Scope and Content Note
The papers of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) span the period 1859-1951, but are chiefly concentrated in the years 1859-1911. The collection consists of Family Correspondence, General Correspondence, Speeches and Writings File, Legal File, and a Miscellany series including financial papers, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and research notes of Giraud Chester, Dickinson's biographer. There are also a small Addition and an Oversize series.
Anna Dickinson's papers treat all aspects of her life and include correspondence with the men and women of her circle throughout the country. Although Dickinson did not make copies of most of her letters, she obtained many of the letters she wrote while on national lecture tours to Mary Dickinson, her mother, and Susan Dickinson, her journalist sister. The correspondence described her travel itineraries, her impressions, and her joys and misgivings. They show the reactions of a person whose plays and performances, including A Crown of Thorns and The Test of Honor, were not well received. By 1900 she was estranged from her sister Susan, formerly her closest friend and housemate, and had outlived most of her associates. As recorded in the legal file and in her scrapbooks, she intiated several lawsuits between 1895 and 1901 as a result of her confinement at the State Hospital for the Insane in Danville, Pennsylvania. Other topics include the elections of 1872 and 1888, the Republican Party, psychiatric hospital and her confinement to the State Hospital for the Insane, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and education.
The Speeches and Writings File, contains several of Dickinson's earliest speeches and stage manuscripts. Those not present are often documented by newspaper clippings and scrapbooks. A notebook in the Legal File records her experiences at the State Hospital for the Insane. Only obituaries and a few financial papers relate to her final two decades.
Correspondents include William B. Allison, Susan B. Anthony, Samuel Bowles, Noah Brooks, Benjamin F. Butler, Fanny Davenport, Frederick Douglass, Ellen Everett, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Wendell Phillips, Samuel C. Pomeroy, Whitelaw Reid, Carl Schurz, Theodore Tilton, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, and John Greenleaf Whittier.