Our interest in Emily Dickinson and her relationship to peanut brittle was inspired when Sally the Intern gifted the WLBOTT Literary Society with the complete works of Dickinson.
We have great respect for Emily Dickinson, the way she played with words, the way she endured and reflected on the sadness in her life, and the way she was compelled to express herself privately, for some unknown inner need.
Based on the only authenticated image of Emily Dickinson, Elder G helped bring her to life.
The serendipitous Sally the Intern / Peanut Brittle connection gave us an opportunity to revisit her life and works after many decades since high school English.
Emily Dickinson reminds us a bit of Kurt Vonnegut‘s alter ego, Kilgor Trout. Trout appears in many of Vonnegut’s books, and in the novel Timequake, Trout finds himself living in a New York City homeless shelter. Every day, he writes a new science fiction story, and every evening he takes the story out to the trash can in front of the shelter and throws it away. The desire to write, to express himself, is his motivation, and perhaps this is the case for Emily. And perhaps this is the case for someone who writes a blog with no visitors.
As a youth, I’d been taught that Emily was a lonely reclusive who never left her room, but that seems far from true. THOSE WHO DECIDE WHAT IS GREAT seem to like to create these fictions, and if the artist is safely dead, so much the better. Another perfect example is Vincent van Gogh – safely dead and easy to mythologize.
The Emily Dickinson Connection
The word “brittle”: we like the onomatopoeiac feel to the word.
Linguistically, it traces back through Middle English (britel) and Old English (brēotan, meaning “to break” or “shatter”), closely kin to words like burst and bruise. English has a knack for words that deliver their own sound effects when something fragile gives way—crack, snap, splinter, brittle.
Emily was no stranger to “brittle”.
How brittle are the Piers / 1433
How brittle are the Piers On which our Faith doth tread— No Bridge below doth totter so— Yet none hath such a Crowd.
It is as old as God— Indeed—’twas built by him— He sent his Son to test the Plank, And he pronounced it firm.
What Soft—Cherubic Creatures / 401
What Soft—Cherubic Creatures— These Gentlewomen are— One would as soon assault a Plush— Or violate a Star—
Such Dimity Convictions— A Horror so refined Of freckled Human Nature— Of Deity—ashamed—
It’s such a common—Glory— A Fisherman’s—Degree— Redemption—Brittle Lady— Be so—ashamed of Thee—
He fumbles at your Soul / 315
He fumbles at your Soul As Players at the Keys Before they drop full Music on— He stuns you by degrees— Prepares your brittle Nature For the Ethereal Blow By fainter Hammers—further heard— Then nearer—Then so slow Your Breath has time to straighten— Your Brain—to bubble Cool— Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt— That scalps your naked Soul—
When Winds take Forests in the Paws— The Universe—is still—
Emily Dickinson – The Background
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. She spent most of her life in this same town, where her family home is now preserved as the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, her work is now widely regarded as canonical. The Poetry Foundation describes her as having “created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.”
Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.
At least eleven of Dickinson’s poems were dedicated to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Some scholars believe censorship helped to obscure the nature of Emily and Susan’s relationship, which has been interpreted as romantic.
Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinson’s paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College.[14] In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on Amherst’s main street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.
Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities. She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.
Life was difficult and often short, and Emily experienced the death of many friends and family, and this is reflected in her poetry. Her poems often reflect on mortality and death.
… some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep – the hour of evening is sad – it was once my study hour – my master has gone to rest, and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone, make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay….
Emily Dickinson
Side Note: Emily’s Ancestors
The Puritan migration to New England took place from 1620 to 1640, and declined sharply thereafter. The term “Great Migration” can refer to the migration in the period of English Puritans to the New England Colonies, starting with Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony. They came in family groups rather than as isolated individuals and were mainly motivated by freedom to practice their beliefs. The Migration primarily came from East Anglia, specifically Lincolnshire, where John Cotton’s teachings were most received in England.
The Dickinson Children, with Emily on the left, c. 1840. From the Dickinson Room at Houghton Library, Harvard University.
In 2012, the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections unveiled this daguerreotype, proposing it to be Dickinson (left) and her friend Kate Scott Turner, c. 1859. It has not been authenticated.
