CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL LIFE AT AMHERST SEVENTY YEARS AGO
1848 — 1853-54
There could have been little in the social life of Amherst seventy years ago to thrill a being like Emily Dickinson. Yet from eighteen to twenty-three she was a social creature in the highest sense, though she complains of often wearying of their house crowded daily with rich and poor, high and low, who came—and so rarely went—as a matter of course, without any warning or invitation, after the manner of that hospitable period, when gig or chariot might turn in at the great gate at any hour, depositing guests for a meal or the night or a long visit as it might happen. One of her contemporaries has left, in what Colonel Higginson once called "the portfolio literature of New England," a sketch of it all which gives, even with the most glowing intention, a rather scanty and very restricted story, lit by a solitary lantern here and there.
There were for Emily the elementals of all girlhood, of course. She evinces interest in her clothes, speaks of new ones in which she presumes she shall appear like an embarrassed peacock; complains of her brother Austin who returns from a trip to Baltimore to see her beloved Susie, as follows:
