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Category: The Poe Museum Blog

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Poe’s Tales of Detective Fiction

XIR236810 Portrait of a Police Officer in Douai in 1848 (oil on canvas); by French School, (19th century); Musee de la Chartreuse, Douai, France; Giraudon; French, out of copyright

MURRAY ELLISON–Urban crime was an area of acute interest in the nineteenth century in America and Europe because the public feared that it was rampant and out of the control of the police. To respond to this concern, Poe demonstrates increasingly complex aspects of ratiocination in each of his three Auguste C. Dupin detective-based tales. He chose Paris, France for these tales because it had one of the first professional police forces. See photo of a French police officer above (myartprints.co.uk).

The term, ratiocination, is not listed in most dictionaries; however, it may be defined by deconstructing its syllables and associating it with other related words. A ratio compares the relationships between two quantities. Poe develops a new system for establishing relationships between unknown events and the motives or solutions to complex problems. Dupin expands the use of accepted nineteenth-century classical investigation techniques and adds hyper-observation and intuitive leaps of imagination to arrive at new solutions. He understands that clues and events are not always understood simply by the way that they appear. He approaches crime solving in the same way as he solves puzzles. With the same understanding of the evidence that the police hold, he provides new metaphoric solutions. His methods of unraveling crimes are unorthodox and appear to the police as irrational. Dupin presents the details of these cases directly or through an unnamed narrator to give readers a glimpse into his ratiocinative thinking. The narrator’s job is to be amazed at and inform the reader about the skills of the detective. Dupin separates the relevant from the irrelevant. He focuses on unexplained deviations from the normal, anticipates the actions and thoughts of his associates and opponents, and embraces information that, at first, appears to be external to the case. Each Dupin story is a self-contained armchair mystery, in that he seldom needs to leave his home to solve the crime.

Matthew Pearl, in his “Introduction” to the Dupin Mysteries, notes that Poe introduced Detective C. Auguste Dupin, of Paris, France to literature more than five years before Boston had established the country’s first professional police department. As a result, Poe chose Paris to be the setting of all three of his Dupin mysteries. Perhaps, he also made this choice because many French scientists and philosophers epitomized Poe’s criticisms of these intellectual ideas of the nineteenth-century Age of Reason. They rejected dogma and sought ways to find objective knowledge. They believed that truth could be best be verified by observation and scientific investigation. Among the ideas that Poe attacked in his detective stories was the irrational belief that man could ultimately attain near stages of perfection, and that he could control his environment by scientific methods. Because of these contradictory views, it is hard to determine if Poe proposed ratiocination to address crime, or if he was mocking the irrational faith that the Age of Reason thinkers had in science. Perhaps he may also have been “duping” his readers by presenting both possibilities simultaneously.

As a non-professional detective, Dupin mocks the inferior crime-solving techniques of the paid Parisian police officials. The prefect appears in each of the Dupin stories and serves as a symbol of the incompetence of police officials. A “prefect” is the French representative of a department or Region. In 1800, Napoleon reorganized the Paris police to fall under the jurisdictions of the Prefecture of Police for security. The Paris police, right after Boston’s department, became one of the earliest professional police departments in the modern western world. The prefect thinks he has the perfect solution to the crime. However, Dupin is always skeptical of his approach and solutions.

In his three tales of ratiocination, Poe demonstrates that Dupin’s methods of scientific reasoning are superior to those of the police. He is critical of the established authorities and power structures. The police are symbols for his criticisms of the professional scientists and the nineteenth century. He believes that scientists are limited in arriving at new solutions in the same ways that the police are limited in solving crimes. Poe’s crime-solving detective is officially titled Chevalier, Auguste Dupin. Chevalier is the rank equivalent to a master detective in France. “Auguste” means the most revered, and Dupin may be associated with the English verb “to dupe.” Thus, his name and title have ambiguous meanings. These stories then can be interpreted that Dupin is the most revered trickster to criminals; he is questioning the public’s irrational beliefs that scientists can solve modern complex crimes. The next Poe and Science column, I will discuss Poe’s first, and perhaps best-known tale of ratiocination, The Murders of the Rue Morgue.

