Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [15]
Mr Dickinson came from a line of venturesome men who led their communities. Their sense of status, more indwelling than show, overlaid a legend of primacy. Dickinson ancestry, they fancied, might be traced to the first voyage from Europe to the Americas, and to the first Normans in England. The European progenitor the Dickinsons chose was none other than Rollo the Dane who in 901 sailed to the shores of New England, and went on to conquer Normandy, entrenching himself as its first duke. Dickinson fantasy then fixed on his descendant in the next century, Walter de Caen, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England where the family - by the name of Dykenson (literally, de Caen’s son) - became hereditary owners of a Saxon manor called Kenson, in Yorkshire. This grand family history does not explain how a nobody called Nathaniel Dickinson emerges from the soggy fenlands of Lincolnshire and sails for New England in 1637.
He and his wife and children joined a party of fifty-eight families who pressed deep into the territory of the Norwottucks in what is now western Massachusetts. They called their settlement Hadley; Nathaniel became its first recorder, its town magistrate and a trustee of the school. He lived to mourn two sons - the elder born in England, the younger in America - killed in the Norwottuck raids of 1675.
In 1742 his great-grandson, Nathan, moved north-east to what became Amherst. He was accompanied by his wife Thankful and son, Nathan Jr. The latter lived to ninety and fathered many children, three of whom married into the same family, the well-connected5 Montagues whose ancestors had been fellow settlers in seventeenth-century Hadley6 and who reappear in Emily Dickinson’s story and the feud that follows. Nathan Dickinson’s daughter, Irene Dickinson Montague, known to Emily as ‘Aunt Montague’, had three children - one, an invalid in Amherst. His name was Zebina, and when he was thirty-two he makes a dramatic appearance in Emily’s first surviving letter, written at the age of eleven in 1842.
‘Cousin Zebina had a fit the other day’, she reports, ‘and bit his tongue into.’ Clearly she’d overheard an exaggeration: ‘bit his tongue in two’. Mr Dickinson feared fits as he feared croup - as though fits were contagious - and warned his wife to keep Vinnie out of their way.
The achiever amongst Nathan’s brood was Irene’s brother, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who became Emily’s grandfather. In 1802 he reinforced the blood ties with the classy Montagues when he married Lucretia Gunn, whose mother was a Montague and whose home town was Montague, Massachusetts. Grandmother Gunn was tart and ill-tempered, and later generations of Dickinsons tended to excuse their outbursts by saying it was Grandmother Gunn ‘coming out’. It would not have been beyond the poet to joke about this explosive inheritance in her line, ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun’.
Her grandfather was tall and spare, plainly dressed, plain to look at, but a man of ideas and principles and a ferocious worker. He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, which he pictured as a seat of the sciences amongst ‘the savages’ of the New Hampshire wilderness. ‘It is still ours to inquire into the nature of man and springs of human action’, he declared in an oration to his class of 1795. Such was his respect for education that he bankrupted himself to found Amherst College. In 1816 he and Noah Webster (the compiler of dictionaries) backed the idea, and it was Samuel Dickinson who had the vision and will to promote it, but in order to do so he was not only reckless with money but also involved members of his family in his debts. In 1833, when Emily was two years old, her grandfather was forced to sell half of his mansion on Main Street and go out west. He ended his days as steward