Elder G helps us bring Emily and Susan’s relationship to life.
Did Emily Dickinson Ever Eat Peanut Brittle?
According to our JV backup elder, Elder G2, pretty likely.
Yes, it is very likely that Emily Dickinson ate peanut brittle—or at least a direct 19th-century precursor to it.
The Confectionery Timeline
19th-Century New England Roots: Although commercial peanut brittle surged in popularity later in the century, regional recipes for boiled sugar, molasses, or maple syrup combined with peanuts (often called groundnuts or goobers) circulated throughout Massachusetts and broader New England during her lifetime (1830–1886).
The Rise of Peanuts: Peanuts transitioned from a regional Southern crop to a widespread street-vendor and household snack across the Northeast following the Civil War.
Dickinson’s Kitchen Connection
An Accomplished Baker: Dickinson was an avid baker and confectioner, regularly entering breads in local agricultural fairs and packaging homemade sweets, cakes, and candies to send out to neighbors and friends with small poetic notes.
Household Candy-Making: Making hard taffies, nut candies, and caramels boiled on a wood stove was a common staple of refined 19th-century domestic cooking in Amherst.
While she may have known it under names like “peanut candy,” “sugar brittle,” or “peanut taffy,” the treat was well within her pantry’s reach.
Peanuts were certainly available during Emily Dickinson‘s lifetime, but they became genuinely popular in New England mainly during and after the Civil War. Commercial American cultivation really developed in the early 1800s, especially in Virginia and North Carolina.
JV backup Elder G2
But Elder G was a little more cautious.
Emily Dickinson and peanut brittle is exactly the sort of historical question for which the surviving documentary record has been scandalously negligent.
If forced to put a number on it, I’d say:
About 35% probability that Emily Dickinson ate something we would recognize as peanut brittle at least once.
Dickinson lived 1830–1886, so the timing works, but only moderately well. Sugar candy made with nuts was certainly nothing new. Recipes for hard sugar candies and nut confections existed during her lifetime, and peanuts were increasingly familiar in the United States during the nineteenth century. But peanut brittle as a widely commercialized, familiar American candy seems to belong more securely to the later nineteenth century and especially the period after Dickinson’s death.
There’s also a terminology problem. Suppose somebody in Amherst around 1870 cooked sugar syrup to the hard-crack stage, stirred in peanuts and poured it onto a buttered surface. Dickinson could have eaten precisely what we’re making while never hearing the term “peanut brittle.” It might have been called peanut candy, nut candy, molasses candy, or simply something peculiar that Cousin Lavinia brought over and which subsequently removed a filling.
So I’d divide my imaginary probability meter roughly this way:
95% that Dickinson ate hard sugar candy of some sort. 70% that she ate some kind of nut confection. 35% that she ate something essentially equivalent to modern peanut brittle. <5% that we could ever demonstrate it from surviving evidence.
Which leaves us with the completely unauthorized Dickinsonian proposition:
Hope is the thing with peanuts That hardens on the Tray…
Elder G
During Emily Dickinson‘s lifetime, chocolate was not very common in candy. It was expensive and used mostly in baking or in beverages, and the industrial processes to create was we consider chocolate today hadn’t been invented. Hershey’s milk chocolate bars came out around 1900.
Scandal! Penny Candy Shops Open On Sundays!
Ah, the guild these children must have felt! Their parents gave them a few pennies for the collections at Sunday School, and all the while they are buying candies!
It seems that many children had pennies for candy, even ones in low-income neighborhoods and those on their way to Sunday school…. The anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) called such stores [penny candy shops] “devil traps” in Traps for the Young (1883). “These traps may be discovered in confectionery stores which keep open on Sunday.” “Any person who has observed these matters must have been struck with the numbers of little ones who throng into candy stores before and while going to Sunday-school. . . . The pennies placed in the tiny hand of the child for the missionary or other good cause, are thus easily secured, and the child, with its back toward home, says, ‘Nobody will know,’ and tempted by the delicious flavors so sweet to the taste, dishonesty is encouraged and swiftly follows.”
