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Chronology of Emily Dickinson life :
1830 : Chronology of Dickinson's Family's father and other family members, birth of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10).
1831 : The poet's maternal grandfather Joel Norcross remarries. The poet's mother is admitted to church membership.
1833 : Birth of the poet's sister Lavinia Norcross Dickinson. Never married for fear of displeasing her father; she becomes Emily's indispensable friend and advocate in later year. Poor and broken spirited, Edward's father Samuel Fowler Dickinson moves to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he supervises building construction at Lane Theological Seminary. His wife and several remaining children follow shortly.
1834 : Lavinia Norcross, the poet's aunt marries her first cousin, Loring Norcross
1835 : Edward Dickinson appointed treasurer of Amherst College, a post he holds for thirty-seven years. Emily begins attending school Edward Dickinson begins a two-year term in the Massachusetts Legislature. Death ofhis father Samuel Fowler Dickinson, his financial affairs in 'sorry mess.
1840 : The Dickinson is move into a spacious wooden house on Pleasant Street. Emily enters Amherst Academy in 'the English course', as does her sister Lavinia.
1842-1842 : In January, Edward Dickinson begins another term in the Massachusetts Legislature,. Emily enters The Classical Department at Amherst Academy
1844 : Depressed by the death of her schoolmate Sophia Holland, Emily Dickinson is sent to stay with her mother's sister Lavinia Norcross in Boston. The trip does her good.
1847 : Beginning in September, Emily Dickinson attends Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she finds herself all engrossed in the study of sulphuric acid.
1848 : Emily Dickinson completes her year at Mount Holyoke and returns to Amherst, her parents having decided that no further formal education is necessary.
1850 : In January, Benjamin Franklin Newton, her father's former law clerk, gives Emerson's Poems. In February, Dickinson's first known publication, a comic valentine letter, appears in The Indicator. In March, Dickinson sends a comic valentine to her father's law partner, Elbridge Gerry Bowdoin. This is her first known poem. Dickinson sends a love letter to Susan Hungtinton Gilbert, who is teaching in Baltimore. Austin Dickinson teaching Irish immigrants. In Boston. Edward Dickinson elected to the U.S. House of Representatives on the Whig ticket.
1853 : Austin Dickinson attends Harvard He becomes engaged to Susan. Gilbert, who is Emily's best friend. Death of Benjamin Franklin Newton who wanted to live until Emily was a poet.
1855 : Edward Dickinson unsuccessful in his bid for selection to Congress. Emily and Lavinia visit Mount Vernon and spend several weeks in Washington, D.C., where Emily attends fashionable dinner parties and impresses the company with her wit. Emily's mother suffers a depression that continues for years after the move.
1856 : Austin and Sue marry on July 1 in Geneva, New York. They move into The Evergreen, which becomes a center of Amherst social life. Emily wins second prize for her poetry and Indian bread at the autumn Cattle Show.
1857 : Virtually undocumented, a transformative year in the life of the poet. A strategic retreat. Emerson lectures on 'The Beautiful in Rural Life' and stays overnight with Sue and Austin, but Dickinson does not meet him.
1858 : Dickinson begins organizing her poems into booklets, or fascicles, a practice she continues into 1864, eventually compiling some forty ot these handsewn gatherings and a smaller number of unbound sets.
1860 : In August Charles Wadsworth visits Emily. Edward Dickinson declines the nomination of the Bell and Everest Party for lieutenant governor Dickinson and Lavinia visit their friend Eliza Coleman and her husband in Middletown, Connecticut, Emily's last social visit away from Amherst.
1861 : Birth of Austin and Sue's first child, Ned, in June. In September, Dickinson, Dickinson experiences a mysterious 'terror' which has been variously attributed toa range of psychological and physical problems.
1863 : Dickinson's most productive year. She writes or transcribe almost 300 hundred poems.
1864 : In March, two of her poems appear in Drum Beat, a Brooklyn newspaper designed to raise funds for the Union cause. In April, Emily moves into a Cambridge boarding house where her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross are also living. She is depressed, suffers from intermittent eye pain, and fears that she is losing her sight. She continues to write poetry.
1864 : In April, Dickinson returns to Cambridge for another seven month stay and for further eye treatment. Again, she lives in Mrs. Bangs's boarding house on Austin street. In April, Dickinson returns to Amherst in better spirits and no longer complaining of eye pain. She is able to return to tasks such as sewing that require visual concentration.
1865 : The Springfield Republican features on its front page, February 14. Birth of Martha, second child of Austin and Sue.
1868 : Dickinson goes out at night with her brother to see the new church on Main Street, which could be viewed from the edge of the Dickinson property.
1869 : Higginson invites Dickinson to a literary salon in Boston. She refuses, stating, "I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town"
1870 : Higginson visits Dickinson in August. 1873: At her father's request, the pastor Jonathan Jenkins examines Emily and pronounces her sound, despite her failure to; attend church services. Higginson pays a second visit.
1874 : Edward Dickinson again serving in the Massachusetts legislature; he dies in June in a Boston hotel room after an injection of morphine; the Dickinsons believe that he was the victim of medical malpractice.
1875 : Dickinson's mother has a stroke on the anniversary of her husband's death. Emily Dickinson signs her own will, saying nothing explicit about her Manuscripts.
1877 : Death of Higginson's first wife, Mary Elizabeth Channing.
1878 : Helen Hunt Jackson visits, with her husband. "Success' published anonymously in A Masque of Poets Dickinson's romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, whom she describes as her father's best friend.
