An Annotated Calendar of Samuel Bowles's Letters to Austin and Susan Dickinson

Abstract

The Houghton Library's 163 manuscript letters from Samuel Bowles to Emily Dickinson's brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, constitute a major underutilized source on the poet, her family and friends, a number of other people, and a variety of topics in nineteenth-century American literature and history. Several well-known excerpts from these packed and racy letters have entered the literature on Dickinson, but scholars seem not to have taken on the entire correspondence. This apparent neglect is easily explained: Bowles's rapid scribble can be extremely hard to decipher, and, like the poet, he generally failed to record the date. The present article, based on a full transcription of Bowles's manuscript letters, establishes the exact, probable, or approximate dates of 156 of them and gives extensive excerpts.1