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Melvil Dewey, the Womanizing OCD Librarian who Organized the Olympics

Melvil Dewey had an obsession with the number 10. He slept 10 hours, wrote 10-page letters and created the Dewey Decimal System to organize libraries. He also had an obsession with women, as in kissing and hugging them. Which is why he’s described as having a “complex legacy.”

Melvil Dewey

Dewey had an enormous impact on the development of libraries in the second half of the 19^th century. He founded Columbia University’s library school and the American Library Association, and he started the traveling library, the library for the blind and the interlibrary loan. He also helped organize the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, where he started a health resort. There his obsessions manifested themselves with $10 membership and a requirement that people turn out their lights at 10 p.m.

Another unpleasant Dewey trait showed up at Lake Placid: his bigotry. He only allowed white Christians into his resort.

Those biases were reflected within the Dewey Decimal System, which marginalized non-Eurocentric subjects.

Melvil Dewey

He was born in 1851 in Adams Centre in upstate New York, known as the Burned-Over District. Waves of reform and evangelism swept over it from 1800 to 1850. The district gave rise to Mormonism, Millerism, the Shakers, the Oneida Colony, abolitionists, suffragists, temperance, educational reformers and Melvil Dewey.

His parents, Joel and Eliza Dewey, made and sold boots and shoes from their little shop. Known as the hardest working people in town, they did not show much affection. That may explain their son’s predilection for unwanted hugging and kissing of women.

As a boy, he had a mania for system and classification. According to an aunt, he liked to arrange his mother’s pantry. He earned nickels and pennies for doing chores and then walked 10 miles to buy an unabridged dictionary with his savings.

His obsession with the number 10 began in high school when he discovered the metric system. He also realized his birthday, December 10, 1851, occurred exactly 52 years after the French National Assembly adopted the platinum meter bar as a standard unit of measurement. The meter measures one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris.

On Jan. 29, 1868 16-year-old Melville Dewey was attending class at the Hungerford Collegiate Institute, a college prep school. A fire broke out in the building, and Dewey carried as many books out as he could. The fire got worse, so he watched from outside in the cold. Exposure and smoke inhalation resulted in a bad cough that left him bedridden for months. His doctor didn’t think he’d live. That near-death experience left him obsessed with something else: efficiency, because life is short.

Amherst College

After high school he taught for a while, went to Alfred College for a semester and then transferred to Amherst College.

In his junior year at Amherst he got a job at the library, then in Morgan Hall. He fretted over the unsystematic way the library shelved books. Back then, libraries had their own systems, but they had to re-catalogue and re-index books when they acquired new ones.

Main quad at Amherst College

Dewey had an “aha” moment when he came up with the answer: a system using letters and decimals to organize books according to their contents. He suggested it to the Amherst Library Committee, which liked the idea. Not only did the committee let him implement it, it named him assistant librarian.

He graduated in 1874, but continued to work at the library. In 1876, he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloging and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. Today, more than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries use it, according to one estimate.

Another of his ideas didn’t go over so well: spelling reform. He changed the spelling of his name from Melville to Melvil to eliminate those inefficient and unnecessary letters at the end of his name. He often signed his last name Dui.

In 1876, he left Amherst for Boston—regretfully, according to his efficient spelling.

“Sum day, dear Amherst, may it be my happy lot tu pruv how great iz the love I bear yu. Proud, always, everwher to be counted among yur sonz, I am Very truly, Melvil Dui.”

Boston

Two years after moving to Boston he married Annie Godfrey, the former librarian of Wellesley College. They had one son, Godfrey.

In Boston he started a company that made and sold library supplies, including the hanging vertical file, which he invented..

From Boston, now “Melvil” organized a librarian convention at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, which then led to the American Library Association (ALA). He also helped found the American Library Journal.

New York

Dewey and his family moved in 1883 to New York, where he got a job as librarian at Columbia University. There he founded the school of library economy. He encouraged women to apply, probably so he could get at them more easily. He admitted 17 women and three men. Applicants had to submit photos so Dewey could gauge their attractiveness. Dewey often commented “You cannot polish a pumpkin.”

