, published in 1884 as part of the "American Men of Letters" series – the first woman represented in that series.

Stanzas on Music: Stedman's high water mark

"Thanks for the volume," Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to Edmund Clarence Stedman in a letter dated November 16, 1873. The volume that Stedman had sent was his 1873 Poetical Works (which he sent to many other influential literary figures). "The poem of yours that I envy — your high water mark if I know anything about it, and one of the very choicest things in our literature," Higginson continued, "is that exquisite 'Stanzas for Music'... It rises in one delicious swell, and the ending is as perfect as the waves of the sea it describes." Higginson, a fellow poet and editor (later wrapped up in the controversy to publish Emily Dickinson's poems posthumously) compared the poem to Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous "Chambered Nautilus."

Here is the poem that Higginson loved so much, "Stanzas on Music":

Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word;
   Close, close in my arms thou art clinging;
   Alone for my ear thou art singing
A song which no stranger hath heard:
But afar from me yet, like a bird,
Thy soul, in some region unstirred,
   On its mystical circuit is winging.

Thou art mine, I have made thee mine own;
   Henceforth we are mingled forever:
   But in vain, all in vain, I endeavor—
Though round thee my garlands are thrown,
And thou yieldest thy lips and thy zone—
To master the spell that alone
   My hold on thy being can sever.

Thou art mine, thou hast come unto me!
   But thy soul, when I strive to be near it—
   The innermost fold of thy spirit—
Is as far from my grasp, is as free,
As the stars from the mountain-tops be,
As the pearl, in the depths of the sea,
   From the portionless king that would wear it.

I changed words here and there

She was born Mabel Loomis in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 10, 1856; after her marriage in 1879, she was better known as Mabel Loomis Todd. More recently, some have called her the woman who destroyed the family of Emily Dickinson.

William Austin Dickinson, the reclusive poet's older brother, entered into an affair with Todd while both were still married (she was nearly three decades younger). Mrs. Todd was very sexually open and, though her affair with Austin Dickinson was only one of many, it was the most passionate. After his death in 1895, she was given access to visit his body in private. In her journal, she wrote of how she had known and loved "every inch" of his body.

Todd never met Emily Dickinson, though they occasionally corresponded. Todd referred to the reclusive poet as "the myth." When Dickinson died at the age of 55 in 1886, she had left no instructions for what to do with her scores of unpublished poems. Her surviving sister Lavinia turned to Todd and Emily's supporter Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Todd commenced editing the poems by standardizing their syntax, punctuation, and structure. Family feud later ensued and Todd locked up her portion of Dickinson's manuscripts, where they remained unopened for half a century.

Higginson has since gotten the bulk of the blame for re-writing Dickinson's poetry. Such was not the case, however. Higginson was frustrated to work with Todd and disgusted by her heavy-handed editing. Todd herself admitted: "I changed words here and there in the two hundred [poems] to make them smoother — he changed a very few" (emphasis added). Higginson protested, "I find with dismay that the beautiful... has been left out." The worst offense Higginson was guilty of? He insisted each poem carry a title. Eventually, he stopped working with Todd altogether.

*Information from this post comes from Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson as well as Polly Longsworth's Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Some additional information, including the image of Mrs. Todd above, is from the Emily Dickinson Museum (which I strongly recommend).

Higginson's milk diet

Known for frequently overworking himself, Thomas Wentworth Higginson soon paid the price of constant labor. By the autumn of 1895, he was bed-ridden for rest and living on a "milk diet" due to dyspepsia, or indigestion (he had a similar problem while a student at Harvard Divinity School, though he also noted his need to save money at the time). After eight weeks, he described having a rare treat — a raw egg — as being like "a whole Christmas dinner." Propped up on pillows during this illness, he wrote his book Cheerful Yesterdays.

On July 30, 1896, Higginson wrote in his journal: "Sent to printers first (new) instalment of narrative... Collapse... This involves putting back on milk diet and cessation of drives for a time."

This relapse also forced Higginson to give up some of his upcoming lectures and trips (one was planned for England). He was resigned to his condition and, in the same journal entry, speculated: "Very possibly semi-invalidism for the rest of my life. Still this to be quietly faced and recognized." Elsewhere, on the cover of this journal, he wrote: "Now that I begin to know a little, I die."

His concern was unfounded, however. Higginson soon recovered and made his trip to Europe after all. Even so, he noticed the positive aspect in his experience as a "semi-invalid." He had read 42 books during the period, for example, and his focus on writing allowed him to earn more money than ever before. Higginson lived for a couple decades longer before his death in 1911.

