1 [James’s notebooks indicate that he did not actually begin work on his classic novel of interplanetary conflict, The War of the Worlds, until the 28th of July, 1900. The book was finished by the 17th of November, unusually quickly for James, and after serialization in The Atlantic Monthly (August-December 1901) was published in England by Macmillan and Company in March 1902 and in the United States by Harper & Brothers one month later. It has remained his most popular book ever since and has on three occasions been adapted for motion pictures. Wells never did write an account of his experiences during the Martian invasion, though those experiences did, of course, have a profound influence on his life and work thereafter. —The Editor.]
2 St. Louis native Rachel Barnett married San Francisco financier Chester J. Simpson on April 20, 1897. They moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter.
3 East St. Louis is a small city in southwestern Illinois, on the opposite side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.
4 The New York World, sister newspaper to the Post-Dispatch.
5 By 1900, Joseph Pulitzer no longer lived in St. Louis. Following the scandal that resulted from the killing of a local attorney by the previous editor of the Post-Dispatch, he had taken permanent residence in New York City.
6 Barnett alludes here to the Spanish-American War, which was largely incited by the World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The novelist Stephen Crane was the Pulitzer newspapers’ correspondent during the war.
7 To ensure privacy, the Pulitzer organization used in-house code words to designate various individuals. “Andes” was Joseph Pulitzer’s code name.
8 For a full account, see H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Oxford University Press, 1898.
9 The details of the discovery are recounted in Desperation and Discovery: The Unusual Number of Lost Manuscripts Located by Doctoral Candidates, by J. Marple, Reading Railway Press, 1993.
10 Actually a poem and a poem fragment consisting of a four-line stanza and a single word fragment* from the middle of the second stanza.
11 While I was working on my dissertation.
12 Dr. Banks’s assertion that “the paper was manufactured in 1990 and the ink was from a Flair tip pen,” is merely airy speculation.*
13 The pathetic nature of her handwriting is also addressed in Impetus to Reform: Emily Dickinson’s Effect on the Palmer Method, and in “Depth, Dolts, and Teeth: An Alternate Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Death Poems,” in which it is argued that Number 712 actually begins, “Because I could not stoop for darts,” and recounts an arthritic evening at the local pub.
14 Dickinson is not known to have smoked, except during her Late or Downright Peculiar Period.
15 Of course, neither does, “How pomp surpassing ermine.” Or, “A dew sufficed itself.”
16 Or possibly “ciee.” Or “vole.”
17 Unlikely, considering her Calvinist upbringing.
18 Or the Australian city, Ulladulla. Dickinson’s poems are full of references to Australia. W.G. Mathilda has theorized from this that “the great love of Dickinson’s life was neither Higginson nor Judge Lord, but Mel Gibson.” See Emily Dickinson: The Billubong Connection, by C. Dundee, Outback Press, 1985.
19 See Rod McKuen.
20 Where Jules Verne was working on his doctorate.
21 The notes contained charming, often enigmatic sentiments such as, “Which shall it be—Geraniums or Tulips?” and “Go away—and Shut the door When—you Leave.”
22 See Halfwits and Imbeciles: Poetic Evidence of Emily Dickinson’s Opinion of Her Neighbors.
23 Virtually everyone in Amherst kept a diary, containing entries such as “Always knew she’d turn out to be a great poet,” and “Full moon last night. Caught a glimpse of her out in her garden planting peas. Completely deranged.”
24 The inability of people to tell Orson Welles and H.G. Wells apart lends credence to Dickinson’s opinion of humanity. (See footnote 15.)
25 Not the one at the beginning of the story, which everybody knows about, the one that practically landed on him in the middle of the book which everybody missed because they’d already turned off the radio and were out running up and down the streets screaming, “The end is here! The Martians are coming!”*
26 See “Sound, Fury, and Frogs: Emily Dickinson’s Seminal Influence on William Faulkner,” by W. Snopes, Yoknapatawpha Press, 1955.
27 She was, of course, already dead, which meant the damage they could inflict was probably minimal.
28 Which she considered a considerable threat. “If the butcher boy should come now, I would jump into the flour barrel,”* she wrote in 1873.
29 Particularly nonlinear differential equations.
30 See “Lord Byron’s Don Juan: The Mastiff as Muse” by C. Harold.
31 He didn’t like people either. See “Mending Wall,” The Complete Works, Random House. Frost preferred barbed wire fences with spikes on top to walls.
32 See “Semiotic Subterfuge in Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’: A Dialectic Approach,” by N. Compos Mentis, Postmodern Press, 1984.
33 Sort of.
34 The word is either “read” or “heard” or possibly “pacemaker.”
35 Also pleats, tucks, ruching, flounces, frills, ruffles, and passementerie.*
36 A good writer is never without pencil and paper.*
37 See “Posthumous Poems” in Literary Theories that Don’t Hold Water, by H. Houdini.
38 Two years later, no longer quite so grief-stricken and thinking of all that lovely money, he dug her up and got them back.*
39 Try it. No, really. “Be-e-e-e-cause I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me-e-e.” See?*
40 Normal to Ong, Nebraska.
41 See Freud.
42 Sort of.
43 The near-rhyme theory also explains why Dickinson responded with such fierceness when Thomas Wentworth Higginson changed “pearl” to “jewel.” She knew, as he could not, that the fate of the world might someday rest on her inability to rhyme.
44 For an intriguing possibility, see “The Literary Litterbug: Emily Dickinson’s Note-Dropping as a Response to Thoreau’s Environmentalism,” P. Walden, Transcendentalist Review, 1990.
45 Number 187’s “awful rivet” is clearly a reference to the Martian cylinder. Number 258’s “There’s a certain slant of light” echoes Wells’s “blinding glare of green light,” and its “affliction/Sent us of the air” obviously refers to the landing. Such allusions indicate that as many as fifty-five* of the poems were written at a later date than originally supposed, that and the entire chronology and numbering system of the poems needs to be considered.
46 A holiday Dickinson did not celebrate because of its social nature, although she was spotted in 1881 lighting a cherry bomb on Mabel Dodd’s porch and running away.**
47 There is compelling evidence that the Martians, thwarted in New England, went to Long Island. This theory will be the subject of my next paper,*** “The Green Light at the End of Daisy’s Dock: Evidence of Martian Invasion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”