In the fall of 1848, a group of young, unmarried Amherst
women formed a social group called the Sewing Society. The group
met twice a month at the Amherst House, a hotel in town. They sewed for
two hours, making things they would donate to charities, and then
received any male callers who wanted to visit. Emily Dickinson and
her friends joined this group. Many of Austin Dickinson's male friends
found Emily charming and witty, though few had romantic designs
on her.
Despite being "plain", as her friend Thomas Wentworth
Higginson would later describe her, Dickinson drew admirers with
her intelligence, charm, and wit. However, although she flirted
with her visitors, Dickinson did not seem to have deep feelings
for any of them. In 1849, Benjamin Newton told Dickinson that he
had decided to move back to Worcester, Massachusetts, the town in which
he grew up. Dickinson was devastated by his departure. As a parting
gift, Benjamin gave her a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Poems.
In 1849, Dickinson's sister Lavinia left home for Ipswich
Female Seminary, a boarding school. Many of the household chores
fell to Dickinson, and they usually took all day. Dickinson reserved
her evenings for reading. For the first time, she began to write
poetry. She often kept her lamp burning late as she sat at her
desk, poring over a book or composing a poem. No one in her family
knew of Dickinson's inclinations toward poetry. She kept her writing
a secret from them, locking away everything she produced in a secret drawer
in her desk.
When Dickinson read Jane Eyre by Charlotte
Bront ë during the winter of 1849–1850, it had a transformative
effect on her. Dickinson may have identified with the novel's heroine,
a frail, intelligent, and plain girl who lamented women's destiny:
remaining forever chained to the domestic realm. The novel's effect
on Dickinson was, as she put it in a letter, "electric."
Within a few months, Dickinson left the Sewing Society.
Her old friend Leonard Humphrey began tutoring her privately. A
sickly, socially awkward young man of twenty-four, Humphrey was almost
a romantic figure to Dickinson. It was after Dickinson's rapturous
reading of Jane Eyre, and during Humphrey's tutelage,
that Dickinson began hesitantly considering herself a poet.
One of Dickinson's old school friends created a social
club she called "Poetry in Motion." It had little to do with poetry;
its meetings were mostly an excuse for the young club members to
dance. Dancing was still considered unseemly in the late 1840s
in small-town New England, so the young people kept their club's
activities secret. Once, when Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson
went away for the weekend, Dickinson and her brother Austin threw
a party at the house. Austin and Dickinson held a "Poetry in Motion" meeting
at the Dickinson house. Dickinson rolled up the rug and the club
members danced in the living room. Unfortunately, when Dickinson
replaced the rug after the meeting, she replaced it upside down.
Her mother noticed, and although she was shocked and dismayed to
learn what had happened, she decided her husband didn't need to
know about the incident.
Dickinson turned twenty in 1850, an eventful year both
politically and socially. In New England, a religious movement
called The Great Revival was taking place. A fervent renewal of
Christian spirituality, the Revival inspired huge numbers of people
to officially join churches and declare themselves "for Christ."
It also resulted in the Temperance Movement, which argued for banning the
consumption of alcohol. The Temperance Movement gained great strength.
In Amherst, a number of town saloons were forced to close. Dickinson's
father joined the Temperance Movement and even officially joined
his Congregational Church. Officially joining the church required
a public declaration of faith, and for a man like Edward Dickinson,
faith was a private matter. However, on August 11, 1850, he officially
joined his church. Lavinia did, too. Dickinson, still unconvinced
and unsure, did not. Also during this year, the 1850 Compromise
was passed, heating up the anti- slavery debate.
Dickinson thought a lot about the Congregationalist faith.
She could not accept all of its tenets, and its concepts of judgment
and hell frightened her. She gave religious matters her thorough
attention. Religious imagery found its way into her poems, which
she was writing with more frequency now. She wrote about faith, domestic
matters, nature, immortality and, increasingly, death. Dickinson
was becoming preoccupied with death and the soul, and her own spiritual
investigations gave her a deep well of imagery and metaphor for
her poems. She began holding together her many poems in little
books which she stitched together using needle and thread.
