Mabel Loomis Todd: The Dressy Adventuress

Heaven only knows I’ve been in love with Hog Island, Maine since I first got there in 1981 for a two week session on ‘nature study.’  National Audubon called it an ecology camp back then, but the older expression nature study still worked just fine.  

All four color-coded groups that made up the ‘camper’ contingent birded, dredged up some critters from the bottom of Muscongus Bay, studied mushrooms and butterflies, excavated clams and then had a clam bake, answered the daily science puzzler in the Queen Mary lab, and listened to various folks, including camp visitor Carl Buchheister -- The Audubon Nature Camp’s first director in 1936 -- tell stories about the history and wonders of the place.  

My favorite personal memories that summer were those of sitting alone, with my journal, on shore boulders just after sunrise watching lobster folk hard at work locating their multi-colored buoys on the bay, winching up the pots, and sorting the day’s catch.  It was big stuff for a born and bred Ohioan who never got to see the sea in his youth. 

Over the last thirty years, Audubon and Hog Island history have occupied much of my time.  I ended up writing a master’s project paper on the place by 1985 and created an Emily Dickinson-based slide show camp director Steve Kress invited me to show campers that summer.  

Ever since that first visit, I wanted to return to Hog Island to teach, though my humanities/history/literature background didn’t quite meet the needs of the ecology/science-based curriculum designed by the naturalists on staff.  By 2002, though, when curriculum morphed into more varied offerings, I was invited back to facilitate a Nature literature and journaling session for a couple of summers.  Good experience, indeed. 

The point I’d like to make here is that I still love Hog Island intently.  Lots of former campers and staff do.  And as I write this, some heavy hitters in the birding/naturalist community are working hard to recreate a Friends of Hog Island organization that can help financially strengthen the place so summer programs there can continue for years to come.  We’d all like to see Audubon’s Camp in Maine on Hog Island flourish while continuing to offer programming for anybody and everybody who wants to come.  (For FOHI updates, see http://fohi.org/)

Still, after all these years, a composite history of Hog Island has not been set down in one place.  Lots of magazine articles over time have been published, some in Down East, some in Audubon, some in various national publications‘ Sunday travel sections.  But nothing focused and complete records the dynamic story that is Hog Island.

I’ve been working on changing that for a long time now.  Things are getting closer and more concrete, but much still needs to be done.  

For starters, I am currently working on a book that specifically celebrates the contributions of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, the ‘founders’ of Hog Island’s current ecological/birding iteration.  It was Mabel Todd who, with the help of Etta Glidden, first bought sections of the island c. 1908.  By 1915, Mrs. Todd owned three-quarters of the 300+ acre island, and with her husband David, created a simple summer encampment on the west side of the island that the family used up until the 1960s.  It was Mrs. Todd’s daughter, Millicent Bingham, who found Audubon’s John Baker in 1935 that subsequently widened the focus of the island to include a Nature Camp for Adult Leaders.   

Mabel Todd’s main claim to cultural fame, as you might know, was her initial work as editor of the Emily Dickinson poetry.  She made alterations to Ms. Dickinson’s work that some scholars since have condemned.   

Much scholarly writing has dissected Mrs. Todd and her efforts to publish Emily Dickinson.  Much has been written, too, about Mrs. Todd’s affair with Emily’s brother, Austin, and the subsequent trouble the Dickinson family endured after first publication and, just a few years following, Austin’s death.  

One of the newest books on the Dickinson-Todd furor is Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family Feuds, written by Lyndall Gordon, published spring 2010.  Like so many other treatments of Dickinson’s work, Mabel Loomis Todd is not regarded warmly therein.  She is described as a family interloper who claimed more credit than she should.  I encourage you to read this and other books to learn more about the family dynamics of Amherst, Massachusetts c. 1890.  I’ll mention more titles in upcoming blogs. 

Regardless of family and community ugliness, Mabel Todd contributed much to the American literary canon through her tireless work on Emily Dickinson.  That fact is hard to deny. 

Over the years I have collected much on Mabel Loomis Todd and her life.  My hope is to shed light on her love of nature and Nature’s people, which links her, again, closely to her contemporary, Emily Dickinson.

As I press on with my writing, I aim to keep interested readers updated on progress in this irregularly published blog.  I might mention, too, that it is Lyndall Gordon’s description of Mrs. Todd as The Dressy Adventuress, that has given title to both my book and this blog.

I’d appreciate your encouragement, too.  Feel free to share your thoughts about this project.