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Archives & Special CollectionsA New Dickinson Daguerreotype?
Skip to Main Content"The World Is Not Acquainted With Us"
 “The world is not acquainted with us”: |
The Amherst College Archives and Special Collections welcomes visitors wishing to view a daguerreotype copy of the image shown during the August, 2012 Emily Dickinson International Society conference and proposed by some participants to be Emily Dickinson and her friend Kate Scott Turner.* The Archives and Special Collections staff saw the original daguerreotype for the first time on July 18, 2007 during a visit and presentation from the owner, a New England collector who purchased the daguerreotype in 1995 and has been researching it ever since. By the time of that 2007 visit, the owner believed he had identified the sitters in the photograph and made the important leap to Kate as the second sitter. Subsequently, the owner tracked down a second photograph (a carte-de-visite) of Kate as a young woman (the photograph is at the New York State Historical Association) and proposed that the daguerreotype of the two women was taken around 1859 during one of Kate's visits to Amherst.
Additional evidence for identifying this image as Dickinson is from computer work with detailed scans of the original daguerreotypes (1847 and 1859) and an ophthalmological report (Susan Pepin Report--pdf) from March, 2010. The addition of a second sitter of whom there a few authenticated images in existence helps the case: if one could show that it's Kate Turner, a known friend of Dickinson, then it would increase the chance that the other sitter who looks like Dickinson is Dickinson. One sure point of contention is the clothing: people will note that the dress "Dickinson" wears seems to be out of date for a late 1850s photograph. However, that evidence may be of less significance when one considers the 23-year-old Dickinson's comment to friend Abiah Root in 1854, "I'm so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare" (Johnson letter 166).
A joint search by Archives and Museum staff members in the Emily Dickinson Museum's textile collection on April 20, 2010, led to the discovery of at least one fabric sample in a blue check that is a candidate for the dress Dickinson wears. A textile expert could perhaps determine whether the sample is the same as the fabric in the dress we see in the daguerreotype, but the original image is very small and it would require special tools to extract the necessary information about the dress.
In the museum sample, magnification revealed that the checks on the blue background consist of 4 white threads crossed with 8 light gray threads.
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Unfortunately, neither woman is wearing much in the way of datable accessories. "Dickinson" seems to have what may be a watch tucked in at her waist (perhaps the "gold watch tucked into her belt" that Martha Dickinson Bianchi mentioned in "Emily Dickinson Face to Face"), and she wears a lace collar with a flower-patterned ribbon around her neck. There is also black lace fringe on her sleeves. The Museum has samples of similar lace and ribbons but none that appeared to match those in the picture. "Kate" has lace at her cuffs and a comb in her hair. She wears widow's black, as would have been appropriate following the May 1857 death of her young husband, Campbell Ladd Turner.
We're glad the image has been released to the public and hope that anyone with information about the photograph will come forward, whether their evidence is favorable or unfavorable to the proposed identification of the image as Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Turner. Perhaps someone in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, where the daguerreotype was purchased, will remember something about the provenance of the piece and let us know.
If the daguerreotype showed Dickinson, it would change our idea of her, providing a view of the poet as a mature woman showing striking presence, strength, and serenity. She (whoever she is) seems to be the one in charge here, the one who decided that on a certain day in a certain year, she and her friend would have their likenesses preserved. In fact, even if this photograph is not of Dickinson and Turner, it has still been of use in forcing us to imagine Dickinson as an adult, past the age of the ethereal-looking 16-year-old we have known for so many years.
"The world is not acquainted with us": Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (1958), Volume II, Letter 203, letter from Emily Dickinson to Kate Scott Turner (Anthon), c. March, 1859.
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*Catherine Mary Scott, born March 12, 1831 in Cooperstown, New York. Known as "Kate Scott," "Kate Anthon," "Kate Turner," et al. Married (1851) Campbell Ladd Turner (1831-1857) and (1866) John Hone Anthon (1832-1874). Kate spent much of her life abroad and died in England in 1917.
-M.R. Dakin, Sept. 2012