Why “The Brain Is Wider than the Sky”: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, the Vestiges , and the Invention of Invention

Abstract In Natural Magic, Bergland claims that Emily Dickinson shared with Charles Darwin a “magical way of thinking” about the natural world, one that was “interactive and participatory.” This essay demonstrates that Dickinson, along with her contemporaries, participated in the vibrant, contentious culture of pre-Darwinian science provoked by the publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in the 1840s, which challenged the narrow empiricism that dominated British and American science. Through Vestiges, Dickinson became acquainted with evolution and was presented with a provocative heuristic, a lens through which she could explore the largest possible questions about existence itself and literary form. Her implicit repudiation of outworn scientific practices enabled her to engage, as would Darwin, with “the invention of invention.”