Emily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Facsimile Edition (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPIf in the nineteenth century Dickinson would have been mildly surprised to learn that in the twentieth century, Harvard University Press would publish two fancy multi-volume print variorum editions of her poems as well as one multi-volume facsimile edition of her folded manuscripts, she would have been flabbergasted by the fact that Harvard has now published an even fancier twenty-first-century edition of her girlhood herbarium, or book of floral specimens. But shocking as it would have been to the poet herself, it is a gorgeous thing for us. Thanks to the advent of digital photography, this newest boxed facsimile printing of one of Dickinson's handmade archives is lavishly produced, tastefully colorful, an object of visual pleasure. And therein lies the problem or at least the question raised by this luxurious edition of the Herbarium: for whom, or for what reason, has this collection of pressed and labeled flora been made public? Beautiful as it is, who will buy it (at $125.00) and who will read—or view—it?
That question receives two very distinct answers in the Harvard edition, since the book itself is divided into two distinct parts, which are really two distinct genres: the editorial and critical essays that preface and conclude the volume, and the herbarium itself—or the images of the herbarium itself—reproduced in every detail, including the album's lovely green embossed cover (purchased by or for Dickinson from the Springfield stationer G. & C. Merriam). The critical surround of the book gives a clear and unequivocal answer to my question: the reason to publish and read the herbarium is that it tells us more than we knew before about Emily Dickinson. As Judith Farr puts it in her preface, [End Page 105]
Click for larger view | Figure 1 This page shows Dickinson's classification of a variety of plants of the genus Pelargonium or Geranium(34). Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from Emily Dickinson's Herbaruim: A Facsimile Edition, with an Introduction by Richard B. Sewall, Foreword by Leslie A. Norris, Preface by Judith Farr, and Appendix by Ray Angelo, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Unviersity Press, Copyright © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. |
The long-awaited facsimile publication of Emily Dickinson's herbarium should both inform and enchant her readers. The herbarium was Dickinson's first "book," her first attempt as a child to address a subject that would thoroughly absorb her as a woman and a poet: flowers
(15).
On this view, the reason we will be interested in this new publication is that we will want to read everything we can that Emily Dickinson wrote, or made. Dickinson never wrote a book, of course, so the description of the herbarium as Dickinson's first "book" goes a long way toward suggesting that the books that have been made of what she wrote were part of her plan from the beginning. Farr makes the analogy between the flowers and the poems explicit when she writes that "in her poems about flowers, Emily Dickinson was to make them immortal. [In her herbarium] the flowers that she prized, pressed, and wrote about have finally become—to the fortunate reader's eye—fresh once more" (18). If to read Dickinson's poems is often to read about flowers, then Farr suggests that the publication of the herbarium gives us the subjects of many of the poems, and thus gives us more of the poet herself.
That is more or less the view shared by the more substantial prefatory essay to the facsimile, Richard Sewall's "Science and the Poet: Emily Dickinson's Herbarium and 'The Clue Divine.'" This essay is a curious editorial choice for a number...
