Special Collections

The collection contains only four manuscript poems, two of which are fair copies (one sent to Susan Dickinson after the death of her son, Gilbert) and one that was enclosed in her first letter to Thomas Higginson in 1862. The seventeen letters also in this series date from 1858-1885, and are for the most part not very detailed, often referring to gifts exchanged or offering condolences. Two of the most significant letters relate to Dickinson's relationship with well-known author Helen Hunt Jackson. The first is addressed to Jackson herself and may be an attempt to renew a correspondence that seems to have lapsed around 1879. The other is addressed to Jackson's husband and expresses Dickinson's grief upon hearing of her friend's sudden death in 1885. In it, Dickinson, clearly shocked by the loss, asks William Jackson to offer an account of her friend's final days.

The family correspondence consists primarily of letters to and from Edward Dickinson, mainly in correspondence with his in-laws, Alfred Norcross and Joel Norcross, both of Monson, Massachusetts. Included with the letters are related documents such as a contract, an insolvency a notice, a receipt, and a subpoena.

After the correspondence of Emily Dickinson's father, the second largest group is the incoming and outgoing letters of Lavinia Dickinson, with the few remaining letters belonging to other members of the Dickinson family.

The bulk of the collection consists of subject files relating to Dickinson, her life, and her literary legacy. These materials include articles and news clippings about Dickinson and her family, press releases and programs for lectures and events held to honor Dickinson's writing, notes relating to an early Dickinson bibliography compiled at the Jones, and catalogs advertising various published editions of her poems. In particular, this series documents a number of musical compositions and theatrical performances inspired by and based on Dickinson's life and poetry. It also contains background information on Dickinson homes in Amherst and on Mabel Loomis Todd, an early editor of Dickinson's poems.

This series consists of letters to and from Charles Green concerning the Dickinson Collection. These letters record the development, growth, and use of the collection as well as the compilation of Green's bibliography of Dickinson. It should be noted that not every single letter to or from Green in the collection is contained in this series. In order to retain their original meaning and context, some letters were kept with the documents that they either refer to or describe. This series, however, does collocate the bulk of Green's correspondence, and taken as a whole it provides a good view of the evolution of this collection.

Of particular interest are the letters between Green and Mabel Loomis Todd. In these letters, Green describes his intention of building a Dickinson research collection and solicits material from Todd. Even though it is not clear whether or not Todd ever sends anything of real value to add to the collection, the forty-five letters exchanged over the course of ten years do include details about the status of their various Dickinson publications. Green discusses adding materials to the collection, too, with Todd's daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham in correspondence dating from 1929-1967. For additional material on Mabel Loomis Todd, see Series 3: Subject Files and Series 6: Emily Dickinson Collections at Other Repositories, which includes copies from her papers held at Yale University.

Photographs in the collection depict primarily members of the Dickinson family as well as various Dickinson homes both in Amherst and in the surrounding towns. Of particular interest are images of Emily Dickinson herself. Even though there is only one known daguerreotype of the poet, there have been numerous attempts to capture her physical likeness in paintings and drawings since her death. Most of these later artistic interpretations romanticize Dickinson, especially those created during the early to mid twentieth century. In addition to the fascination that the poet's physical appearance holds for artists, her appearance holds a similar fascination for literary scholars and biographers eager to identify other photographic images of Dickinson. The most recent example of this fascination can be seen in the debate over an albumen print identified as a portrait of the author dating from the late 1840s-early 1850s. While it cannot be proven that this is indeed a second photograph of the poet, the evidence is believed by many to be quite strong. This series includes a copy of that image as well as other artistic and photographic attempts to illustrate Dickinson's appearance.

In addition to actively seeking original material for his Dickinson collection, Green and the curators that followed him, also sought out copies of manuscripts held at other research libraries. This series contains that material, bringing together Dickinson's manuscript poems and letters from the Boston Public Library and Harvard University. In addition to the poet's manuscripts, the series also contains letters of William Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd housed at Yale University.