*This article is an extract from Murray Ellison M.A Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015©

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Mellonta Tauta: An Imaginary Journey

Description of an artificial hand, by Sir George Cayley, published by Tyler and Reed, 1845, London.

Extracted from Dr. Murray Ellison’s MA Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015©

In Poe’s Imaginary Journey, “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), the narrator, Pundit, embarks on a balloon trip to outer space in the year of 2848 and writes a letter narrating the details of his journey.

The name that Poe gives his narrator suggests that he is a pundit, a knower of sublime truth. However, Poe may have selected his character’s name because he delivers puns or a satiric presentation of science fiction. Pundit records his adventures in a journal that is presumed to have originated from the nineteenth century, as he is traveling to the distant future.  From these accounts, we may conclude that Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” is one of the earliest fictional works to explore time travel. The narrator outlines his view of the history of science and of his objections to nineteenth-century science, and he also describes the technologies he sees in the future. The narrator’s opinion also likely represents Poe’s views on the topics he discusses in this story.

Pundit begins his talk: “In all the ages the great obstacles to advancement in Art have been opposed by the so-called men of science.” He says that our men of science are not quite as “bigoted as those of old.” He refers to the wise “Hindoo” philosopher, “Aries Tottle” [Aristotle], and continues his monologue: During the dark ages, “metaphysicians” tried to dispel the “singular fancy that there existed but two possible roads for the attainment of Truth!” He lectures that Aristotle relieved them of this misconception by introducing “the deductive or a priori mode of investigation.” He started with what he called “self-evident truths, and then proceeded ‘logically’ to results.” His disciples and their system of thinking, “flourished supreme” until the “advent” of Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, who “preached… the a-posteriori or inductive [system].”  Bacon “proceeded by observing, analyzing and classifying facts…into general laws.” Pundit concludes that Bacon “operated to retard the progress of all true knowledge—which makes its advances almost invariably by intuitive bounds.” For hundreds of years, he states: “a virtual end was put to all thinking.” Pundit proposes that the only valuable knowledge gained in the history of science was by men who combined the methods of science and intuition to solve scientific problems. He notes that Newton “owed the truth of gravitation” to Kepler. Kepler “guessed—that is to say, imagined” [gravity].  Kepler, Pundit states, unraveled gravity like a “cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph,” in a process that is similar to conducting hermeneutic literary interpretation.

Pundit reports that the passengers on his futuristic space exploration see a “magnetic cutter in charge of the middle section of floating telegraph wires.” He comments it was once “impossible to convey the wires over the sea, but now we are at a loss to comprehend where the difficulty lay.” In this passage, Poe anticipates electronic communications. Near the floating electric wires, he wryly comments that a man has been knocked overboard “from one of the small magnetic propellers that swarm in [the] ocean below us.” The narrator comments, stoically, that the detached man was “soon out of sight.” He continues: “I rejoice, my dear friend that we live in an age so enlightened that no such thing as an individual is supposed to exist. It is the mass for which the true Humanity cares.”  Pundit may be either observing a period in the remote future when society had formed into a unified collective. In 1848, Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. Articles about Communism had also been reported in American newspapers in the 1840s. Perhaps by bringing up this observation, Poe may have also been expressing his opposition to the contributions of the individual creator in a collective society. However, his opposition to individualism seems contrary to the fact that Poe was a lone creator in a society that, he believed, did not fully appreciate his individual contributions. Pundit may also have been observing a period in the future of the Universe when all souls had been assimilated into a Supreme Being. These themes carry into Poe’s final treatise called Eureka, which I shall explore in future columns.

Pundit speaks about the Milky Way, which he observes through telescopes that, he notes, are vastly improved over the ones used in the nineteenth century. He challenges the thinkers of his age, to “attempt to take a single step towards the comprehension of a circuit” so utterly incomprehensible. He marvels that: “A flash of lightning itself, traveling forever upon the circumference of this inconceivable circle, would still forever be traveling in a straight line. The flight ends when the balloon collapses and tumbles into space. Pundit remarks: “Whether you get this letter or not is of little importance, as I write altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS. up in a bottle, however, and throw it into the sea.”(a line he had used in his earliest published story, “MS Found in a Bottle.” Despite this statement, Poe likely wished that his story would be discovered by enlightened individuals in the future. “Mellonta Tauta” further demonstrates that Poe was critical of nineteenth-century science but optimistic about distant future civilizations.

