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By Root 800 0

1846, when Vinnie was emerging from childhood, until Lyman took off for the South in the spring of 1851 he courted, won and dropped her, though for years to come, until he married a restrained Southern girl in 1858, he remembered Vinnie with occasional regret - whenever his Romeo inclinations replaced the stern ambitions of a Caesar, his preferred posture. To cultivate power he forced himself along what he called a flinty path and chose a sturdy wife to support a rising lawyer - a cerebral choice, he was unkind enough to tell her. At thirteen, Vinnie had responded to him with the passionate commitment of a Juliet. The passion held, but when she was eighteen - of marriageable age - it occurred to him that so much excitement might prove distracting. He was insecure financially and unsure what exactly was due to him from a wife, but as the years passed he came to think that what must matter most was a woman who would push him. Vinnie had been so young and so in love, and his intelligence so channelled to public success, that he had failed to detect the strength in her. Having characterised her as a creature of love, he did not notice the telling excellence of the books she was reading in 1851. What is known of Lyman’s lingering tie to Vinnie (as late as 1854, after a three-year absence, he still thought to marry her) comes from later, instructional letters to his bride-to-be warning her about bereft girls like Vinnie who had insufficient regard for his ambitions - who failed, as he puts it, to ‘come up to snuff’. A weak man rules by caprice. Lyman found it easy to fault an admirer in New Orleans who had shown herself too sexy, while Vinnie, though unmistakably a lady, had been too keen in her attentions. Another time, he blamed Vinnie for neglecting to write as often as she might. If he defected it would be her fault. Then, plumping for a cooler bride, he was perverse enough to prod her reserve with nostalgia for Vinnie’s warmth.

Vinnie had been openly in love with Lyman, at his side, hanging on his arm or placing a red ottoman close by his chair so that she might lay her book - Virgil, at one time - against his chest, her arm across him, while she read aloud, looking up into his face. Her arms were plump and soft, Lyman noticed, and her soft mouth and kisses were ‘very very sweet’. She liked to sit on his lap, pull out the pins from her long silken tresses and bind the loosened strands around his neck. To shake out long hair was the voluptuous gesture of the day, like Hester Prynne pulling off her Puritan cap when she meets the minister, her former lover, in the woods. For Vinnie to unpin her hair made her wildly different from the way girls of good family were expected to behave.

The reserved Dickinson parents had somehow produced these rampant offspring. Emily was not an oddity amongst them; all three were intense in the ties they cultivated. Austin spoke of ‘long fainting for tenderness’: ‘I have never before received any - from any body.’ At home, Austin’s moodiness was tempered with wit. He set his family laughing over his antics as a temporary master at the Endicott School in the poor North End of Boston. Austin caricatured his power over cowering Irish boys whose families had fled the potato famine of 1847. Emily played this up, urging him to whip the boys just short of death and assuring him the temptation to kill was reasonable.

‘. . . I should like to have you kill some [Irish boys] - there are so many now, there is no room for the Americans, and I cant think of a death that would be more after my mind than scientific destruction . . . Wont you please to state the name of the boy that turned the faintest, as I like to get such facts to set down in my journal . . . I dont think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young woman’s journal.’ She is sorry to have little news at the Amherst end, but since it’s mid June ‘it is almost time for the cholera, and then things will take a start!’ This was the grim humour the Dickinsons relished. ‘We laughed some when each of your letters came - your respected parents