Emily Dickinson and Victorian Poetry

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is best known for her elliptical, enigmatic and highly original poems and her extreme reclusiveness, culminating in her confinement in her father's house for the last twenty years of her life. It is only very recently that Dickinson scholarship has challenged this popular conception by demonstrating her innovative and daring interventions in the historical, social, cultural and literary world from which she apparently secluded herself. My project offers a new and original advancement on this work by examining her often provocative responses to her favourite British poets: the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson and George Eliot. It begins by combining analysis of Dickinson's epistolary references to these poets and the marginalia in her editions of their works with an exploration of the predominant ways in which these poets were read in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Having reconstructed aspects of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson read these poets, the project then compares Dickinson's poems with those of her contemporaries as a means of delineating shared and common features of nineteenth-century Anglo-American poetry. For example, it examines similar recurring topics, tropes and image-clusters in their works and the comparable ways ideas about the function of poetry and the role of the poet shaped their authorial identities. By positioning Dickinson's work within this context, she emerges as a writer who did not make distinctions between British and American writers, nor promote American cultural nationalism as did her contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Yet even these writers, like Dickinson, engaged with and admired the works of British poets, and, accordingly, Dickinson's attitude is more representative than it at first appears, deriving as it does from a transatlantic nineteenth-century culture in which writers were shared between ever-increasing Anglo-American communities of readers. This research counters approaches to nineteenth-century literature that ignore this transatlantic context and instead emphasise a cultural opposition between Britain and America, which is emergent in this period but has not yet become an overpowering reality.

While the primary beneficiaries of the proposed research will be academics, Dickinson's appeal to general readers means that this project will have beneficiaries beyond academia and attract a non-academic, international readership.

In the United States, Dickinson's popularity is equivalent to that of Austen's in the United Kingdom. Owing to my established reputation as a Dickinson scholar, I would expect to speak about my project to non-academic audiences in th US. For example, in 2004, I was invited to speak about my last monograph at the Emily Dickinson Museum (in Amherst), and, in 2010, on the invitation of the conference organisers, I participated in a plenary panel at the Emily Dickinson International Society conference on Dickinson's Transatlantic Connections, which took place in Oxford. This Society, which includes highly respected international academics, also includes non-academic members.

In addition, the book's discussion of important nineteenth-century writers, such as the Brontës, the Brownings, Tennyson and George Eliot, whose popularity is long-standing and international, suggests that it will appeal to a wide audience. I hope my second monograph will, like my first monograph, Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare (2006), be issued in paperback. Like its predecessor, it will be written in an accessible, jargon-free way to facilitate general readership.

This project on Dickinson and Victorian poetry aims to extend and challenge public understanding of Dickinson, Victorian poetry and nineteenth-century literature more generally.

One crucial area of my project on Dickinson's reading of and response to these British writers is the nature of nineteenth-century literary celebrity, in particular the fame and renown these writers enjoyed in American culture. My research on Dickinson and Victorian poetry, in particular my chapter on Dickinson and Tennyson, will have a social and cultural impact because it is an integral part of a larger Knowledge Transfer project on Tennyson and nineteenth-century literary celebrity, which I am coordinating with Dr Charlotte Boyce, one of my colleagues at the Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL) at the University of Portsmouth. We have secured money from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to explore Tennyson's Isle of Wight circle, which included major literary and artistic celebrities of the day, such as G. F. Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. This development involves collaboration with a range of local institutions and commercial partners: Farringford House (Tennyson's home on the Isle of Wight), Dimbola Lodge Museum (Julia Margaret Cameron's home), the Freshwater Tennyson's Society and the Local Studies Library on the Isle of Wight. The research will be disseminated to a wide, general audience through public lectures, the production of an illustrated booklet and a web resource to be hosted by the University of Portsmouth. The booklet and website will be launched in September 2011. This enterprise will increase the dissemination of my work on the nature of nineteenth-century literary celebrity, the position of celebrities such as Tennyson in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture, and the response of an admirer such as Dickinson to these literary icons.