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Poe Museum Acquires New Letter

Poe Writes on Illness and Poverty in Poe Museum’s Newest Acquisition

RICHMOND–For the first time in 15 years, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia has added an original Edgar Allan Poe letter to its collection. There will be a special viewing of the letter on April 25 from 6-9 p.m. during the first Unhappy Hour of the 2019 season, after which time it will be on display in the museum’s exhibit galleries until July 31.

This rarely seen letter Poe wrote to his foster uncle, Edward Valentine, has remained in the family of its original recipient until Valentine’s great-great-great granddaughter placed it with the Poe Museum this month. The letter, composed less than a year before Poe’s early death, begins, “After a long & bitter struggle with illness, poverty, and the thousand evils which attend them, I find myself at length in a position to establish myself permanently, and to triumph over all difficulties…”

According to the Poe Museum’s curator Chris Semtner, “This letter was Poe’s desperate attempt to fulfill his dream of establishing his own literary magazine, and it was written at a pivotal time in his life—the day before he began a disastrous month-long engagement to Rhode Island poet Sarah Helen Whitman.”

Because of Poe’s popularity—as well as his early death in 1849—his letters are both scarce and highly sought-after by collectors. Semtner continues, “This is only the second Poe letter to enter the museum’s collection in the past half-century. While the Poe Museum is nearly 100 years old, we received most of our Poe letters and manuscripts by the late 1940s.”

The letter is an especially welcome addition to our collection because Poe wrote it to someone with whom he was very close during his childhood in Virginia. This makes it an important reminder of Poe’s lifelong connection to the state.

The letter will go on display on April 26, the Poe Museum’s 97th anniversary, and will be on view until July 31, 2019.

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Poe Has “Some Words With A Mummy”

Close up view of young mummy wrapped in gauze and displayed on table in the darkness

An excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 MA Thesis from Virginia Commonwealth University on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©

Poe’s tale, “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) provides one of the most revealing views about the low value he places in nineteenth-century science. Although the unnamed narrator of this short story, who also speaks in the voice of Mr. Poe, does not go anywhere special, he imagines that an ancient Egyptian Mummy is revived by an electro-voltaic shock to reflect on the relative values of ancient and nineteenth-century technologies, and is brought to his house in New York. This literary device allows the mummy to provide a view of nineteenth-century science that was significantly different from the one that was widely understood by professional scientists. Mabbott notes that the public, at that time, was fascinated with “Modern Egyptology.” The 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone revealed much previously unknown information about Egyptian civilizations and several major museums in Poe’s lifetime offered exhibits of Egyptian artifacts and entombed mummies (1175).

The narrator invites nineteenth-century “gentlemen” friends to his house to “unwrap” and examine a mummy that they have borrowed from the “Directors of the City Museum” in New York (1178). They invigorate “Count Allamistakeo” with a voltaic shock. His name is satiric because he begins to count many of the mistakes of nineteenth-century science. As soon as he wakes up, the gentlemen boast about nineteenth-century advances in phrenology, mesmerism, transportation, steam engines, and metaphysics.

After listening to their claims, the mummy is unconvinced that there has not been much scientific advancement in the nineteenth century when compared to the innovations of Egyptian civilizations. He informs the “gentlemen” that ancient Egyptians lived for thousands of years and could exist in a state of hibernation for as long as they wished. It is evident that he has accepted the idea of being awoken and discoursing with them. He boasts that his civilization practiced an extremely advanced system of Phrenology. He suggests that the “gentlemen” look at Egyptian architecture and notice that it is far superior to the best examples of the nineteenth century (1192). The nineteenth-century railroads, he adds, are “rather ill-conceived” in comparison to the “grooved causeways” built by the Egyptians.

