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Two Unpublished Emerson Letters

Author(s): Vivian C. Hopkins and Ralph Waldo Emerson


Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 1960), pp. 502-506
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/362678
Accessed: 24-12-2018 14:17 UTC

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5?^ THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

TWO UNPUBLISHED EMERSON LETTERS

VIVIAN C. HOPKINS

TWO unpublished letters of Emerson throw light on his in-


terest in a pair of literary ladies of his time: Delia Bacon an
Caroline Healey Dall. The first letter, to George Putnam, concer
Emerson's efforts to help Miss Bacon publish her "new" theory
of the authorship of Shakespeare's Plays, and decide between m
zine and book publication. Urged by Elizabeth Peabody, Emerson
had some correspondence with Miss Bacon between June and Se
tember, 1852.1 Late in April, 1853, after the promise of a subs
from Charles Butler for a year's residence in England to carry
research, Delia Bacon visited her friend Eliza Farrar in Cambrid
Here she was somewhat dismayed by Caroline Healey Dall's de-
mand that she produce evidence for the hypothesis that Shake-
speare's Plays had really been written by a coterie of wits, with
Francis Bacon their leading mind.2 A visit to Emerson at his Con-
cord home early in May, 1853, restored Miss Bacon's confidence; he
urged her to publish the inductions first, following them with sub-
stantiating evidence; and he gave her several introductory letters
to English friends. While in New York in August, 1853, Emerson
seized the opportunity to get the ear of George Putnam on the
subject of Miss Bacon's work. "I met Putnam the bookseller," he
told his brother William. "I rode a mile further in an omnibus, to
talk with him of Miss Bacon....3 Earlier that spring, Putnam had
withdrawn an offer to publish Miss Bacon's work; like Mrs. Dall,
he wanted more evidence.4 But the persistent Emerson kept George
Putnam in mind. Although Putnam was no financial wizard, his
years of English residence while a member of the firm of Wiley and

1 For a summary of Emerson's assistance to Miss Bacon, in connection with


the larger subject of Francis Bacon's influence on Emerson, see my "Emerson
and Bacon," A.L., xxix, 408-430 (Jan., 1958).
2 Caroline Healey Dall, "Delia Bacon," What We Really Know Albout
Shakespeare (Boston, 1886), 103-106. Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912), wife of
a Unitarian clergyman and later well known for lectures and books on women's
rights, did finally include a tribute to Delia in her study of Shakespeare's per-
sonality (What We Really Know About Shakespeare). Here she rejected the
Baconian and group theories, but indulged in some fancies of her own about
Shakespeare's supposed American descendants.
3"R. W. E. to W. E., Concord, Aug. 4, 1853," Ralph L. Rusk, editor, The
Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1939), Iv, 378.
4 See my Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (Cambridge, 1959), i6i-i66.

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MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 5<3

Putnam, securing of contracts for the works of Carly


for his own firm, and heroic efforts to establish an International
Copyright Law made him a valuable contact for this iconoclastic
attack by an American on England's greatest writer.
After two years in England, Miss Bacon asked Emerson, her
American agent, to help market her manuscript. Following Emer-
son's renewed recommendation, Putnam wrote Miss Bacon, Au-
gust i, 1855, that he was still unable to publish her book, but that
he had urged Dix and Edwards, then proprietors of Putnam's
Monthly Magazine, to print her first article on the subject. This
brings us to the first unpublished letter:

Concord, Oct. 19, 1855.