Low Library at Columbia University

Columbia officials didn’t like having ladies at the college and decided to close the library school. But in 1888, Dewey left for Albany, where he got a job as state librarian. He also took his library sciences school with him, reestablishing it as the New York State Library School. (It returned to Columbia in 1926.)

Over the next 20 years, Dewey expanded and modernized the state library. Gov. Teddy Roosevelt called it “an inspiration to intellectual life throughout the state.” As state librarian until 1906, he created the first library for the blind, the first traveling library, the first interlibrary loan program and the first children’s library.

Olympics

In 1895, while serving as state librarian, he founded the Lake Placid Club, a health resort. There he could indulge all his whims, his obsessions and his bigotry. He banned Jews, blacks and other religious and ethnic groups. Dewey also continued his unwelcome hugging, kissing and touching of female subordinates.

And at Lake Placid, he could spell the way he wanted to. One 1927 menu listed “hadok, poted beef with noodls, parsli or masht potato, butr, steamd rys, letis, and ys cream.”

A promoter of winter sports, he also helped organize the 1932 Olympics at Lake Placid.

WPA poster for the 1932 Olympics

That Complex Legacy

He did have friends, who sometimes got tired of defending him against persistent complaints about his behavior. In 1924, Tessa Kelso, former head of the Los Angeles Public Library, wrote in a letter, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”

In 1906, he went on a trip to Alaska sponsored by the American Library Association. He hit on four prominent librarians during the trip. Unlike women he’d hugged and kissed in the past, they spoke up. Dewey had to quit as state librarian.

At least one woman welcomed his advances. In 1924, two years after his first wife died, he married Emily McKay Beal.

In 1930, at the age of 78, he had to pay his former secretary at the Lake Placid Club more than $2000 in a sexual harassment settlement.

System of Bigotry

It wasn’t just his personal behavior that inspired criticism. His Dewey Decimal System marginalized non-Christian religions and the works of people of color. It also classified lesbian and gay subjects under “Abnormal Psychology,” “Perversion,” “Derangement” and “Medical Conditions.”

New York State Library

Dorothy Porter, for 40 years librarian at Howard University, challenged the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she said in her oral history.

Porter said that in white libraries “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”

Porter developed a new system of classification. Ironically, she was the first African American to graduate from Columbia’s school of library science.

Melvil Dewey died December 26, 1931, of a stroke at Lake Placid.

In 2019, the American Library Association voted to take Dewey’s name off of its highest honor, the Melvil Dewey medal. ALA members voted to rename it the ALA Medal of Excellence.

With thanks to Joshua Kendall Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator in American Libraries March 24, 2014; William Weigand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey and to Mass Moments, Dewey Proposes Library Classification System.

Images: Amherst College By David Emmerman – PicasaWeb, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10411732.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Black Cake, A Christmas Treat Emily Dickinson Loved To Bake

If something called a black cake sounds like a perfect Christmas sweet from a famously reclusive poet prone to black moods – well, it is.

Emily Dickinson not only wrote stunning poetry, she was a terrific baker. She baked for her family, and often sent cakes and breads to her friends along with odd little notes.

Critic R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1937 “[S]he was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit.”

You can turn that around: She was a private cook who baked as indefatigably as she wrote. And one of the things she baked was a black cake.

Retouched daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent Amherst, Mass., family on Dec. 10, 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a trustee of Amherst College; her mother, Emily Norcross, was a homebody who spent decades of her life bedridden with chronic illnesses.

Emily had two siblings, brother Austin and sister Lavinia. They grew up in a large home in Amherst, where she lived all her life. When Austin married one of Emily’s friends, Edward Dickinson built a house for them next to the family homestead.

Emily attended the Amherst Academy for seven years, and went to Mount Holyoke (then Mary Lyon‘s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary). Whether troubled by depression, ill health or homesickness, she only lasted there for 10 months. Austin brought her home.

