Editing Emily: Players

Thomas Herbert Johnson
1902-1985

Equally telling are Johnson's elaborate and seemingly "scientific" analyses and categorizations of her writings. One need only examine his extensive appendices to see an obsessive need for editorial containment, whether this be by date or subject or recipient or genre or numbering or tabulation. In other words, Johnson expends a great deal of effort (and a great many pages) "taming" her works (as well as her persona), arranging them so that they can be manageable and managed within the "objective" and "scientific" and "intellectual" spheres of scholarly literature and textual criticism. http://www.emilydickinson.org/classroom/spring99/edition/johnson/j-dis.htm

Biographical Sketch
Prepared by Ran Tao, Princeton Class of 2006

Thomas Herbert Johnson was born in Bradford, Vermont, on 27 April 1902. He was the son of Herbert Thomas and Myra (Burbeck) Johnson.

Johnson studied English at both Williams College (A.B. 1926) and Harvard University (A.M. 1929, Ph.D. 1934) before beginning his own career as an educator. His first teaching position was at Rutgers University (1928-1929), but he returned to his undergraduate alma mater the following year (1929-1931). Next he taught at the Hackley School (Tarrytown, N.Y.) from 1931 to 1937, before moving to the Lawrenceville School (Lawrenceville, N.J.) where Johnson would teach until 1972, as well as serve as English department chair (1944-1967).

During his long tenure at Lawrenceville, Johnson also served as a guest lecturer at many institutions, including Chautauqua (1937), New School for Social Research (1943-1944), Columbia University (1948), Harvard University (1950), University of Copenhagen (1951-1952), University of Pennsylvania (1958-1959), and New York University (1959-1960).

Johnson was a renowned scholar of Emily Dickinson. He wrote Emily Dickinson: An Interpretative Biography (1955), as well as edited several volumes of her poems and letters: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared With all Known Manuscripts (1955), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1963), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1970), Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (1971), and Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems (1984).

Johnson's other published writings include editing three books relating to teaching and youth, two works relating to Jonathan Edwards, and The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (1939).

On 11 September 1934, Johnson married Catherine Schyler Rice. Together they had a daughter and son, Laura Bradley and Thomas. Johnson died on 3 January 1985; he was 82 years old.

Dartmouth

In 1780, Dartmouth gave a D.D. to Ezra Stiles. In addition to being the President of Yale (Eleazar Wheelock's college), Stiles was the grandson of the seventeenth-century Puritan divine Edward Taylor, whose unpublished poems were discovered in the Yale library in 1937 by Thomas H. Johnson 1923 and were given their definitive edition in 1960 by Donald E. Stanford, an instructor in English here at the College in 1937, the year Johnson made his discovery. Stiles was also the father-in-law of Abiel Holmes, the compiler of one of our earliest national histories, The Annals of America, 1492-1826 (in which Columbus again discovers the United States) and the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor of Anatomy in the Medical School from 1838 to 1840 and, of course, a major figure in the anthology of Chief American Poets, which was compiled in 1905 by Curtis Hidden Page, Dartmouth's third Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature from 1911 to 1930 and, as such, the teacher of Thomas H. Johnson.

At the nearest reaches of the pattern, the Dartmouth connections become quite direct. The graduating class of 1795 included Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the founder of Amherst College and the grandfather of Emily Dickinson, who is now trebly tied to Dartmouth, first by her brother's namesake in the Class of 1813, second by direct descent, and third by two Dartmouth graduates who went on to become American scholars of the first magnitude: Thomas H. Johnson, who in 1955 prepared the edition of Dickinson's poems that remains definitive, and Richard Chase 1937, whose critical biography of Dickinson (1951) enshrined her uncomfortably in the series called 'American Men of Letters.'

Later in the article:

Thomas H. Johnson published in rapid succession his Representative Selections from the writings of Jonathan Edwards (1935), the first collection of Edward Taylor's poems (1939), and, with Perry Miller, the landmark anthology called The Puritans (1938).

Eberwein on "scholars"

Jane Donahue Eberwein writes in "A CENTURY OF DICKINSON SCHOLARSHIP: Reflections of an Encyclopedist:"

One thing that strikes me in appraising a century of Dickinson scholarship is that a remarkable amount of truly significant work has been done by people who haven’t held Ph.D.s in English or appointments to university faculties. Since the very first American literature programs in United States colleges were established in the same decade of the 1890s that Dickinson’s poems first appeared, one would hardly expect her first editors and commentators to be scholars in our current sense of the word. Thomas Wentworth Higginson belonged to that civilized class of gentlemen known to us as men of letters. Mabel Loomis Todd was a faculty wife with her own literary and romantic ambitions but not a college graduate. What comes as more of a surprise is that the three doctorates held by Thomas Johnson were honorary ones (prime examples of the occasionally false distinction betweenthose and “earned” degrees).