“There’s a good time coming”: Emily Dickinson, The Hutchinson Family Singers, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes

On 14 November 1853, in a letter to her brother Austin in Cambridge, Emily Dickinson put a phrase in quotation marks: "There's a good time coming." According to Cristianne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell in their 2024 edition of Dickinson's letters, that phrase was both common at the time and the title of a song by the popular Hutchinson Family Singers, whom Dickinson had once heard in concert. But for me, it also echoes a picture on my metal Kellogg's Corn Flakes tin: above a scene with a small girl pulling on the tablecloth on a set table to get at the corn flakes is the caption "There's a good time coming". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 September 2025)