Jackson/Holm: a mild form of hysteria

The publishing company founded in 1846 in New York as Baker & Scribner. After the death of Isaac Baker, his partner, Charles Scribner, bought the rest of the company. From then on, it was a family business. But, it was not until July 18, 1879 that a published book included the inscription of "Charles Scribner's Sons."

That first book was Saxe Holm's Stories (second series) by an anonymous writer, later revealed as Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson typically used the pseudonym of "H.H." — though her true identity was not a secret by 1879 — and tried to keep "Saxe Holm" a distinct character.

Jackson's first stories as Holm were written while living in the same boardinghouse in Colorado as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and his wife. Jackson claimed that Higginson even helped edit or write a few of them. But Jackson wanted to keep her identity as Holm a secret from the public, confessing to Charlotte Cushman that she would stop writing if the secret was revealed. Cushman called her hypocritical and told her, "You have virtually drawn it upon yourself."

Jackson was so adamant about keeping Holm a secret in an attempt to disassociate herself from her more autobiographical or more politically-charged works as H.H. The author's own growing doubts about her ability as a writer were also a factor. The second series stories published by Scribner's had an additional problem: many featured a man and a woman who fell in love after one or the other was already married. Jackson felt some guilt about the close relationship she shared with Higginson at the time (who also introduced her to Emily Dickinson; both women were born in Amherst, Massachusetts).

The concern may have been irrelevant, as Holm's popularity was sinking as of this second series. One critic noted they seemed "as if recited by a person laboring under a mild form of hysteria."

Charles Scribner's Sons eventually became Simon and Schuster.

*Some information for this post comes from Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life by Kate Phillips. The image above shows Jackson circa 1875, courtesy of the Tutt Library at Colorado College.

Higginson: Something to have lived for

From the diary of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, dated June 26, 1898:

Received degree of LL.D. somewhat tardily, but glad of delay for the sake of the roar of applause from the audience (beginning with the young men) which greeted it. It was wholly a surprise to me and was something to have lived for.

The honorary doctorate was from Harvard, his alma mater, where he was elected to Phi Theta Kappa at age 16. Colonel Higginson was accomplished as an officer in the Civil War, as an editor, and as a writer. His "better late than never" attitude might have been a reference to his having already received an honorary degree two years earlier from Case Western Reserve University, while his own alma mater was just catching up.

Earlier in 1898, Higginson also published Cheerful Yesterdays, an autobiographical memoir with a title inspired by William Wordsworth's Excursion. In his second chapter, titled "A Child of the College," Higginson praises Harvard:

I come back to Cambridge every autumn, when the leaves are falling from the trees, and the old university, like the weird witch-hazel in the groves, puts out fresh blossoms at the season when all else grows sere.

Higginson goes on to describe his reaction to seeing the newest-matriculated class of freshmen, "boys... full of the zest of their own being, taking the whole world as having been made for them, which indeed it was." Higginson himself was a freshman at Harvard at age 13. It's not hard to imagine him as one of the "kings of to-morrow" when he was a student.

Even so, biographer Brenda Wineapple suggests that these later works of Higginson's, including Cheerful Yesterdays, watered-down his radical past as an abolitionist, military man, feminist, etc. This was partly his own fault for writing his "cheerful" reminiscences. He also purposely disassociated himself; in 1896, he was working on an essay titled "The Recollections of a Radical" — but changed the title for being too combative.

Death of Emily Dickinson

The end of Emily Dickinson's life was full of grief. In April 1882, a minister she befriended named Charles Wadsworth died and, six months later, her mother died. A little over a year later, her favorite nephew died too. In March 1884, her friend Otis Phillips Lord (a judge, whom some speculate may have been a romantic interest) died. Dickinson wrote, "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come."

On May 15, 1886, Dickinson herself died of a form of kidney disease called Bright's disease. She was 55 years old. She requested that all her letters be burned; she left no specific instructions about her manuscript poems, which were found later. Few had ever been published.

Her funeral was held in the library at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her white coffin was decorated with vanilla-scented heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid, and blue field violets. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor from whom she sought advice on her writing, read the poem "No Coward Soul Is Mine" by Emily Brontë. He had previously met her only twice but would become her greatest booster posthumously. She was buried in the family plot at West Cemetery in Amherst (pictured). The greater controversy over her poems was yet to come.

Her poems were heavily edited then re-edited posthumously, before later being restored. Her poems are usually without titles and today are often referred to by a numbering system. This one was numbered XXXI. in a 1924 edition:

Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
"Dissolve," says Death. The Spirit, "Sir,
I have another trust."

Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.