The Count argues that the Egyptians determined that what the nineteenth-century gentlemen referred to as “Progress was quite a nuisance” (1193). He discounts the high value placed by the scientists regarding the developments of the nineteenth century and western civilization. In his criticisms, he is suggesting that culture and the quality of life are more important than scientific progress when attempting to determine whether a particular civilization is advanced.

It is ironic that the only triumph of the nineteenth century that the mummy concedes to the “gentlemen” is its development of blood-purifying laxatives and cough lozenges. This humorous observation of the sole progress obtained in his lifetime demonstrates that Poe lacked faith that science could cure the ailments of humanity, and that he wanted to get as far away from the assumptions of the nineteenth century as he could imagine.

The narrator is profoundly congested by the mummy’s revelations, commenting, “The truth is I am heartily sick of this life and the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong.” He despairs that he would like to “get embalmed for a couple of hundred years” (1195). Perhaps he also wished that he could hibernate for two thousand years and wake up to enjoy the glorious future he imagined. We can only wonder if Poe would have been even more dismayed about the progress of twenty-first-century science if he woke up today.

Sources

Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, 1831-1849. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1978.

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A Look at Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”

Excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 VCU M.A.Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©

“The captain’s gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron clasped folios, moldering instruments of science and obsolete long-forgotten charts”

– “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

 

Several researchers have proposed that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic writers (a sub-genre of the “Romantic” writers) inform Poe’s views of the horrors and uncertainties of science (Gewirtz, Tresch, Willis). German and English writers were among the first who attempted to examine the ways that new technologies impacted society. Although they were well-schooled in Enlightenment Age science, they also were notable for introducing elements of uncertainty and chilling reactions to nineteenth-century readers. The “Enlightenment’s assumption that truth is the product of an unmediated encounter between the eye and its subject got sidelined when the novel acquired atmosphere, mood-creating tone and texts” (47). The Gothic writers blurred lines between reality and illusion. They illustrated that the most compelling tales may be derived with believable scenarios from ordinary life, that then spin out of control into fantastic imaginative tales.

The earliest examples of these influential German Gothic writers are Frederich Schiller and E.T.A. Hoffman, whose works were translated from German into English, and the British writer, Mary Shelley. The 1795 English translation of Frederich von Schiller’s “The Ghost-Seer” inaugurated British reader’s interest for German tales of terror. Readers of these types of narratives are never quite certain how to distinguish what is real from what is illusion. Martin Willis writes that Hoffman is important because his stories generated “heated debates on the relationship between the new empirical science and the older methods of natural philosophy” (28). Perhaps Hoffman’s most notable work is “The Nutcracker and the Mouse” (1816) because it confounds the lines between illusion and reality without explaining to his readers when those lines are crossed. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” offers connections between science, magic, and mesmerism.” Willis argues, “Hoffman’s balancing of these previously considered distinct categories “reflect the difficulty in categorizing scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century” (29). Gothic writers made significant contributions to our present-day understanding of how the public learned about science in the early nineteenth century. They also defined the relationships between magic and science, and between illusion and reality. Martin Willis asserts that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in France in 1824 is important because it is a “condemnation of the overreaching scientist.” He describes it as a “cautionary tale of scientific hubris,” and argues that the novel “critiques the role of science in the early nineteenth century” (63). It is also important because it is one of the first important Gothic book widely published in English, and thus accessible to Poe when he started writing fiction in the 1830s.

The Gothic writers also were important because they incorporated the public’s uncertain reactions against the dehumanizing effects of the expansion of nineteenth-century industrialization and the rise of the power of machines and mechanistic processes. Poe and the “Romantic” period writers felt this mechanistic view detracted from natural human tendencies, such as emotion, reason, and creativity. These writers criticized rational and empirical scientists as being detached from emotion and artistic creativity. They also blurred the boundaries between scientific disciplines; and between science and pseudo-science. Poe was inspired by several of their approaches and established Gothic tones of uncertainty and terror in several of his science fiction narratives. He also extended Gothic themes and created new forms of fiction that he based on his reactions to the themes of Industrial Age science. The next series of columns will explore Poe’s Gothic and other styles of fiction which expressed his interest and views of nineteenth-century science.

