Editing Emily: Players

Millicent Todd Bingham

Picture courtesy of Dickinson College Archives

"Mrs. Millicent Todd Bingham from Washington D.C., who was a geographer and author, and received the honorary doctorate of Letters. Bingham was the daughter of Professor David Peck Todd. She established Todd Wildlife Sanctuary in memory of her mother."

From Women of Achievement and Herstory, Compiled and Written by Irene Stuber

"B. 02-05-1880, Millicent Todd Bingham, daughter of Mabel Loomis Todd, writer and lecturer. First woman to be awarded a doctorate in the department of geology and geography from Harvard University. Her mother, given the original manuscripts by the Dickinson family, had begun editing the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson. Following her mother's death, MTB devoted herself to editing the manuscripts and letters full-time."

From "Sirens within the IGU - an analysis of the role of women at International Geographical Congresses (1871-1996)" by Marie-Claire Robic (CNRS) / Mechtild Rössler (UNESCO):

"Millicent Todd Bingham (1880-1968) was one of the few women who read a paper at the International Geographical Congress in Paris in 1931. Bingham had studied geography at the University of Berlin from 1909 to 1911 and continued at the Department of Geology and Geography at Harvard University. She met Ellen Semple in 1916, who had urged Bingham "to make geography her profession" (Berman, 1987: 8). In 1923 she completed her dissertation on Peru. Her main influence and also recognition was the translation of works of Vidal de la Blache, in particular Principes de géographie humaine, which was published in 1926. Like other women at that time, she was concerned about the protection of the environment and donated an island belonging to her family to the Audunbon Society as a wildlife sanctuary."

Wrote/Edited

Bingham, Millicent Todd. Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1945.

---. "Introduction." Bolts of Melody. Emily Dickinson. Ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1945.

The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime. Ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914).

Bingham, Millicent Todd, Emily Dickinson's Home, Harper, 1955.

Curious

On a page entitled "from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert: Mattens" I found the following quote:

Emily Dickinson copied the second and third stanzas of this poem and put it with her own, where it was found and mistaken for hers (From http://lal.cs.byu.edu/mlists/emweb/199607/19960723-23.html no longer on the Web):

When "Bolts of Melody" first came out in 1945 it was "reviewed" in "The Talk of the Town" section of the June 16, 1945 issue of "The New Yorker" magazine. There it was first pointed out that poem number 232, on page 125, "My God, what is a heart?" was really two stanzas from "Mattens" by George Herbert, and not by Emily. It was mistaken for one of hers by Mrs. Millicent Todd Bingham (or Mabel Todd). Dickinson had apparently liked it and jotted it down on a scrap of paper, so it resembled one of her poems.

"The New Yorker" was quite facetious in their remarks, having "no comment to make on this funny coincidence, except to point out to poets that it is dangerous to jot down any thought but your own, and sometimes inadvisable even to do that." Their distain was directed to Herbert’s beautiful poem with its so called "clumsy" line; "That thou shouldst it so eye and woo." Their parenthetical comment was "My God, what a mouthful?"