Reconsidering Mabel Loomis Todd’s Role in Promoting Emily Dickinson’s Writings

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Notes

¹ This does not mean that I intend to make light of Susan Dickinson’s role as a transcriber. On page 679 of Miller’s edition, you will find a poem starting with the line “Unto a broken heart” (F1745) with the initial SD. This poem earned the Japanese readers’ attention in 2011, as one anonymous journalist cited it in a popular column titled 天声人語 [“Vox Populi Vox Dei” (The voice of the people [is] the voice of God)] in one of the country’s foremost newspapers, Asahi Shinbun (March 19, 2011), just after a big earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. In the column, the journalist confesses, “I have always kept these words close to my heart” and describes “reporters torn between their sense of mission and their great reluctance to ‘go unto broken hearts.’” This clearly indicates that the poem has long served for him as a motto, a warning against ruthlessly intruding on others’ privacy and anguish. Remarkably, the original manuscript is no longer extant, so without Susan’s quotation in her letter to Samuel Bowles, Jr. in 1912, the poem could not have entered the Dickinson canon. For the transcript of Susan’s letter, which is now at the special collection of Amherst College, see Asahina (“Unto a broken heart”). 

² The Town History of Esashi reveals that David wrote the poem in a slightly different version on a piece of paper to show his gratitude to the priest Shinkan Hatao of Ryukanji Temple at Esashi on August 15, 1896, a day before Todd’s version appeared (The Town History 791–92). Unfortunately, David’s version is now lost, and only a photograph in The Town History survives. In contrast with Todd’s omission of Dickinson’s name, David wrote it down. Without David’s note, the villagers might not have been able to attribute this poem to Dickinson.

³ It is generally reported that Mabel Loomis Todd is the first “western” or “foreign” woman who reached the summit of Mt. Fuji (Bingham 325). To be more precise, the first western woman was Fanny Parkes, wife of Harry Smith Parkes who served as Consul General of the United Kingdom to Japan from 1865 to 1883. Fanny and her husband reached “that proud and sacred eminence” in 1867, although it was officially closed to women until 1872 (Young Japan 2:88). Therefore, it is more accurate to say that Todd was the first “American” woman who ascended Mt. Fuji. For Todd’s account of her climbing, see especially her essay “An Ascent of Fuji the Peerless,” which was co-authored by David Todd.

⁴ For instance, Richard Sewall mistakenly lists in Todd’s publications “two volumes of poetry (A Cycle of Sonnets, 1896; A Cycle of Sunsets, 1910)” (172). The former is a collection of sonnets bequeathed to Todd by an anonymous poet. Todd states in its preface that the sonnets “were written in mature years, and in the splendor of his first great love for the fair girl who died during the second year of their engagement.” Further, as I discuss here, A Cycle of Sunsets is not poetry at all, but Thoreau-inflected nature writing.

⁵ To elaborate on Bingham’s dedication to the work of editing Dickinson’s poems is beyond the scope of this study, but it merits attention that her inclusion of “fragments” in Bolts of Melody, which reflects her stance that “the poems should be given an equal chance at survival” (Bolts of Melody xxvii), has contributed to establishing Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870–1886: <http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/ > edited by Marta L. Werner.