The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, page 41
“anxious to remain”: Poe to William Gwynn, May 6, 1831, in Ostrom, 1:66.
The city prided itself on industry: David Gaylin, Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore (Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia, 2015); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 94–115.
more than seventy journals: John C. French, “Poe’s Literary Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine, June 1937, 101–12; AHQ, 187n2.
Douglass: J. Gerald Kennedy, “‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 225–57. For Douglass’s time in Baltimore, see Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 26–50; David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 48–66.
the preeminent national issue: See Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); Reynolds, Waking Giant.
David Walker: Rusert, Fugitive Science, 40–44.
revival meetings: Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
“A city slave”: Douglass, Narrative, 38, quoted in Kennedy, “Trust No Man,” 231.
“The idea as to how I might learn”: Douglass, Narrative, 43.
a fiercely informed opponent: Rusert, Fugitive Science, 13–14, 124–28.
Baltimore meant living among caring relatives: Whitty, “Memoir,” xix–lxxxvi.
fear of contagion: Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Recent work on Poe and medicine has moved beyond a preoccupation with (his alleged) psychopathology to consider Poe’s adaptations of medical writing and his reflections on the basis and limitations of its claims. See, for instance, Dana Medoro, “Introduction: Edgar Allan Poe and Nineteenth-Century Medicine,” PS 50, no. 1 (2017): 2–11; Cristina Pérez, “Edgar Allan Poe, MD: Medical Fiction and the Birth of Modern Medicine,” Trespassing Journal 4 (Fall 2014): 64–65; Emily Gowen, “A Global Sickness,” EAPR 20, no. 2 (2019): 269–88.
teacher and an editorial assistant: Weiss, Home Life of Poe, 62–63, in TPL, 127.
making bricks: Robert T. P. Allen, a West Point classmate, in “Edgar Allan Poe,” Scribner’s Monthly, Nov. 1875, 143, in TPL, 141.
“one of the most hardworking men”: Lambert Wilmer, “Recollections of Edgar A. Poe,” Baltimore Daily Commercial, May 23, 1866, reproduced in Lambert Wilmer, Merlin, Baltimore, 1827; Together with Recollections of Edgar A. Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941); AHQ, 197. Wilmer later wrote a play based on Poe’s thwarted love affair with Elmira Royster.
general conditions of literary production: Michael L. Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
“giving Virginia lessons”: Wilmer, “Recollections of Edgar A. Poe”; AHQ, 198, in TPL, 125–26.
“When I think of the long twenty one years”: Poe to Allan, Oct. 16, 1831, in Ostrom, 1:67–68.
“I am in the greatest distress”: Poe to Allan, Nov. 18, 1831, in Ostrom 1:47.
“Do not let me perish”: Poe to Allan, Dec. 15, 1831, in Ostrom 1:48.
inmates of Baltimore’s jail: Lawrence G. Wroth, “Poe’s Baltimore,” Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine, June 2, 1929, 4; AHQ, 190.
“few American authors”: Editorial in Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Aug. 4, 1832; AHQ, 195.
“supposed to be read”: Poe to Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham, May 4, 1833, in Ostrom, 1:77, in AHQ, 199.
Tales of the Folio Club: See Alexander Hammond’s extensive work, including “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book,” in Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1976), 13–43.
The starting point for “A Decided Loss”: See Michael J. S. Williams, A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 49–53.
“silver fork” novels: Edward Copeland, The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Alexander Hammond, “The Folio Club Collection and the Silver Fork School: Perspectives on Poe’s Framestory in Recent Scholarship,” EAPR 19, no. 2 (2018): 153–76.
“Lionizing”: Alexander Hammond, “Poe’s ‘Lionizing’ and the Design of Tales of the Folio Club,” ESQ 18, no. 3 (1972): 154–65. On Poe and literary fame, see Leon Jackson, “‘The Rage for Lions’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Culture of Celebrity,” in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome J. McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 37–61.
“‘Fine writer!’”: Poe, “Lionizing,” LOA, 213.
French precedents: Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977).
John Latrobe: John Edward Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe and His Times, 1803–1891 (Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1917).
“was so far, so very far superior”: Latrobe to Charles Chauncey Burr, Dec. 7, 1852, quoted in Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), 837–39, in TPL, 132.
“who carried himself erect”: “Reminiscences of Poe by John H. B. Latrobe,” in Rice, Memorial Volume, 60, in TPL, 133.
“To judge by the outward man”: Latrobe to Burr, Dec. 7, 1852, in Hubbell, American Literature, 837–39, in TPL, 132.
“MS. Found in a Bottle”: Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Oct. 19, 1833, 1.
“perishing—absolutely perishing”: Poe to Allan, April 12, 1832, in Ostrom, 1:73–74.
“Mr. Allan raised his cane”: Ellis, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in TPL, 137.
Allan died: See Silverman, Mournful, 97–99.
“has wounded me to the quick”: Poe to Kennedy, March 15, 1835, in Ostrom, 1:83–84.
