A 752: etext transcription
- Physical Description
- Manuscript: A 752
- Date: [about 1885 or last decade (THJ)]
- Status: text 1: message-fragment, remains; text 2: fragment, extrageneric
- Formula: 1 fragment
- Paper: wove, white stationery embossed WESTON'S LINEN RECORD 1881
- Dimensions: 101 x 60 mm; reverse: 60 x 101 mm
- Edges: left, right, top: torn; reverse: top, bottom, left: torn
- Media: pencil
- Hand: rough
- Collection
- Amherst College Library
- Transmission History
- MSS from LND to MLT, 1891?
- Publication History
- A 752, text 1: OF (1995), A 752a, in facsimile, with unredacted transcription A 752, text 2: Rev (1954), 94; Letters (1958), PF 32; OF (1995), A 752, in facsimile, with unredacted transcription
- Commentary
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This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper constitute separate textual spaces. A 752a carries the remains of an abandoned message-draft, addressee and date of composition unknown. The message, now almost entirely illegible, was probably saved only because Dickinson used the other side of the paper to jot down the text beginning "Emerging from | an Abyss and | entering it again -." The brief, extrageneric fragment inscribed on A 752, by itself an autonomous text, appears as a trace in a letter to Susan Dickinson (HCL B 148) composed around 1885 (THJ). A single, horizontal pencil line along the torn bottom edge of the manuscript, along with several stray letters and marks, indicate that text has been lost, though whether the lost text belonged to the extant fragment or to another text, possibly torn away in an act of revision designed to isolate the extant prose fragment, is not known.
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- Tags
- Text was composed between c.1870 and c.1886
- Document was discovered among Dickinson's papers, unbound
- Weston's Linen Record 1881
- Document has been torn; text has been lost beyond the tears
- Composed by Dickinson in pencil
- Composed by Dickinson in a rough-copy hand
- Dickinson's writing appears on both sides of the paper/leaf
- Dickinson drew horizontal lines to divide the manuscript into different sectors
- Text contains stray letters and/or marks
- Text contains illegible letters, words, and/or passages
- Amherst College Library, Special Collections