An Annotated Calendar of Samuel Bowles's Letters to Austin and Susan Dickinson

The Houghton Library's 163 manuscript letters from Samuel Bowles to Emily Dickinson's brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, constitute a major underutilized source on the poet, her family and friends, a number of other people, and a variety of topics in nineteenth-century American literature and history. Several well-known excerpts from these packed and racy letters have entered the literature on Dickinson, but scholars seem not to have taken on the entire correspondence. This apparent neglect is easily explained: Bowles's rapid scribble can be extremely hard to decipher, and, like the poet, he generally failed to record the date. The present article, based on a full transcription of Bowles's manuscript letters, establishes the exact, probable, or approximate dates of 156 of them and gives extensive excerpts.¹

127 of the letters were arranged and numbered in 1956 by Theodora Ward, who determined or conjectured their dates and prepared a typed index (available in the Houghton Library box containing the correspondence). Soon afterward, 35 more letters came into the collection and were assigned fractional numbers (1.1, 2.1, 5.1, etc.) that inserted the new letters into the already established sequence. In 1960 Myra Himelhoch made a largely successful effort to date fourteen early letters by consulting various historical sources, chiefly the Springfield Republican and George Merriam's 1885 biography of Bowles. Her work saw print in 1972, after Rebecca Patterson revised the article Himelhoch had drafted. One last item was added to the collection in the early 1990s, when Cheryl Walker announced her valuable discovery of a new Bowles letter in Austin and Susan's copy of The Household Book of Poetry, edited by Charles Dana.²

These treatments of Bowles's correspondence have been indispensable for those interested in his relations with Dickinson, but caution is in order. It turns out that the Houghton's sequence of letters bears little relation to their actual chronology. Ward's index offers no rationale for its assigned dates, many of which have proven incorrect or needlessly vague. Himelhoch and Patterson's dating is more secure, but there are a few consequential errors and a number of early letters are not accounted for.³ Walker's article, which suggests that the presentation letter was sent to Susan and Emily and not to the married couple at the Evergreens, doesn't quote the passages that make this interpretation look implausible.

According to Susan Dickinson's memoir, "Annals of the Evergreens," she and Austin became acquainted with Bowles soon after their marriage, when he "came to town to report the result of some agricultural experiments on an estate near us." Aware of Susan's tendency to assign too early a date to remembered events, Himelhoch discounted the recollection and dated the origin of the friendship to "the winter of 1858-59" (MH 1-2). But Susan's memory, however fallible and subject to inflation (in her manuscript "estate" was originally "farm"), should be taken seriously. On 30 June 1858, in a well-attended public event, six rival haymaking machines were tried out on Levi C. Cowles's large North Amherst farm. Bowles's paper, the Springfield Republican, had a weekly "Farm and Garden" feature and in other ways paid close attention to farm issues. On 1 July 1858 this paper ran a lengthy report on this "Trial of Mowing Machines."

It was undoubtedly on this occasion that Bowles met Austin and Susan (Habegger, My Wars 709). Not only did the Dickinsons winter their livestock on hay put up from the field south of Main Street, but the family had a history of promoting agricultural progress. Samuel Fowler Dickinson had addressed western Massachusetts' tri-county agricultural society in 1831; Edward Dickinson played a leading role in creating the East Hampshire Agricultural Society in 1850 (Hampshire and Franklin Express, 23...