Spirit and Society

Blake’s religious dissent made him a natural ally for reformers whose works were driven by personal religious quest. This chapter looks at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist reading of Blake, Lydia Maria Child’s reprinting of ‘The Little Black Boy’ in the context of Abolitionism, the appearance of several of the Poetical Sketches, and a commentary on The Little Vagabond in the context of social utopianism. It exposes the irony as well as the importance of the kinship liberal Americans felt with Blake. By the end of the century, Blake was becoming known in literary circles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson drew a comparison between Blake and Emily Dickinson in his introduction to the 1890 edition of the latter’s Poems and Amy Lowell turned to Blake as a master of poetic form, with a brilliant pictorial imagination and a sensitive ear, but most importantly, a great mind.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (b. 1823–d. 1911) was a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard College (1841) and Harvard Divinity School (1847). A prolific author and popular lecturer, Higginson was also a Unitarian minister, an abolitionist activist, a soldier, an editor, a women’s rights leader, and a literary critic. His reputation has largely been based on his relationship with and co-editing (with Mabel Loomis Todd) of the poet Emily Dickinson as well as on his antislavery activism and command of the First South Carolina Volunteers (later the 33rd US Colored Infantry Regiment), the first military unit composed of freed slaves during the Civil War. More recently, critical attention has focused on specific writings in Higginson’s extensive literary canon. In his wide-ranging articles, Higginson addressed topics of interest in 19th-century America—from transcendentalism, physical health, abolitionism, and women’s rights to US and transatlantic literary culture, Civil War experiences, biography, and history, in addition to, albeit fewer in number, works of fiction and poetry. His articles appeared regularly in the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s, Putnam’s Monthly, Independent, Century, Harper’s Monthly, and other periodicals. He also contributed hundreds of columns addressing women’s rights and other political subjects to the Nation, the Radical, and the Boston Woman’s Journal. Higginson’s best-selling work was a classroom text, Young Folks’ History of the United States (1875), while his Civil War volume, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), has become a staple of today’s college syllabi. His only novel, Malbone (1869), is a fairly formulaic romance, set in New England, that received little critical attention. During the antebellum era, his liberal Unitarian ministry reflected his radical abolitionism as well as the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. After the Civil War, Higginson settled in Newport, Rhode Island, with his first wife, Mary Channing Higginson, where he cultivated a staid postbellum literary identity frequently characterized as “genteel.” He was closely involved with the women’s rights activists who organized the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, and for many years he penned a column on women’s issues for this organization’s Woman’s Journal. Higginson is known for encouraging young literary aspirants, particularly women, who in addition to Dickinson, include Harriet Prescott Spofford, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Emma Lazarus. His Life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1884) offers a sympathetic treatment of Fuller’s genius and importance. In 1879, following the death of his first wife two years prior, Higginson married Mary Thacher Higginson; their daughter, Margaret, was born in 1881. Toward the end of his life, Higginson joined the likes of Upton Sinclair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and others in his support for the newly organized Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

Emily Dickinson's Animal Pedagogies

E. DickinsonWould you instruct me now?—Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Johnson 449)In 1866 Emily Dickinson Ended a lapse of eighteen months in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson by sending him three lines that connect the major concerns of her work: death, subjectivity, and the conditions of knowledge. When Higginson later published these lines in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” he explained that the poet would on occasion include “an announcement of some event, vast to her small sphere as this,” the death of her dog who had been her companion for sixteen years (450). In measuring Dickinson's loss biographically by the “small sphere” of her life, Higginson sets aside her ability to “wade grief” (Franklin 312) and situates her letter within the sentimental culture of pet keeping, which had transfigured a predominantly agricultural practice (pet initially referred to a lamb) into a staple of genteel domesticity and bourgeois subjectivity (Mason; Grier; Kete; Ritvo; Thomas). Far from participating uncritically in the roles and relations Higginson projects onto her, Dickinson interrogates the formation and gendering of sentimental subjectivity (Dillon; Blackwood) by placing “Carlo died” in relation to the other two lines—the signature and the call for instruction. “E. Dickinson” refers ambiguously to Emily or to her father, Edward Dickinson (Holland 146). The signature pluralizes the subject; it doubles and ultimately obscures “E.”'s gender. This ambiguous subject hinges on the animal's death as a scene of pedagogy: it stands in the liminal space between the announcement of Carlo's death and the request: “Would you instruct me now?”