“My Shaggy Ally” 

– Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, February 1863 (L280)

Newfoundland Dog. Painted by Col. H. Smith, eng. Lizars

Carlo was Edward Dickinson’s gift to Emily, his eldest daughter, in the fall of 1849, presumably to accompany her on the long walks she enjoyed in the woods and fields of Amherst. Apparently a brown Newfoundland (perhaps a curly-coated Lesser Newfoundland, for Dickinson once jokingly sent one of the dog’s tawny curls to a friend purporting it to be her own), Carlo may have been procured from family friends, the Huntingtons, who raised litters of the massive breed at their farm on the Connecticut River in Hadley. If so, it adds wit to Dickinson’s naming Carlo after the pointer of St. John Rivers in her favorite novel at the time, Jane Eyre.

Other novels soon featured dogs named Carlo – Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford Rise – and by 1858 five dogs named Carlo were registered in Amherst, including another Newfoundland owned by local photographer J.L. Lovell. The breed, known for its friendly, inquisitive intelligence, enjoyed popularity among the Romantics, and was a favorite of authors whom Dickinson admired – Byron, Scott, Dickens, and Robert Burns among them. Harriet Beecher Stowe included a Newfoundland named Bruno in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Dickinson’s first written mention of her “mute confederate” occurred in an 1850 valentine that was published by the Amherst College student magazine, The Indicator.

Thereafter she spoke often of Carlo in several dozen letters and even in a few poems, usually with homely humor, and always with affection and respect. She delighted that Major Edward B. Hunt, watching Carlo snap up a bit of fallen cake at the Commencement Tea in 1860, believed her dog “understood gravitation” (L342b). In April 1862, she introduced Carlo to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson by letter, saying, “You ask of my Companions. Hills – sir – and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me -” (L261). It seems clear from her commentary that Carlo provided the poet great psychological comfort over the years, while her dependence on his protective presence can be gauged by her marked reclusivity once he was gone.

Neighbors described Dickinson coming to call with her outsize dog beside her. One remembered Dickinson saying to her when, as a child, she walked with the poet and her “huge dog”: “Gracie, do you know that I believe that the first to come and greet me when I go to heaven will be this dear, faithful old friend Carlo?” (Years and Hours, Vol. II, p. 21).

When Carlo died at about age 17 in January 1866, Dickinson announced his death in a terse letter to Higginson: “Carlo died. / E. Dickinson / Would you instruct me now?” (L314). Months later, still feeling his absence, she paid him this tribute:

Time is a test of trouble
But not a remedy –
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no malady.
(Fr861)

Work cited:

The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, ed. Jay Leyda, Vol. I, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960

“That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural.” 

– Emily Dickinson to Mabel Loomis Todd, late September 1882 (L769)

Mabel Loomis Todd, around the time of her arrival in Amherst

Born November 10, 1856, Mabel Loomis Todd was the only child of Eben J. and Mary Wilder Loomis of Washington, D.C. Her father, a clerk in the Nautical Almanac Office, was an amateur naturalist and poet. A pretty, vivacious, talented young woman, she attended Georgetown Female Seminary, then studied piano and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. She cultivated, as well, her talents for flower-painting and writing, and had had stories published by the time of her marriage in 1876 to astronomer David Todd.

In September 1881, the Todds moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, so that David could take the new professorship of astronomy at Amherst College. Mabel Todd wrote her parents of a Miss Dickinson who wrote poetry and lived such a secluded life she was called by some in town “the myth.” Todd soon became friends with the poet’s sister-in-law Susan Dickinson and was invited by the poet’s siblings, Austin and Lavinia Dickinson, to play the piano and sing for their reclusive sister and invalid mother. Over the next four and a half years Todd often performed music in the Homestead, becoming acquainted with the poet by way of exchanged notes and occasional conversations between rooms, yet never saw her face to face.

Nearly two years after Emily Dickinson’s death, Lavinia brought to Todd a portion of her sister’s recently-found poems and begged the younger woman to get them published. By that time Mabel was well into a thirteen-year clandestine love affair with Austin Dickinson, an intimacy that had alienated her from Susan, Austin’s wife. Lavinia had first asked Sue to publish the poems, but, impatient with Sue’s slow progress, Lavinia retrieved the manuscripts and brought them secretly to Mabel.