She then helped managed the household, handling the kitchen chores and caring for her mother while Lavinia did the marketing and housekeeping. Neither sister married, and Emily became more and more reclusive.

When she reached her 30s, she pretty much stayed in the house all the time. Lavinia later said their mother needed constant attention, which Emily provided.

That doesn’t explain why she gave some neighborhood children gingerbread by lowering a basket of it out a second-floor window. Or spoke to visitors through doors. Maybe she developed agoraphobia. Or maybe she just wanted to write her poems without the distraction of the outside world.

The Black Cake

One of the delicacies Emily Dickinson baked was a black cake. It started out in England as a fruitcake or plum cake, cakes made with dried or fresh fruit. As Bruce Kraig explains in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, English women in the early 1800s began to make their plum cakes darker. They did it with treacle, a syrup made during the refining of sugar.

The so-called black cake spread to the British colony of Jamaica, where it got darker and boozier.

American women began to make it too. In 1832, Lydia Maria Child wrote a cookbook recommending using molasses (also made from the sugar-refining process, but whether treacle is molasses is a debate we won’t enter here).

Lydia Maria Child

“A little molasses makes it dark colored, which is desirable,” wrote Child. (Click here for the recipe.) She didn’t call it black cake, though. She called it wedding cake and iced it. Princess Diana and Prince Charles served a tiered fruitcake at their wedding that lasted quite a long time. An auction house put a piece up for sale in 2018 for $1,200.

In the Caribbean, black cake has more to do with Christmas than weddings. For some, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a slice of black cake. It takes a year, say some, to make a proper black cake, and burnt sugar creates the distinctive black color.

It has rum in it, too. According to Wikipedia, “It is possible to become intoxicated from consumption of an excessive amount of rum cake.”

Baking the Black Cake

Emily Dickinson learned to bake bread at the age of 14. She wrote to a friend, “I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, salaratus, etc., with a great deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.”

She developed into an accomplished baker as well as a poet. She wrote some of her poems on kitchen paper and even wrote one on the back of a recipe for coconut cake.

And she loved to do it. Her kitchen in Amherst was her favorite room, with pale green walls illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the yellow windowsills.

The Dickinson home.

Her father would only eat bread she baked, which she did every day. Emily’s rye-and-Indian bread took second prize at the 1856 Amherst Agricultural Fair.

In 1883, when she had reached her early fifties, she sent her recipe for black cake with a bouquet of flowers to Nellie Sweetser.

In June of 1884, she collapsed in the kitchen with an apparent nervous breakdown.

“I was making a loaf of cake…when I saw a great darkness coming and knew no more until late at night,” she wrote. Her health continued to suffer, and she died on May 15, 1886 of Bright’s disease.

The Belle of Amherst

In 1976, William Luce’s play about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, opened on Broadway. Julie Harris, who starred in it, won a Tony for her performance.

In the play, “Emily Dickinson” recites the actual recipe for a black cake: “two pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, nineteen eggs, five pounds of raisins, one and a half pounds of currants, one and a half pounds of citron, one half pint of brandy — I never use Father’s best — one half-pint of molasses, two nutmegs, five teaspoons of cloves, mace and cinnamon, and — oh, yes, two teaspoons of soda, and one and a half teaspoons of salt.”

Remember, 19^th-century bakers used to do a lot of baking all at once.

Then “Emily” goes on to tell the audience to beat the butter and sugar together, add the 19 eggs one at a time without beating. Beat again, adding the brandy alternately with the flour, soda, spices and salt, which have all been sifted together. Then add molasses. Take the raisins and citrons and gently sprinkle into the batter. Bake for three hours if you use cake pans, six or seven if you use a milk pan.

You can get a more modern (smaller) version of the recipe here, but don’t plan to serve it until next Christmas.

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

With thanks to Carol Dommermuth-Costa · Emily Dickinson Singular Poet. This story was updated in 2021.

