What Answer? — Reading Companion

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In Category - Marriage Society

Authors: Dickinson, Anna E. (Anna Elizabeth), 1842-1932 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2005 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; War stories; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction; Love stories; Political fiction; African Americans -- Fiction; Philadelphia (Pa.) -- Fiction; Passing (Identity) -- Fiction; Racism -- Fiction; Racially mixed people -- Fiction; Draft Riot, New York, N.Y., 1863 -- Fiction; Interracial marriage -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- African Americans -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 70,438

Reading time 307 min

Text sections 6

For What Answer? — Reading Companion, the stored edition analysis reports 70,438 words, 5 hr 7 min estimated reading time, and 6 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 20.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #15402

Anna E. Dickinson's 1868 novel uses contrasting diction and layered dialogue to explore interracial marriage, passing, and the New York Draft Riots, centering on a love story that tests societal boundaries.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg15402

Read the Text

There was a great row, it seems; and Mr. Surrey examined the books, and found, as he was pleased to say, that I'd kept them in first-rate style; so he dismissed Mr. Snipe on the spot, with six months' pay,--for you know he never does anything by halves,--and put me in his place.

"The men don't like it, I know, and haven't liked it, but of course they can't say anything to him, and they haven't said anything to me; but I've seen all along that they looked at me with no friendly eyes, and for the last day or two I've heard a word here and there which makes me think there's trouble brewing,--bad enough, I'm afraid; maybe to the losing of my place, though Mr. Surrey has said nothing about it to me."

Just here the little green door opened, and the foreman whom we have before seen--James Given as the register had him entered, Jim Given as every one knew him--came in; no longer with grimy face and flannel sleeves, but brave in all his Sunday finery, and as handsome a b'hoy, they said, at his engine-house, as any that ran with the machine; having on his arm a young lady whom he apostrophized as Sallie, as handsome and brave as he.

"Evening,"--a nod of the head accompanying. "Miss Howard's traps done?"

"I wish you wouldn't say 'traps,' Jim," corrected Sallie, _sotto voce_: "it's not proper. It's for a collar and pair of cuffs, Mrs. Franklin," she added aloud, putting down a little check.

"Not proper! goodness gracious me! there spoke Snipe! Come, Sallie, you've pranced round with that stuck-up jackanapes till you're getting spoiled entirely, so you are, and I scarcely know you. Not proper,--O my!"

"Spoiled, am I? Thank you, sir, for the compliment! And you don't know me at all,--don't you? Very well, then I'll say good night, and leave; for it wouldn't be proper to take a young lady you don't know to the theatre,--now, would it? Good by!"--making for the door.

"Now don't, Sallie, please."

"Don't talk that way."

"Don't yourself, more like. You're just as cross as cross can be, and disagreeable, and hateful,--all because I happen to know there's some other man in the world besides yourself, and smile at him now and then. 'Don't,' indeed!"

"Come, Sallie, you're too hard on a fellow. It's your own fault, you know well enough, if you will be so handsome. Now, if you were an ugly old girl, or I was certain of you, I shouldn't feel so bad, nor act so neither. But when there's a lot of hungry chaps round, all gaping to gobble you up, and even poor little Snipes trying to peck and bite at you, and you won't say 'yes' nor 'no' to me, how do you expect a man to keep cool? Can't do it, nohow, and you needn't ask it. Human nature's human nature, I suppose, and mine ain't a quiet nor a patient one, not by no manner of means. Come, Sallie, own up; you wouldn't like me so well as I hope you do if it was,--now, would you?"

Mrs. Franklin smiled, though she had heard not a word of the lovers' quarrel, as she put a pin in the back of the ruffled collar which Sallie had come to reclaim. A quarrel it had evidently been, and as evidently the lady was mollified, for she said, "Don't be absurd, Jim!" and Jim laughed and responded, "All right, Sallie, you're an angel! But come, we must hurry, or the curtain'll be up,"--and away went the dashing and handsome couple.

Abram, shutting in the shutters, and fastening the door, sat down to a quiet evening's reading, while his mother knitted and sewed,--an evening the likeness of a thousand others of which they never tired; for this mother and son, to whom fate had dealt so hard a measure, upon whom the world had so persistently frowned, were more to each other than most mothers and sons whose lines had fallen in pleasanter places,--compensation, as Mr. Emerson says, being the law of existence the world over.