“found him in a state of starvation”: Kennedy, diary entry, Oct. 10, 1849 [shortly after Poe’s death], quoted in Woodberry, Life, 2:350–51, and TPL, 148–49.
“monomania”: Étienne Esquirol, Des maladies mentales: Considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal, 2 vols. (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1838), 2:1–130.
“Would to God”: Poe, “Berenice,” SLM, 2, no. 7, March 1835: 333–36.
“far too horrible”: Poe to White, April 30, 1835, in Ostrom, 1:84–85.
discuss, debate, and reprint it: Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); Whalen, Poe and the Masses.
the possibility of a job: AHQ, 209.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure”: Poe to White, June 22, 1835, in Ostrom, 1:93.
5. Richmond: The Palpable Obscure
southern intellectual and political circles: Prominent figures included the novelist and essayist Lucian Minor, the law professor Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and the president of William & Mary College, Thomas R. Dew. See AHQ, 218; David K. Jackson, Poe and the “Southern Literary Messenger” (Richmond: Dietz, 1934); Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
“imparts the same energy”: Thomas White, “Publisher’s Notice,” SLM 1, no. 1 (Aug. 1834): 2.
“to establish something”: Thomas White, “Virginia Historical and Philosophical Society,” SLM 1, no. 3 (Nov. 1834): 123.
“to see the North and South”: Thomas White, “Prospectus of the Southern Literary Messenger,” SLM 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1838): ii.
rioting and attacking free Blacks: Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 423–31.
“peculiar institution”: See Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956).
“positive good”: John Calhoun, from his 1837 “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in The Works of John C. Calhoun, ed. Richard K. Crallé, 6 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1851–56), 2:625–33.
“average racism”: Whalen defines this as “a form of racism acceptable to white readers who were otherwise divided over the more precise issue of slavery” (Poe and the Masses, 112). From the end of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, Poe was often presented as a southern partisan and defender of slavery, in part because the Drayton-Paulding review was attributed to him: his critiques of democracy as “mob rule” and defense of the privilege due to exceptional individuals have been read as expressions of southern aristocratic and slaveholding values. A much more complex and contextualized picture of Poe has emerged in recent years, as marked by the 1995 edited collection by Rosenheim and Rachman, The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, which included Whalen’s demonstration that Poe was not the author of the Drayton-Paulding review. Poe’s hostility toward the democratic “mob” was directed above all at Jackson’s followers, and his stances and identifications have been shown to be mobile, ambiguous, and often subversive. Key texts concerning Poe, slavery, and race include Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); the collection edited by Kennedy and Weissberg, Romancing the Shadow; Goddu, Gothic America; and Joan (Colin) Dayan’s works linking Poe’s imagery and metaphysics to the legal status of the enslaved and imprisoned, from Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) to The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).
sold a twenty-one-year-old enslaved man: See Kennedy, “Trust No Man,” 235; John Miller, “Did Edgar Allan Poe Really Sell a Slave?,” PS 9, no. 2 (1976): 52–53; the “letter of conveyance” is reproduced at eapoe.org (www.eapoe.org/works/docs/d2912100.htm).
“No early American author”: Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 32.
He promoted accessible works: “Critical Notices,” SLM 2, no. 10 (Aug. 1836): 596, review of Introductory Lecture to a Course of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy: Delivered in Hampden Sidney College, by John W. Draper.
“highly creditable to Cincinnati”: “Critical Notices,” SLM 1, no. 13 (Sept. 1835): 778. For a helpful survey of Poe’s science writing, see Carroll Dee Laverty, “Science and Pseudo-science in the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1951); see also Madeleine B. Stern, “Poe: ‘The Mental Temperament’ for Phrenologists,” American Literature 40, no. 2 (1968): 155–63.
“Pinakidia”: Pinakidia was the name of tablets stored at the ancient library of Alexandria. Whalen links the series to the need for compact, easily accessible compendia (almanacs, encyclopedias, and so on) of useful information (Poe and the Masses, 26); on the political economy of information, see Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
intellectual arcana: Baron Bielfeld, The Elements of Universal Erudition: Containing an Analytical Abridgment of the Sciences, Polite Arts, and Belles Lettres, trans. W. Hooper, 3 vols. (London: G. Scott, 1770). On Poe’s erudition, see Burton R. Pollin, ed., The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: The Imaginary Voyages, rev. ed. (New York: Gordian Press, 1994); Shaindy Rudoff, “‘Written in Stone’: Slavery and Authority in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” ATQ 14, no. 1 (2000): 61–82.
Poe also printed a new tale: Richard P. Benton, “The Tales: 1831–1835,” in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 110–28; Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 152.
“We have never perused”: Notice of the SLM in Richmond Whig, ca. Aug. 1835, in TPL, 164.
Poe drew from: Meredith Neill Posey, “Notes on ‘Hans Pfaall,’” Modern Language Notes 45, no. 8 (Dec. 1930): 501–7.
“a capital burlesque upon balloonings”: Baltimore Republican, cited on SLM wrapper, May 1835, in Pollin, Collected Writings, 1:373.