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Six Historic Places Connected to Illicit Love Affairs

Illicit love affairs are as much a part of history as are war and elections, and the New England Historical Society doesn’t hesitate to publish stories about them. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you six places connected to illicit love affairs. They include a movie star’s home, a racy monument, several historic houses and a watch tower. There is one for each New England state.

Hepburn House

Katharine Hepburn’s house

Katharine Hepburn had a 25-year love affair with her married co-star Spencer Tracy. It only ended with his death.

At their introduction on the set of Woman of the Year, Katharine famously said, “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy.” Film director George Stevens retorted, “Don’t worry, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”

Instead, he fell in love with her and she with him. “I loved Spencer Tracy. I would have done anything for him,” she said.

They starred in nine movies together, but lived apart and kept their affair private. Tracy and his wife were estranged, but neither sought a divorce.

Tracy and Hepburn did stay together at Hepburn’s summer home in the Fenwick beach colony in Old Saybrook, Conn. Her caddy remembers them having breakfast together.

When Tracy died in 1967, Hepburn didn’t attend his funeral service out of respect for his two children. She did follow his hearse on the six-mile trip through Los Angeles and, when it reached the church, whispered, “Goodbye, friend – this is where I leave you.”

The house, on Mohegan Ave., is privately owned, but you can visit the Katharine Hepburn Museum in Old Saybrook. It’s at 300 Main St. Click here for more information.

Cliff Walk Path and Many (Supposed) Illicit Love Affairs

Cliff Walk Path, York Harbor, Maine

What’s worse than not getting any Valentine’s Day cards or letters? How about getting a letter announcing that your wife has a heartthrob — just not you.

Allen Ryan received just such a jolt in 1922 about his wife Sarah and her “friend,” entertainment lawyer George Maxwell. Ryan, a one-time king of Wall Street, had so much money and clout he could move the stock market at will.

The shock of the poison pen letter received by Allen Ryan jolted society all the way from Philadelphia to Maine, where the Ryans summered at York Harbor. York Harbor in the Roaring 20s was a popular destination for wealthy summer travelers escaping the cities.

The ensuing scandal resulted in Maxwell being charged with sending the poison pen letter himself, along with letters to husbands of 40 other society women with whom he was supposedly having illicit love affairs. George proclaimed his innocence and blamed his enemies. Predictably, the affair ended in the Ryans’ divorce.

York Harbor has changed a lot since the Ryan-Maxwell scandal of the 1920s, but you can still get a flavor of the old days on the Cliff Path along York Harbor, where gracious cottages of long-ago York remain perched on the edge of the sea.

Emily Dickinson Museum

Emily Dickinson’s married brother Austin carried on an illicit love affair for 13 years with Mabel Loomis Todd, also married. The whole town of Amherst, Mass., including Todd’s husband, knew about the affair. He was okay with it. Austin’s wife was not.

On Sept. 10, 1882, Austin took Mabel to sing and play the piano for his two reclusive sisters and mother, who lived next door to him. Emily listened to her from the shadows of the hall, but never appeared. Only Emily’s sister Lavinia ,,met Mabel face-to-face.

The next night, Austin and Mabel paused on their way to a whist party and confessed their love for each other. “Rubicon,” Austin wrote in his diary afterward.

Their liaison was one of the better-chronicled of the illicit love affairs. Austin and Mabel kept diaries, in which they called their love ‘overwhelming,’ ‘God-inspired,’ ‘beyond any love that ever was.’

Mabel described their sex life in her diary: “Sweet communions. Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable” and “A little Heaven just after dinner.”

Emily Dickinson died in 1886, and Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to publish her poems. They did, and Mabel embarked on a lecture tour that made famous the reclusive Emily.

Mabel’s affair with Austin ended with his death in 1895.

The Emily Dickinson Museum includes both Emily’s and Austin’s house at 280 Main St. in Amherst, Mass. Click here for more information.

John Parker Hale House Museum

The Woodman Institute Museum, Dover, N.H. , which includes the Hale House

In the 1860s, Valentine’s Day was the perfect opportunity for a young man to flirt with a girl from a different class. People then viewed a Valentine’s note as an acceptable way to express their affection without fear of giving offense.

