As my lovely winter sabbatical at Lake Cumberland wraps up, I found myself this morning boiling down some basics about Mabel Loomis Todd for a friend of mine who thought I might have been talking about President Lincoln’s spouse.
My retired high school English teacher wife reminds me that I have created an abstract. It felt like a word game, crafting only the basics of Mrs. Todd’s story into an engaging synopsis.
I assume a lot of people who pick up my book will know of Emily Dickinson, but little more. Surely most will know nothing of Mabel Loomis Todd.
So I figure my job is to certify the magnitude of Emily’s poetry while connecting it’s editing and publication to Mrs. Todd’s efforts. Since that work has borne important fruit in the humanities, I want to bring the reader into a further awareness of her committed interest in the Natural world. In short, because she bought a mostly wilderness island in 1908, the field of environmental education has been impacted worldwide. You could look it up. ;-)
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A quick take on Nature’s people
Mabel Loomis Todd entered into the Emily Dickinson legend through a friendship with her brother’s family. As a new faculty wife, Mabel was welcomed into the Amherst College community through soirees held at the home of the college treasurer and important-man-on-campus, William Austin Dickinson. His wife Susan’s hospitality offered young Mrs. Todd a venue for companionship, engagement in the arts, and extended after-dinner conversation. Austin Dickinson’s participation in family activities was limited, but over time his friendship with Mabel grew.
Mrs. Todd was quite taken, and taken in, by the Dickinsons. But all was not right at the Evergreens, Austin & Susan’s home located just through the hedge from his parents’ homestead, then the residence of Emily and their sister Lavinia. Story in town was that Susan’s friendships burned hot and bright for a time but then cooled. The same could be said about her marriage to Austin, who subsequently spent many hours talking with his sisters in their kitchen about life and his unhappiness.
About a year after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst, her friendship with Austin crossed what they lovingly referred to as their ‘Rubicon.’ Their affair, an open secret in town, would end only with Austin’s death thirteen years later. David Todd, the new college astronomer and husband, tacitly approved of the pair’s intimacy because he was sincerely fond of them both and had a bit of a reputation himself. Their only child, Millicent, grew up in that environment. Susan Dickinson was aware as well, and as story has it, did not make her husband’s time at home all that comfortable.
Austin and Mabel celebrated their love as ‘of the ages.’ Surely sister Emily knew about them, though she never wrote about it, unless metaphorically in her poems and letters. Emily’s own legend, in fact, has her in love with a married man herself, so perhaps she knew something about loving a man she could not have. Mrs. Todd, by the way, did write about it. A lot. (See Polly Longsworth’s Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd.)
Following Emily Dickinson’s death and discovery of an unknown wealth of poetry, Lavinia ultimately turned to Mabel Todd to make sense out of the cache of paper scraps, written-on envelopes, and sewn-together, recopied poems. It was tedious work at a time of high family tension. Within a decade, Mabel Todd had three editions of Emily’s poetry published along with a volume of collected letters. The rest, as they say, is history.
Besides their entanglements with the Dickinsons, Mabel and David Todd enjoyed full and engaging lives together. Both were popular lecturers who often spoke of their travels on astronomical expeditions to far corners of an Earth linked, at the time, only by extended ocean voyages. Besides Emily, the Myth & her poetry, Mrs. Todd spoke and wrote about mysterious destinations traveled that most of her audiences could only dream about: Japan, northern Africa, high in the Andes, Indonesia, Russia just as The Great War broke out. It should be noted too, that her voluminous personal written record of journals and diaries provides such in-depth personal insight into a woman of her era that it has been used in period case studies. (See Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud.)
By midlife Mabel Todd made one more move that would broaden her personal legacy beyond the humanities. Big into trees, she bought half of a mostly wilderness island in Maine. She bought a second forest about that time, too, that one on a knob near Amherst, just to preserve the dignity of the stand. Besides saving the trees on Hog Island, the Todds would make a summer camp there that the family enjoyed for over fifty years. Upon the death of Mrs. Todd and the advent of Millicent Todd Bingham as island owner, the National Audubon Society entered the picture with a residential summer camp for adult leaders that has for decades impacted global environmental education while engaging the bodies, minds, and hearts of myriad campers, Nature’s people all.
I am one.
Tom Schaefer
Lake Cumberland
23 February 2014
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I realize folks don’t like to comment much on this blog. If you have any thoughts about what I’m doing here, I’d really appreciate your saying something. I want to be sure I tell this narrative True. I’m acting like that’s possible.
image: ‘Lobster House, c. 1905’ From Yale University archive, used without permission. I’ll get all the details straight by the time the book comes out.