"_Every one has his day, from which he dates._"

You see, Surrey, the school is something extra, and the performances, and it will please Clara no end; so I thought I'd run over, and inveigled you into going along for fear it should be stupid, and I would need some recreation."

"Which I am to afford?"

"As clown or grindstone?--to make laugh, or sharpen your wits upon?"

Continue Reading →

Anna E. Dickinson opens What Answer? with a crowded Fifth Avenue scene that immediately establishes a tension between surface glamour and underlying suffering. The narrator’s ironic voice—‘Let us dress, dine, and be merry!’—undercuts the glittering parade, while ‘poverty, frost-nipped in a summer suit’ and a funeral procession intrude. This juxtaposition of elegance and pain recurs throughout the novel, especially in dialogue that reveals characters’ social positions and hidden conflicts.

Diction as Social Marker

Dickinson assigns distinct vocabularies to different social spheres. The opening chapter’s idle onlookers speak in clipped, fashionable phrases: ‘A most eligible parti!’ and ‘Handsome as a god!’ Their language is shallow, concerned with wealth and appearance. In contrast, the young man at the window hums a ballad of Percy and Douglas, his voice described as ‘humming one of these same lays.’ The archaic, chivalric diction sets him apart from the crowd, hinting at a romantic idealism that will clash with the novel’s harsh realities. Later, a letter from Augusta uses cold, legalistic phrasing—‘I commend you for your sensible decision’—to mask emotional violence. These shifts in register are not decorative; they map the characters’ moral positions and the social codes they inhabit.

Dialogue That Conceals and Reveals

Conversations in What Answer? often work by indirection. When Augusta recounts her interview with Miss Ercildoune, she reports her own words—‘let me send that back, with your words’—but the other woman’s responses are reduced to mechanical repetition: ‘“Close the whole affair,” she repeated after me, mechanically.’ The dialogue becomes a power struggle where what is unsaid matters as much as the spoken lines. Dickinson uses this technique to expose the gap between public propriety and private anguish. The repeated command ‘Go!’ is a verbal barrier, yet the physical description—a ‘spasm,’ a dead faint, blood trickling from a temple—contradicts the controlled tone. The reader must read between the lines to grasp the full emotional weight.

Description as Moral Commentary

Dickinson’s descriptive passages do more than set scenes; they judge. The young man’s appearance is catalogued in lush detail—‘a mass of rippling hair like burnished gold,’ ‘eyes too expressive to be blue’—but the narrator immediately undercuts this idealization by noting the ‘possibility of more to be in the full process of his ripening days.’ The description is aspirational, not static. Conversely, when Augusta observes Miss Ercildoune lying ‘prostrate upon the floor,’ she thinks it ‘a very hard existence’ for ‘such as she.’ The clinical detachment of the observation reveals Augusta’s own moral failure. Dickinson uses physical detail—a gesture ‘less of a caress than a spasm’—to externalize inner conflict, making the body a site of social and emotional truth.

Structure and the Unreliable Letter

The novel embeds a crucial letter within a letter, creating a layered narrative that forces the reader to reconstruct events. Willie reads his aunt’s account of a confrontation, but the text signals that this version is partial: ‘Words would fail to express the emotions with which Willie read this history: let silence and imagination tell the tale.’ Dickinson deliberately withholds direct access to Miss Ercildoune’s perspective, leaving her interiority a blank. The letter’s smug tone—‘I think it has been well done’—is undercut by the physical evidence of violence (the faint, the blood). This structural choice mirrors the novel’s larger concern with how stories are told and whose voices are suppressed. The reader must weigh the reliability of each narrator, especially when race and class shape what can be said.

Readers attentive to Dickinson’s authorial choices will find a novel that uses language as a weapon and a shield. The contrast between polished dialogue and raw physical detail, the strategic withholding of interiority, and the ironic narrative voice all reward close reading. Approach the text as a series of competing testimonies, each shaped by the speaker’s social position, and notice how the gaps between what is said and what is shown generate the novel’s moral complexity.

That rainy afternoon, What Answer? kept me turning pages through Dickinson’s sharp-edged dialogue, the way love and skin color tangled in every sentence. Afterwards, I sat quiet, thinking how stories carry their weight through voices. Then I found myself opening Show Boat — Context and Discussion, and Edna Ferber’s river felt like the same current, just moving slower.