Despite initial reluctance, Todd spent the next nine years ordering, transcribing, and editing hundreds of poems into three volumes of Poems by Emily Dickinson published in 1890, 1891, and 1896 respectively. Todd enlisted the help of Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the selection process, the two making changes in punctuation and some rhymes, and adding titles, attempting to shape Emily Dickinson’s unusual verse forms to the tastes of late 19th-century readers. Both also worked assiduously to herald and promote the volumes. With Lavinia’s help, Todd rounded up Dickinson’s vast correspondence with friends for a two-volume Letters of Emily Dickinson, published in 1894. She gave lectures about the mysterious poet of Amherst, thus influencing the public’s initial image of Dickinson.

After Austin’s death in 1895, tensions between the Todds and Dickinsons led to a March 1898 lawsuit over a piece of land, fueled by long-standing jealousies, fears, and vindictiveness on both sides. When Mabel lost the suit, she angrily locked away a mass of unpublished poems and Dickinson family papers still in her possession. For fifteen years she enjoyed a lecture career that took her all over the northeast United States speaking on some three dozen topics. She accompanied her husband on eclipse expeditions around the world and locally was instrumental in founding the Amherst Historical Society, the Amherst Woman’s Club, and the Amherst chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

A stroke in 1913 ended Todd’s writing and lecturing. The Todds moved to Florida soon afterwards, but in 1931 Mrs. Todd was goaded by Martha Bianchi’s publications of her Aunt Emily’s materials to reissue, with her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham’s help, an enlarged version of the earlier Letters of Emily Dickinson. Other materials in Todd’s possession were later published by Bingham following her mother’s death from stroke in October 1932. Bingham subsequently gave Amherst College the Dickinson poems and letters in her family’s possession.

Further Reading:

Bingham, Millicent Todd. Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. New York and London: Harper Brothers, 1945.

Longsworth, Polly. Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

“Dear friend, A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”

Thomas Wentworth Higginson and daughter, ca. 1884

– Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, June 1869 (L330)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, co-editor of the first two collections of Emily Dickinson’s poems, was a man of astonishingly varied talents and accomplishments. A lifelong radical, he was an outspoken abolitionist, advocate of women’s rights, and founder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. During the Civil War, he served as commander of the first Union regiment of freed African American soldiers. An ordained Unitarian minister, Higginson was also a prolific writer; his most highly regarded work was a memoir of his war years, Army Life in a Black Regiment.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born in Cambridge in 1823 into a distinguished family whose ancestors trace back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He attended Harvard College and graduated from the Harvard Divinity School. Before the Civil War, Higginson served as a minister at several Unitarian churches and was involved in a number of radical political causes and activities, including active support of John Brown as well as membership in the Free Soil party.

Higginson had a long association with the Atlantic Monthly, contributing a number of articles, essays and poems. In the April 1862 issue, he published “Letter to a Young Contributor,” in which he encouraged and advised aspiring writers. Within a month, he received a note from Emily Dickinson, then 31 years old, along with four poems, thus beginning a relationship that was to last until the poet’s death in 1886.

Although he did not actively urge Emily Dickinson to publish during her lifetime, Higginson became, in Dickinson’s own term, her “Preceptor.” Written communication between the two continued after their first letter; about 70 letters from their correspondence survive, along with about 100 poems. Higginson also visited the poet twice and attended her funeral in the spring of 1886, reading a poem by Emily Brontë, “No Coward Soul Is Mine.”

After Dickinson’s death, Higginson assisted Mabel Loomis Todd in editing her poems, lending his considerable literary influence to the eventual publication by Roberts Brothers, Boston, of a first series in 1890 and a second the following year. Both volumes were well received by critics and the public.

Higginson published more than 500 essays and 35 books during his long life. He was active into the twentieth century, producing memoirs, novels, political tracts, and biographies. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1911, survived by his second wife, Mary Thacher Higginson, and two daughters.

The influence of Thomas Wentworth Higginson as a liberal thinker and activist remains historically significant, and several of his books are in print. However, it is Higginson’s relationship with Emily Dickinson, as correspondent, advisor and editor, for which he is best remembered.

Further Reading:

Bingham, Millicent Todd, Ancestor’s Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. New York, Dover, 1945.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Atlantic Monthly LXVIII (October 1891), pp. 444-456.

_________“Letter to a Young Contributor,” Atlantic Monthly IX (April 1862), pp. 401-11.

__________ The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Edited by Howard N. Meyer. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2000.

Wineapple, Brenda, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York, Knopf Publishing Group, 2008.