In 1862, one of the South’s most notorious villains took the opportunity to express his affection for one of New Hampshire’s leading ladies. To his surprise, perhaps, John Wilkes Booth captured the eye of Lucy Lambert Hale.

Hale charmed a great many men in both Washington and New England. John Hay, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Todd Lincoln were all said to have expressed some interest. Her father was John Parker Hale, a U.S. senator, abolitionist leader and Lincoln supporter. But an anonymous Valentine in 1862 from Booth caught Lucy Hale’s fancy, and soon the two got better acquainted.

Hale was mad enough that his daughter was involved with an actor. Imagine his shock when his daughter’s beau turned out to be an assassin.

When Booth was captured after killing President Lincoln, he had Lucy Hale’s picture in his pocket. Senator Hale spread word far and wide that Lucy was not engaged to the actor-turned-murderer. Father and daughter then departed for an extended visit to Europe.

One of Lucy Hale’s gifts to New Hampshire is the house where she grew up. The Woodman Museum at 182 Central Ave. in Dover, N.H., acquired the Hale house in 1915, and it’s open to visitors.

Hannah Robinson Tower

The view from the Hannah Robinson Tower

Hannah Robinson fell for a poor French dancing teacher and set off one of the greatest scandals of colonial America. Her love affair was less illicit than unapproved and tragic.

Born in 1746, she was the daughter of a wealthy Narragansett planter. The family lived in a large stone house in Newport near Narragansett Bay. During the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau visited the Robinson house.

Hannah wanted for nothing, and one of her favorite pastimes was to sit on a large rock and look out at Narragansett Bay. She was sent to finishing school in Newport, where she fell in love with her French dancing teacher, Peter Simons. Peter returned Hannah’s feelings, but the lovers knew her father wouldn’t consent to a marriage. He believed Peter wanted Hannah’s money.

They eloped one night and set up house in Providence.

Unfortunately for Hannah Robinson, her father was right – and he cut her off financially.

Peter abandoned Hannah after he realized he wouldn’t get any of her money. When her father learned his daughter was poor, ill and suffering in Providence, he finally relented and went to fetch her.

On their slow journey home, she asked them to stop when they reached the large rock where she had watched the bay. Unfortunate Hannah Robinson died soon afterward at home on Oct. 30, 1773.

In 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a new watch tower at the site where Hannah Robinson watched the Bay. The Hannah Robinson Tower, is now owned by Preserve Rhode Island and managed by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

You can find it at the interchange between U.S. Route 1 (Tower Hill Road) and Route 138 (Bridgetown Road) in South Kingstown, R.I.

An Illicit Love Affair Revealed in Hope Cemetery

Louis Brusa gravestone

Most of the people buried in Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vt., carved their own memorials and tombstones. Barre calls itself the granite capital of the world, and skilled stonecutters flocked to it from Europe, especially Italy, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The 65-acre cemetery attracts tourists with its beautifully carved and sometimes unusual granite memorials. They include images of a soldier smoking a cigarette, a race car, a bored angel, a soccer ball and an 18-wheel truck.

Louis Brusa was an Italian-born master stonecutter. He practiced his craft in Barre with the new compressed air tools, which made his work go faster but sent granite dust into his lungs.

Louis, born Luigi Giovanni in 1886, became a partner with the Brusa Brothers. He developed silicosis from the granite dust and died at the age of 51.

As he was dying, Brusa decided to warn others about the disease. He then commissioned Don Colletti to carve a memorial of a man dying in the arms of a woman. When the monument was placed over his grave, it caused a local scandal. The woman looked not like Brusa’s wife Mary, but just like his mistress.

This story about illicit love affairs was updated in 2022.

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Mabel Loomis Todd, the Adulteress Who Made Emily Dickinson Famous

Mabel Loomis Todd often visited Emily Dickinson’s home, but never laid eyes on the poet except in her coffin.

Mabel Loomis Todd

After her first visit, Mabel plunged into a passionate love affair with Emily’s married brother Austin Dickinson, who lived next door to his sister.