Dear Sir,
I send you Miss Bacon's Preliminary Chapter for Putnam's Maga-
zine, and her note to you, enclosed. I have kept the chapter a few
days, as she desired me to read it, and correct it, if I thought fit. I
have read it, but, on the whole, decided to let well alone; partly,
because I have not, in these days, the time to correct anything so
important; and chiefly, because it reads well as it is. I think it will
commend itself to your editors, as a strong preliminary state-
ment, and presenting the negative argument.
I have from her a long letter describing the terror of the several
London publishers, when they were successively made acquainted
with her main design.5 All that makes it formidable there, should
make it popular here. But I do not think well of the plan of pub-
lishing it in parts; and shall advise her to print it here in two 12mo
volumes.
If anything occurs to you that can aid her here or in London,
pray advise her. She believes so heartily in her theory, and works so
nobly, that she cannot fail to interest.
Mr. Longfellow said one day to me, that the "Magazine" wanted
more literature." [sic] That want this paper will go to supply.
Respectfully
Mr. Putnam R. W. EMERSON6

Miss Bacon's article was printed as "William Shakespeare and


His Plays: an Inquiry Concerning Them," Putnam's Monthly
Magazine, VII, 1-19 (Jan., 1856). The $55 payment which Delia
Bacon received for it was her only cash return for years of labor on

5 Prodigal Puritan, 189-190.


6 Dorothea Dix Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Grateful
acknowledgment is made to Edward W. Forbes and the Ralph Waldo Emer-
son Memorial Association for permission to quote these letters (see n. lo).

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504 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

this strange literary hypothesis. The article aroused


both sides of the Atlantic (unfortunately Miss Bacon
that it made friends as well as enemies). The hostile
Richard Grant White led Dix and Edwards to hold up further
publication in Putnam's; yet, in the spring of 1856, thinking the
editors still interested in her work, Delia sent three more articles in
Emerson's care. In the hope of getting better terms for his client,
Emerson had his brother William recall these from Putnam's
office. Sophia Ripley, on a visit to the William Emersons on St
Island, started to convey the manuscripts back to Concord-and
lost them, between William's home and the Staten Island ferry
boat. (A later admirer of Delia's, Ignatius Donnelly, accused Sophia
of being an "accomplice" of Richard Grant White in a dark plot
to keep Miss Bacon out of print.) By June 23, 1856, when Emerson
wrote Miss Bacon of this unfortunate event, she had already trans-
ferred the management of her literary affairs from Emerson's care
to that of his former neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, then consul
at Liverpool. Reassured by Hawthorne's efforts on her behalf,
Miss Bacon forgave Emerson for his "carelessness" with her manu-
scripts, and he continued to be interested in her writing.
In September, 1856, Hawthorne and his English friend Francis
Bennoch, who was helping to see Delia's book through the press,
were agitated by a recently published pamphlet by William Henry
Smith, Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? A Let-
ter to the Earl of Ellesmere [President of the Shakespeare Society].7
In his Preface to Delia Bacon's book, The Philosophy of the Plays
of Shakespeare Unfolded (London and Boston, 1857), Hawthorne
sharply reproved Smith for what he considered an act of plagiarism.
While reading Delia's book, Emerson also became interested in the
question of Smith's "borrowing," and wrote to James T. Fields,
October 9, 1857, for a copy of Smith's book.8 Meanwhile Caroline
Healey Dall, who prided herself on having been Delia Bacon's first
friend in Boston when Delia first came there to lecture in 185o,
was another curious seeker for Smith's work. On December 6, 1857,
she wrote to Emerson, asking him to lend her his copy:

With Miss Bacon I was very well acquainted and it was through
me, that she was first introduced to those who became her kindest
Boston friends. My interest does not flag. In her sorrows, her labors,
7 Later published as Bacon and Shakespeare (London, 1857).
8 Rusk, editor, Letters, v, 85.

