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  • Emily Dickinson's Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry
  • Robin Peel
Emily Dickinson's Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry. Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter, with Ellen Louise Hart as consulting editor. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2008. http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu. $148/$221/$295 (institutional prices, according to degree-awarding status)

In the twenty-first century very few people are privileged enough to be able to see, let alone handle, an original manuscript by Emily Dickinson. Quite apart from the fact that seeing a manuscript would entail a pilgrimage to a special [End Page 217] collection such as that at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the Robert Frost Library at Amherst, the manuscripts themselves are so old, so fragile, and considered to be so precious that they are not available for even scholarly scrutiny except in the rarest of cases. The black-and-white photos in R. W. Franklin's The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson provide some idea of their appearance, but they are a poor, inadequate substitute. Now, as the result of a project led by Martha Nell Smith and her fellow editors, some of these manuscripts can be seen online through the University of Virginia's Rotunda Press website. Even though the "Dickinson Editing Collective" has been forced to slim down its original plan to include the entire body of Dickinson's manuscripts online, what is available offers joy and revelation in equal measure.

A paid subscription allows entry to a home page that includes the rationale, a twenty-four-page introduction by Smith, a contents list of available manuscripts, the materials themselves, and a search engine. Selecting a title brings the manuscript image onto the screen, and with subsequent clicks the reader can see the poem in high-quality digital form, zoom in and out, left and right, up and down, as might be expected. These tools enable very careful scrutiny of each word and punctuation mark.

The manuscript pages are not called letters, poems, fascicles, or documents; rather, they are collectively and punningly defined as "correspondences"—with no distinction between letter and poem—on the grounds that Dickinson often avoided such distinctions herself. Letters are sometimes poems, poems sometimes letters. Collectively they represent correspondence with individuals—sometimes Thomas Wentworth Higginson but more often Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the poet's sister-in-law, close friend, and critic. One innovative feature of this site is that it provides the opportunity to see groups of related manuscripts (called "constellations" by the editors) on screen simultaneously. With the aid of the mouse to move around and scrutinize pairs of manuscripts, researchers may easily make detailed comparisons in a rather easy manner.

A fundamental and sometimes contentious question among Dickinson scholars is, "How should we read Emily Dickinson?" The editors of this "XML-based archive" make clear their position on its opening page, where they place Dickinson's famous statement to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "I had told you / I did not print." Print means publish in print, as opposed to publish through private, personal circulation of hand-written notes. Anything else is a betrayal of the artist's intention, goes the argument, and the history of mangled poems in print editions over the past century makes it a strong one. Now, however, with the resources of the web and the digital age, it is possible for the world to see Dickinson's manuscripts in a way that comes very close to viewing the original papers. The textual notes, which are very detailed but unobtrusive (the reader [End Page 218] has to select a link to see them), make clear that even the most comprehensive edition of Dickinson's poems can result in a distortion for which the word "mutilation" is not too strong. Nonetheless, to admire and be immensely grateful for this wonderful resource, readers and scholars do not have to subscribe to the belief that this format is the only way to read Dickinson.

Robin Peel
University of Plymouth, United Kingdom
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