They continued the affair for 13 years, until Austin’s death. After Emily died, Mabel edited and published her poems.

And then after Austin died, she campaigned to save trees from loggers.

Mabel Loomis Todd

She was born Nov. 10, 1856, and grew up in straitened circumstances, though she had Mayflower ancestry. She spent her youth in boardinghouses in Concord and Cambridge, Mass., and in Washington, D.C.

Mabel was charming, pretty, smart and artistic. She studied music at the New England Conservatory, and in 1879 she married the astronomer David Peck Todd.

They had an open marriage. She knew about his philandering, and he knew about her affair with Austin Dickinson soon after it started.

Two years into their marriage, the couple moved to Amherst, Mass., so David could take a job at Amherst College as astronomy professor.

The Affair

Austin Dickinson was 53 years old when he and Mabel confessed their love for each other. She was 25. He was a leading citizen of the town, a lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College. He and his wife and children lived next door to his invalid mother and reclusive sisters, Lavinia and Emily, who Mabel called “the climax of all the family oddity.”

The Dickinson home.

On Sept. 10, 1882, Austin Dickinson took his mistress-to-be to sing and play the piano for his two reclusive sisters and mother. Emily listened to Mabel from the shadows of the hall, but she never appeared. Her mother listened from upstairs. Only Lavinia – “Miss Vinnie” – met Mabel face-to-face, taking her hands and complimenting her singing.

Wrote Mabel, “It was odd to think as my voice rang out through the big silent house that Miss Emily in her weird white dress was outside in the shadow hearing every word.”

When Mabel stopped singing, Emily sent in a glass of sherry and a poem she wrote during the concert.

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest Room
If in that Room a Friend await
Felicity or Doom—

What fortitude the Soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming Foot—
The opening of a Door—

After the visit Mabel wrote,

Emily is called in Amherst “the myth.” She has not been out of her house for fifteen years…She writes the strangest poems, & very remarkable ones.

Mabel then described Emily as a genius in many respects. “She wears always white, & has her hair arranged as was the fashion fifteen years ago when she went into retirement.”

Emily frequently sent her flowers and poems, wrote Mabel, and, “we have a very pleasant friendship in that way.”

Rubicon

Austin Dickinson

The next night, Austin and Mabel paused on their way to a whist party and confessed their love for each other. “Rubicon” Austin wrote in his diary afterward.

Pretty soon everyone in town knew about the affair. Mabel’s husband didn’t mind. Austin’s wife Susan was devastated.

Austin and Mabel called their love “overwhelming,” “God-inspired,” “beyond any love that ever was.”

“No love story approaches it,” wrote Mabel.

She liked sex and described it in her diary: “Sweet communions. Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable” and, “A little Heaven just after dinner.”

In 1887, Mabel began wearing Austin’s wedding ring.

Genius Recognized

After Emily died in 1886, Lavinia destroyed her letters and asked Austin’s wife to make sure Emily’s poems were published. Susan didn’t show much interest in the project, so Lavinia asked two family friends – Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson – to publish the 40 manuscripts Emily left. The two made alterations to Emily’s poems.

The Roberts Brothers published the first volume, Poems, in 1890. Within two years, 11 editions were printed. Mabel began a 15-year lecture career about the mysterious poet of Amherst, fixing her image in the public’s mind.

Emily Dickinson

A second volume of poems was printed in 1891, but Higginson didn’t like Mabel Todd’s alterations and quit.

On her own, Mabel Loomis Todd extensively changed Emily Dickinson’s poems for a third volume.

Austin died of overwork in 1895. He had bequeathed a piece of land to Mabel and David Todd, who had remained a friend to Austin despite his affair with his wife. Lavinia challenged the bequest in court and won. As a result of the falling out, the Todd and Dickinson families split Emily’s manuscripts.

Austin’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, produced four books of Emily’s poems and two biographies between 1913 and 1937.Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter Millicent published more of Emily’s poems between 1931 and 1955.

