Emily Dickinson and the Scottish New Rhetoric

The ongoing interest in re-editing Emily Dickinson reflects a desire to see her work presented as she penned it rather than altered by editors. Current scholarship recommends that we trust Dickinson's own judgment, rather than that of Todd or Bianchi or Johnson or Shurr, regarding the form of her work. She seems to have wanted her poems to look the way they do in her manuscripts. In theoretical terms, recent Dickinson criticism revisits the intentionality of her writing in order to celebrate its calculation as well as its brilliance.

This paper and the longer study it presages follow in the footsteps of current studies (exemplified by the work of Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Ralph Franklin, Sharon Cameron, Marta Werner and others) that share an interest in getting us closer to the actual circumstances, feelings and choices embodied in Dickinson's works. I address a question natural to students and scholars alike: when Dickinson sat down to write a poem or a letter, what kind of creative act did she think she was performing? For example, an argument for or against treating certain passages in her letters as poems benefits from a clearer understanding of what she thought a poem was. I take the further step of proposing that Dickinson's thoughts about writing can be illuminated by studying what she and her contemporaries were taught about it. By reconstructing her rhetorical education and milieu, we can paint a picture of the ideas and values of which her practice takes account and thus sort out her accessions, appropriations, revisions and departures.

Dickinson's textbooks belong to a coherent tradition whose influence on American education historians of rhetoric have only recently clarified. Her texts incessantly cite each other and a larger circle of books on which understanding of their precepts depends. They are meant to be taught, and like all textbooks they make presumptions concerning the education of the teachers who will use them. Furthermore, the rhetoric Dickinson studied in school differs from the literary tradition central to her recreational reading: in a word, her training in writing retains the neoclassical texture of its Scottish enlightenment roots.

Emily Dickinson's education in composition, typical of her contemporaries, was dominated by what Wilbur Samuel Howell in Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric terms the "New Rhetoric." The "New Rhetoric" emerged in treatises by such eighteenth-century Scottish theorists as Hugh Blair, George Campbell and Henry Home, Lord Karnes. Along with its popular British and American offshoots, among them texts by Richard Whately, Samuel Newman, Alexander Jamieson and John Quincy Adams, the "New Rhetoric" dominated American schooling in writing and oratory throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, a fact substantiated by Sharon Crowley (The Methodical Memory), Nan Johnson (Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America), James A. Berlin (Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges), Winifred Bryan Horner (Nineteenth-Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection), John Michael Wozniak (English Composition in Eastern Colleges, 1850-1940) and other scholars of rhetorical education.

Emily Dickinson's training in the "New Rhetoric" is indicated by the textbooks in use at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke and in her father's library (compiled by Carlton Lowenberg in Emily Dickinson's Textbooks), among them those of Newman, Whately and Kames. Indeed, Samuel Newman, whose 1834 Practical System of Rhetoric was used by both institutions and went through over sixty editions, was the brother of Amherst: bookseller Mark Haskell Newman, who married Emily's aunt Mary Dickinson and whose orphaned daughters figure prominently in family letters. Dickinson's relationship to the author of her Amherst Academy rhetoric text could scarcely have escaped her notice.

The "New Rhetoric" owed much of its extraordinary authority to its congruence with the common-sense philosophy passed on by Scottish enlightenment thinkers, especially Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, to such new world interpreters as John Abercrombie and Thomas Upham, the latter a colleague of Newman's at Bowdoin at a time when the intellectual leadership of the Maine college was widely recognized. Stewart, Upham and Abercrombie, along with the logic texts of Isaac Watte (whose hymns...