“but hoax, with these”: Poe, on p. 580 of the first published version of the story, “Hans Pfaall—A Tale,” SLM 1, no. 2 (June 1835): 565–80.
This jarring instability: Maurice S. Lee, “Genre, Science, and ‘Hans Pfaall,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 338–50; Lee notes shifts between “verisimilitude and rigamarole” on 347.
“is decidedly superior”: Paulding to White, Dec. 7, 1835, in The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 170–72, printed in Washington’s Daily National Intelligencer, Dec. 18, 1835, reprinted in SLM 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1836): 138, in TPL, 184.
“He first touches”: Winchester Republican, reprinted in “Opinions of the Press,” SLM 1, no. 9 (Aug. 1835), in TPL, 168.
“Mr. Poe possesses an extraordinary faculty”: From Eastern Virginia, “Letters of Correspondents,” reprinted on covering papers of SLM 1, no. 9 (May 1835), in TPL, 156.
“the first genius”: Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richmond Compiler, reprinted in “Opinions of the Press” SLM 1, no. 13 (Sept. 1835), in TPL, 173.
viewed with some suspicion: On questions about Virginia’s youth, see Silverman, Mournful, 103, 124.
“small for her age”: Weiss, Home Life of Poe, 85–86; Silverman, Mournful, 124.
“My dearest Aunty”: Poe to Maria Clemm (and Virginia E. Clemm), Aug. 29, 1835, in Ostrom, 1:102–4.
Portrait of a girl (Virginia Poe): The portrait of Virginia presented here is a matter of some dispute: in The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 70, painter Michael Deas denied that it was painted by Thomas Sully and is of Virginia Poe. Cynthia Cirile defends both identifications on her provocative website, “Virginia Clemm Poe: The Myth of Sissy” (www.synastrypress.com/virginia2.html), which she promises to elaborate in a future book. The portrait’s owner, Dr. Marion Rundell, has had the painting convincingly authenticated as a Sully. Given its resemblance to a deathbed portrait of Virginia, the timing that places Sully and the Poes together in Richmond, and supporting documentation at the Frick Art Reference Library (see Deas, Portraits and Daguerreotypes, 88), the identification of the subject as Virginia Poe strikes me as highly plausible.
constitutional julep: “A dram of spirituous liquor that has mint steeped in it, taken by Virginians of a morning.” John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America (Bristol: R. Edwards, 1803), 379.
“Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman”: Woodberry, Life, 2:443, in TPL, 168.
“unfortunately rather dissipated”: White to Lucian Minor, Sept. 8, 1835, in TPL, 167.
“It must be expressly understood”: White to Poe, Sept. 29, 1835, in TPL, 172.
“My health is better”: Poe to Kennedy, Jan. 22, 1836, in Ostrom, 1:120.
affidavit declaring: AHQ, 252; Poe to Kennedy, Jan. 22, 1836, in Ostrom, 1:122.
whatever physical form: Silverman quotes a secondhand account (Frederick W. Coburn, “Poe as Seen by the Brother of ‘Annie,’” New England Quarterly 16 [1943]: 471) that Poe slept in a separate room from Virginia and for at least two years did not “assume the position of a husband.” Silverman, Mournful, 124. According to Marie Bonaparte, “That Poe’s marriage was never consummated is accepted by several biographers” (including George Woodberry, Hervey Allen, and Joseph Krutch), Life and Works, 78; Bonaparte, grand-niece of Napoleon and evangelist of Freud, attributes much of Poe’s writing to “physical impotence” caused by a “mother-fixation”; Kenneth Silverman pursues similar psychoanalytic explanations for Poe’s subjects, compulsions, and misfortunes.
Each magazine would review: See the foundational work of McGill, Culture of Reprinting; Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
“scenes of great power”: Lewis Gaylord Clark, Knickerbocker, Nov. 1835, in TPL, 176.
“WELL!—here we have it!”: “Critical Notices,” SLM 2, no. 1 (Dec. 1835): 54–56.
Fay replied with a comedy sketch: Theodore S. Fay, New-York Mirror, April 9, 1836, in TPL, 197.
In an era: Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); Leon Jackson, “‘Behold Our Literary Mohawk, Poe’: Literary Nationalism and the ‘Indianation’ of Antebellum American Culture,” ESQ 48, no. 1–2 (2002): 97–133.
“neglectful of the totality of effect”: “Critical Notices,” SLM 2, no. 10 (Aug. 1836): 600; Willis described literally setting fire to Poe’s poem “Fairyland” in The American Monthly (Nov. 1829), in TPL, 99.
“the sentiment of Intellectual Happiness”: Review of Drake and Halleck, SLM 2, no. 3 (April 1836): 326–36.
against Coleridge’s influential view: On Poe’s aesthetic stances in dialogue with Coleridge, see Barton Levi St. Armand, “‘Seemingly Intuitive Leaps’: Belief and Unbelief in Eureka,” ATQ 26, no. 1 (1975): 4–15.
“To originate”: Poe, “Peter Snook,” SLM 2, no. 2 (Oct. 1836): 716–32.
