A 817: etext transcription

Physical Description
- Manuscript: A 817
- Date: [March 1885 (THJ, RWF)]
- Status: letter, with poems embedded [to Helen Hunt Jackson], fair-copy draft, incomplete, not mailed
- Formula: 1 sheet (2 l); 1 sheet (2 l)
- Paper: laid, off-white stationery embossed Pure Irish Linen F. H. D. & Co. and impressed with a crown
- Dimensions: 205 x 132 mm, leaf
- Folds: folded horizontally in half
- Media: pencil
- Hand: fair
Collection
- Amherst College Library
Transmission History
- MSS from LND to MLT, 1891?
Publication History
- Letters (1894), 424–25; Poems (1955), P 1640, lines of verse (1) only, discussed but not reproduced; Poems (1955), P 1601 n, lines of verse (2) only; Letters (1958), L 976; Poems (1998), P 1671 (C), lines of verse (1), with letter in part; Poems (1998), P 1675 (A), lines of verse (2), with letter in part
Commentary
- This fair-copy letter-draft, composed around 1885 (THJ, RWF), was found among Dickinson's papers after her death. The text is incomplete. For additional drafts of this letter, see A 818 and A 819; for related fragments, see A 820, A 821, and A 822. These fragments, probably composed around 1885, may be drafts for passages in Dickinson's last letter to Hunt Jackson, or, as seems more likely, autonomous texts, incorporated into this letter-draft because of their momentary aptness. One passage in this draft appears, altered, in an earlier (?) letter to Benjamin Kimball; see NYPL—Berg (1885 [THJ]). The published versions of the letter-draft to Hunt Jackson are all composites based on manuscripts A 817, A 818, and A 819.
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