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MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 505

her privations, I feel the sympathy that her genius k


only hope that in her present helplessness her pap
cared for. If they do not prove what she claimed, the
ly prove important things & one thing is sure-she has shown us
that our present Shakesperian [sic] theory is utterly untenable. I
have not corresponded with her of late, do you happen to know
where she now is-? 9

Emerson's reply to Mrs. Dall's request is the subject of the sec-


ond unpublished Emerson letter:
Concord
Dec. io, 1857
Dear Madam,
I shall have great pleasure in sending you Mr. Smith's book, but
not quite yet. It is held, at present, with some other books and pa-
pers, as means or materials to some notice of Miss Bacon's work,
though who will write it is not quite yet certain.
I am sorry that I cannot give you the information you ask con-
cerning Miss Bacon. If you have seen Miss Peabody, I had my last
tidings from her. Tis [sic] very tragic to have such extraordinary
abilities made unavailable by some disproportion, or by a want of
somewhat which everybody else has. But if one could forget that
there is a suffering woman behind it, her book, as it is, is a literary
feast. More ability, &8 of a rare kind, goes to it, than to a score of
successful works.
With much respect,
Yours,
Mrs. Dall R. W. EMERSON10

The "notice" of Delia's work to which Emerson here refers was


never written. His ambivalent attitude doubtless held him back;
by June, 1856, he had abandoned his earlier fascination with the
theory, for lack of proof; yet he continued to admire Miss Bacon's
critical insight as well as her personality. He was, furthermore,
well aware of the touchy family feelings about their distinguished
relative.1l On his last trip to England in 1873, as he studied the
9 Emerson Papers, Houghton Library.
10 Massachusetts Historical Society. The Society's permission to print is
gratefully acknowledged.
Cf. "R. W. E. to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, Oct. 13, 1857," Rusk, editor, Letters,
v, 86-87, where Emerson stated that Whitman and Delia Bacon were "the sole
producers that America has yielded in ten years."
11 Emerson's first news concerning Miss Bacon's insanity reached him in
February, 1858, in a note from Celina Greaves Flower, a mutual friend in Strat-
ford. His offer to Leonard Bacon to help with her support, Feb. 18, 1858, was re-
fused (Prodigal Puritan, 257).

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506 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

stones
stones overover
Shakespeare's
Shakespeare's
grave, he recalled
grave, Miss
heBacon's
recalled
plan to
Miss Bac
move
move them;
them;
and inand
the essay,
in the"Quotation
essay,and "Quotation
Originality," and
Letters
Origin
and
and Social
Social
AimsAims
(Boston,
(Boston,
1875) he mentioned
1875) he hermentioned
"bold theory." her "b
If Emerson had written a criticism of Miss Bacon's book, he would
have been obliged to admit her one irresistible claim on his at-
tention: the fact that her theory concerning the authorship of
Shakespeare's Plays was transcendental self-reliance raised to the
nth degree.

EMERSON'S BRAHMA: AN INDIAN INTERPRETATION

K. R. CHANDRASEKHARAN

O LIVER Wendell Holmes, described Emers


"the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelli-
gibility that language can pump out of itself." The style of the poem
and the philosophical ideas packed into it are capable of mystify-
ing even the most intelligent western reader who is not acquainted
with the Indian literature which Emerson read, and the Indian
philosophical concepts which he had assimilated. Today, thanks
to the studies made by a number of distinguished American schol-
ars including W. T. Harris, D. L. Maulsby, W. S. Kennedy, F. I.
Carpenter, and A. E. Christy, there is a greater understanding of
the poem by the average reader in America. This article is
prompted by the hope that American students of Emerson might
welcome an interpretation by an Indian, who has some acquaint-
ance with the writings of Emerson along with a knowledge of the
possible sources of the famous poem.
First, a word of explanation about the title. Even a scholar as
well informed as F. I. Carpenter has misunderstood its significance.
A note on the poem in his edition of the works of Emerson re-
marks: "In Brahma the 'I' is the impersonal creative energy of the
universe."1 This is not correct. In Hindu philosophy, God is often
represented as a Trinity. The three aspects of Godhead compris-
ing the Trinity are the creative, the preservative, and the destruc-
tive. God the Creator is termed Brahma; God the Preserver is
Vishnu; and God the Destroyer is designated Siva. Carpenter ob-
viously mistakes the "Brahma" of Emerson's poem to be God the
Creator, who is one of the Trinity. The subject of the poem is not

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Selections (New York, 1934), 451.

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