Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [19]
An undisguised intensity cuts through the courtesies of communication. The letter is shot through with clichés in inverted commas - ‘You will excuse . . . all want of friendly affection in the sight of the verse “the deepest stream stillest runs”’, throwing dead words back in Abiah’s face. It’s surly, she acknowledged. ‘I love to be surly - and muggy - and cross’, Emily could say defiantly. It’s also a gift, sharing her sparks, ‘treasures’ the poet would bestow in future on more favoured correspondents.
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A SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION
To what extent did greatness depend on the special advantages this girl enjoyed? Emily attended a private school and had the same classical and scientific education as her brother. On the classics side, the sexes were not separated at Amherst Academy. Emily took classics for three to four years, while Vinnie remained on the English side.
‘We have a very fine school,’ she told a friend. ‘There are 63 scholars. I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, and Botany.’ Many images in Dickinson’s poems would be drawn from geology - volcanoes, earthquakes, coral reefs, anthracite, quartz - and she had a lifelong passion for plants. She studied Edward Hitchcock’s Catalogue of Plants Growing without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Amherst College (1829) and collected specimens for her herbarium: Indian Pipes, wild strawberry and the yellow ox-eye daisy mounted with crossed stems.
When Emily was a schoolgirl geology was the hot subject, and here again Edward Hitchcock was the author of her textbook, Elementary Geology (1840). Hitchcock himself, with his beak nose and jutting chin above his dark stock, was a well-known figure in the Amherst of Emily’s schooldays. He was professor of chemistry and natural history at the college, which he made a leader in the natural sciences, on a par with Harvard and Yale. The prominence he gave to science influenced the curriculum at Amherst Academy. At the same time Hitchcock encouraged women’s education and invited local schoolgirls to sit in on college lectures (along the sides, to avoid the impropriety of sitting amongst the men).
He spoke of a timescale reaching ‘far back into past eternity’. His evolutionary chart looked at plants and animals side by side. At the base of both is ‘Quartz Rock’. Reptiles and ‘tracks of birds’ - creatures the poet would observe minutely - appear halfway up the chart, and corals in the historical period at the top. Professor Hitchcock taught a precision narrative, starting with ‘distinct Propositions’, then ‘Definitions and Proofs’, followed by successive ‘Inferences’. Logic along these lines taught pupils ‘to condense the matter’, and this mental training is evident in the bold propositions, swift logic and startling inference in Dickinson’s poems.
In the late 1830s geologists such as Charles Lyell had come upon incontrovertible evidence of the timescale of pre-history and, nearly twenty years before The Origin of Species (1859), Hitchcock spoke a pre-Darwinian language. ‘Species’, he said, were gradually ‘fitted to adapt’ to peculiar conditions. Hitchcock foresaw the conflict with the creation story in the Bible, and warned religious teachers to keep up with the enquiring young. To him, as an ordained minister, the ‘eternity of matter’ did not preclude a deity. Even if continents arose from natural causes, the creation of life ‘must be regarded as the highest act of omnipotence’. As a ‘transcendent naturalist’, the professor urged pupils to seek ‘the Divine character’ through examining formations of rocks.
Our earth is a mass of lava, Emily