"Some things that I called mine": Dickinson and the Perils of Property Ownership

Owning real estate was important to all the Dickinsons, yet not long after the poet was born, her family suffered a catastrophic loss of land. In part to help finance construction of Amherst College's first buildings, her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson had mortgaged the family house on Main Street, the Homestead, and when he fell into ruinous debt, the house was sold. Subsequently, Squire Dickinson's son Edward was compelled to move his own young family from the Homestead to a less desirable residence on Pleasant Street. Not until 1855, when the poet was in her early twenties, did he redeem his father's pecuniary imprudence by repurchasing the house. ¹ Losing the Homestead inevitably brought the Dickinsons down a notch in Amherst, where land, not wealth, constituted the basis of a family's claim to membership in the village's pocket-sized upper-middle class. Moreover, land ownership was integral to attorney Edward Dickinson's Whig political philosophy. Daniel Webster, the party figurehead, was convinced that citizens with a stake in a larger political entity such as the commonwealth of Massachusetts would always be less likely to rise up in rebellion. ² But Webster's vision of a nation unified by common property interests crumbled in 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which Representative Edward Dickinson saw debated on the floor of Congress) effectively overturned the Compromise of 1850 that he had helped broker. Among other things, the Act revived the Runaway Slave Law, tacitly acquiescing to the South's claim that an escaped slave, like any other piece of abstracted property, lawfully had to be returned to his or her owner. After that, property rights inevitably came into direct conflict with what abolitionists were increasingly identifying as human rights.

Furnished with the example of his father's descent into debt, as well as by his own experience in court with clients who disputed lot lines, challenged deeds, and contested estates, Edward Dickinson must have come to look upon property as a peculiarly mixed blessing. His older daughter evidently inherited this attitude, as well as a rational, legalistic approach to resolving arguments over property. Yet rather than applying the law literally, as her father did, Dickinson took it into her own hands, appropriating her father's concepts and terminology for her own purposes. This conversion becomes apparent in a series of poems addressing the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining clear title to properties. In my present example, "I had some things that I called mine - ," Dickinson emulates Whiggish attitudes towards property while simultaneously contesting them by treating the subject humorously, by situating the poem's legal action outside of any conventional judicial purview, and by blurring distinctions (or border lines) between public and private property.

Within the grounds of her father's house, Dickinson took a proprietary interest in the family flower garden, which, in "I had some things that I called mine - ," she makes representative of all things people regard as possessions:

I had some things that I called mine -
And God, that he called his,
Till, recently a rival claim
Disturbed these amities.

The property, my garden,
Which having sown with care,
He claims the pretty acre,
And sends a Bailiff there.

The station of the parties
Forbids publicity,
But Justice is sublimer
Than arms, or pedigree.

I'll institute an "Action"
I'll vindicate the law -
Jove! Choose your counsel -
I retain "Shaw"!

(J116, Fr101) ³

Here Dickinson anthropomorphizes an untimely late spring or summer frost that wilts her plants as a "Bailiff," an officer of the law. In this regard the poem would seem anomalous, for other poems in which the frost appears explicitly figure it as a felon: an assassin, in "Apparently with no surprise," or a murderous midnight sniper, in "The Frost was never seen - ." Yet this poem imputes some criminality to the frost...