Hog Island

In 1908, Mabel Loomis Todd took on a new project: saving Hog Island from clearcutting. She had visited the island off the coast of Maine after Austin died, and saw that logging had begun.

According to her daughter, the clearcutting shocked her. Millicent Todd Bingham wrote:

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “they must not destroy any more of it! This island is too wonderful, it must be preserved, what CAN we do about it?”

She began persuading friends to buy up parts of the island, and bought some herself. Eventually David and Mabel Loomis Todd gained majority ownership of the island, and they built a summer camp there.

Mabel Loomis Todd died on Hog Island, Maine, on Oct. 14, 1932. Her daughter believed a permanent environmental preserve would serve as the most fitting tribute to her mother. She donated the land to the Audubon Society in 1936, and together they established an ecology camp on the island.

Roger Peterson, who wrote the Peterson Field Guides, served on the staff of the camp. Today, people can visit the Todd Wildlife Sanctuary six miles east of Damariscotta, Maine.

Photos: Austin Dickinson courtesy Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database; Mabel Loomis Todd from American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with Over 1,400 Portraits; Emily Dickinson courtesy Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. Bald Eagle by Fyn Kynd, CC by 2.0. With thanks to Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd by Polly Longsworth.

New England Historical Society updated this story in 2023.

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Helen Hunt Jackson Exposes the Mistreatment of Native Americans

Helen Hunt Jackson was an odd choice to write one of the most popular romances of the period between the 1880s and 1920s. Prickly, pushy and driven, she turned to writing romantic fiction only in the hope that her work might do for the American Indians what Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for enslaved African Americans.

Helen Hunt Jackson hoped her novel Ramona would do for American Indians what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the slaves.

Helen Hunt Jackson hoped her novel Ramona would do for American Indians what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slaves.

Her signature work, Ramona, was not as influential in improving the plight of Native Americans. But it ran through countless printings, sold more than 600,000 copies and has been adapted for a variety of media, including four films.

Helen Hunt Jackson

Jackson came by her passions through her schooling. Born in Amherst, Mass. in 1830, she attended the Ipswich Female Seminary, which trained girls to become teachers and missionaries.

In her early adulthood, Jackson lived a conventional life, married with two children. By age 35, however, both her children and her soldier husband had died. She then began writing. Originally, Jackson dabbled in poetry and fiction, but in 1879 she began to focus on Native American issues.

She was inspired by a speech given in Boston by a chief of the Ponca tribe. He recounted how the government mistreated his people and cheated them out of their lands. The speech turned Jackson into a crusader.

She travelled west and uncovered broken treaties and stolen lands, exposing them in reports that were picked up by newspapers. She took her crusade to Washington and blistered anyone who contradicted her.

Century of Dishonor

In 1881, she published a scathing account of official corruption, titled Century of Dishoner and sent copies to every member of Congress. She travelled to Southern California where, between them, the Mexican and U.S. governments were systematically stripping the Mission Indians of their lands, disregarding all claims of ownership.

1928 poster for a movie based on Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson

A new commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hiram Price, commissioned Jackson to write a report on the situation. It landed in Washington with a resounding thud. It called for reparations, new land purchases for the dispossessed American Indians and investments in schools. The Senate acted on the report, the House of Representatives declined.

Hiram Price

Frustrated by the dithering, Jackson decided to use fiction to drive her points home to a broader audience and Ramona was born. She concluded that it was not enough to marshal facts to bring about change, she must also rouse people’s emotions.

“If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life,” she wrote.

Ramona told the story of a girl, half-Indian and half-Scots, and her struggles to exist in California amid a culture of racism that denied her her true love because he was an Indian.

Success

The tear-jerker drew instant commercial success. The story moved so many people it caused an uptick in tourism to Southern California.

Buoyed by the success, but battling stomach cancer, Jackson planned a second novel about the obstacles American Indian children faced. But cancer got to her before she could complete it.

She died hoping that her books, a Century of Dishonor and Ramona, would propel forward the movement to bring justice to the American Indians.

This story updated in 2022.

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