1879 : In February, Higginson marries Mary Potter Thacher of Newton, Massachusetts.
1882 : Death of the poet's bedridden mother.
1883 : Sudden death of the poet's eight years old nephew Gilbert, from typhoid fever. Dickinson goes to The Evergreen and suffers from 'revenge of nerves.
1884 : Death of Otis Phillips Lord, following a period of long ill health.
1885 : Helen Hunt Jackson, who had asked to be Dickinson's literary executor, predeceases her; Dickinson 'unspeakably shocked'.
1886 : On May 15, Emily Dickinson dies at around six o'clock in the evening, The official diagnosis is 'Bright's Disease', a kidney disorder, but hypertension is more likely to have been the primary cause.
1887 : Amherst resident Mabel Looms Todd is transcribing the poems; she is assisted by her husband and several others. This activity is kept secret from Sue.
1890 : Poems, edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, published by Roberts Brothers. It contains 115 poems. At death she left behind close to 1,800 poems, only a handful of which had been published against her will or with her grudging permission Not only did she seek fame in her own lifetime, but she positively shunned publicity of any kind, securing for herself by her early thirties a solitude that was so complete that few were ever to see her again.
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| Emily Dickinson |
Chronology of Historical Events during Dickinson's era :
1830 : Birth of the poet, novelist, and Indian activist Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst. Massachusetts residents no longer required to pay taxes to support churches. Abraham Lincoln moves with his father's family from Indiana Illinois. There are thirteen million Americans.
1831 : In Virginia, Nat Turner leads an unsuccessful slave rebellion.
1832 : Andrew Jackson reelected the president on the Democratic ticket.
1833: Abraham Lincoln elected to first term in the Illinois legislature. Burning of Charles convent by anti-Catholic natives 1836 Battle of the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas. Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Nature.
1837 : Victoria becomes the queen of England. Birth of Mark Twain. Financial panic, economic depression cause widespread unemployment.
1838 : Edgar Allan Poe publishes his only novel , The Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym, of Nantucket. Meville's future father-in-law Lemuel Shaw becomes the first chief justice of Massachusetts to send a man to prison for blasphemy.
1840 : William Henry Harrison elected president on the Whig ticket after a hard fought campaign. Margaret Fuller edits The Dial.
1842: Abraham Lincoln marries Mary Todd in Illinois. Nathaniel Hawthorne marries Sophia Peabody in Massachusetts.
1843 Birth of Henry James, Jr. in New York City. Whitman's temperance novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate : A Tale of the Times.
1844 : Activist anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia. Mormon leader Joseph Smith killed by mob in Carthage, Illinois. Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes 'A Vision of Poets'. Emerson, Essays: Second Series.
1845 : Irish potato famine accelerates immigration to America. Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning; they take up residence on the continent. Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
1846 : United States declares war on Mexico; Lincoln elected to Congress, his only term. Thoreau at Waldon Pond; arrested for not paying taxes.
1847 : Publication of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
1848 : Women's Rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Gold discovered in California. In Europe, revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy that influence democratic thinking in the United States. Herman Melville publishes Typee; Death of Emily Bronte, in Yorkshire, England, of consumption.
1849 : Death of Edgar Allen Poe under tragic circumstances, in Baltimore. Hawthorne writing The Scarlet Letter, after losing his job in Salem Custom-House.
1849 : Compromise bill enacted that restricts slavery in the territories. Death of Margaret Fuller. Elizabeth Barrett Browning publishes her politically radical poem The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point.
1850 : Moby Dick and The House of the Seven Gables are published.
1851 : Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; 1852 : The nativist Know-Nothing Party is organized. Thoreau publishes Walden.
1855 : Longfellow publishes Hiawatha.
1856 : Second Edition of Leaves of Grass published, as is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminist novel in verse, Aurora Leigh.
1857 : Economic depression grips the nation.
1858 : Lincoln - Douglas debates. Douglas wins reelection to U.S. Senate from Illinois.
1859 : Unsuccessful antislavery raid at harpes Ferry, Virginia, led by John Brown, who is captured and executed. Higginson is one of his financial backers.
1860 : Abraham Lincoln elected on the Republican ticket. Third edition of Leaves of Grass published containing 'Calamus' and Children of Adams poems. In England, George Eliot publishes. The Mill on the Floss.
1861 : Civil War begins in April. Death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
1862 : Birth of Edith Wharton, later a powerful critic of Old new York.
1863 : Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation. Whitman in Washington, D.C. visiting wounded in Civil War hospitals.
1864 : Death of Hawthorme, in a hostel room. Lincoln reelected.
1865 : In April, Lincoln assassinated while attending a performance of Our Cousin in Ford's Theatre with his wife. Civil War ends.
1869 : War hero Ulysses S. Grant inaugurated as president. Life in a Black Regiment.
1870 : Higginson publishes Army Life in a Black Regiment.
1871 : George Eliot begins publishing Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life , one of Dickinson's favourite novels.
1872 : Economic depression. Whitman suffers paralytic stroke and moves Washington, D.C., to Camden, New Jersey.
1873 : Birth of Gertrude Stein, daughter of Jewish immigrants, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
1876 : George Eliot begins publishing Daniel Deronda.
1879 : Henry James publishes Daisy Miller
1880 : George Eliot marries John Walter Cross and dies seven months later
1881 : President Garfield assassinated; Henry James publishes The Portrait of a Lady.
1884 : Helen Hunt Jackson publishes her novel Ramonia, urging justice for Indians in California. Twain publishes The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.
1885 : Henry James publishes The Bostonians, a novel of homosocial and homoerotic female friendship.