These Fevered Days by Martha Ackmann

Author:Martha Ackmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

* Charles Thompson lived with the Stearns family from the time he was fifteen until his marriage. He worked as a “choreboy” for the family and later as custodian at Amherst College, becoming inextricably connected to both the institution and the lives of students. When Thompson was courting his future wife, Frazar Stearns helped write his love letters. [Abigail Eloise Stearns Lee, “Prof. Charlie”: A Sketch of Charles Thompson, Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1898.]

† Dickinson consistently misspelled Frazar Stearns’s first name.

‡ Scholars have confirmed the handwriting in the letter (L248a) is Charles Wadsworth’s. While the letter is undated, Thomas Johnson theorizes it was sent in spring 1862. Other scholars concur that Wadsworth’s concern may address Dickinson’s “terror since September” and therefore could have been written in the 1861–1862 time frame. [Margaret Dakin, email to the author, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, April 3, 2017.]

§ Fort Sumter was attacked on April 12, 1861. The Amherst College cannon ceremony occurred on April 14, 1862.

¶ Newton Spaulding Manross enlisted July 22, 1862, and was killed two months later at Antietam on September 17, 1862.

# Ralph Franklin believes “We play at Paste” may have been written in direct response to Higginson’s article. [Ralph Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 24.]

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