Selected Sources

Gewirtz, Isaac. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, Ed. New York: New York Public Library, 2013.

Tresch, John. “The Potent Magic of Verisimilitude: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mechanical Age.” The British Journal of Science 3.3 (1997): 275-90. Web. 15 Mar. 2014

Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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Poe’s Balloon Hoax – Part II

Written by Murray Ellison, 2015

As noted in Part I of this column, J. Harris was one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s April 1844 New York Sun columns on the “Balloon Hoax.” As Eric Carlson comments, “In the considerable rush for copies” for the “Balloon Hoax,” they “were sold for as much as fifty cents each” (260). This would be equal to at least $15 a newspaper today-even more than charged at most airports!  Poe’s anonymous story “was written in the style of a journalistic flash, since the Sun extra edition gave all of the signs of being a real newspaper scoop,”  as he used details provided by Mason Monck’s actual 1843 balloon trip. Poe added “realism to his description of the construction of the Victoria,” by providing details of the landscapes that the passengers viewed while they were transported in the balloon (261).

The Victoria Balloon – “New York Sun”

However, it was not until January 20, 1845 (about nine months after its publication and the public had lost interest in that topic), that Poe was first publicly credited with writing the story. James Lowell inserted this revelation near the end of a review of Poe’s literary career, simply concluding that Poe is “the author of the anonymously published Balloon Hoax” (Poe Log 490).  

In a preview copy of Naomi Miyazawa’s Doctor of Philosophy dissertation, she noted that Poe first conceded that he was the author when wrote a follow-up story about his hoax in his column, “Doings in Gotham.” His article was first published in the Columbia Spy (Pennsylvania) on April 25, 1844. In that columns, Poe even bragged that the “Balloon Hoax” was his story. He comments, “The crowd outside of the Sun was lined up and chaotic in hopes to purchase the Extra article on the balloon voyage,” marveling that that “the whole square surrounding the Sun was literally besieged. I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper” (3). Miyazawa contends that Poe’s account “was another fraud,” arguing that “The story was not as sensational as Poe believed it was, and his hoax probably fooled fewer people than he thought it did” (4).

Poe’s reporting of the balloon hoax story in The Columbia Spy re-confirms that he planted the original Sun article anonymously in the news section of the newspaper in an attempt to build credibility for his hoax. He may not have expected that he could have ever published a fictional story about a trans-Atlantic balloon crossing that would have received anything close to the notoriety of his anonymously written news story. Although his “Balloon Hoax” sold many newspapers, it also significantly reduced his credibility as a technical report writer, and thus limited his ability to write additional serious science journalism reports. His final journalistic style report also began to take on a more skeptical tone than his previous works.

Gerald Kennedy concludes: “Finally, when neither fact nor fiction would do, Poe exploited “the art—or perhaps the science of the literary hoax” (64).  Thus he casts the hoax as more of a success than a setback for Poe. As Kennedy considers Poe’s long-term reputation as an artist, he contends that his “desire to exploit or control the mass market” is one of his greatest literary innovations.” He adds that “An attentiveness to the emerging mass market informs Poe’s aesthetic writings, for he is perpetually investigating the possibility of creating a single literary text capable of satisfying both the popular and the critical taste” (67).

Perhaps, though, Poe also realized that the emerging popular topics of science also offered him the opportunity to engage in a journalistic career and to find the “jewels of the sky” that he first considered in his 1829 poem, “Sonnet—to Science.”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Poe’s interest in science was sparked by the public’s excitement about the emerging popular technological trends of the nineteenth century. Though his non-fiction science narratives demonstrated that though he was lacking in professional science credentials, they also revealed that he had a keen interest in science and a highly focused ability to investigate complex scientific questions. Those stories also reveal that he had the insight to ask the important questions about the possible future direction of science: What will the future be like if machines could think? How will the public be affected if machines could record visual images of their every activity?

Writing about Poe’s science through journalism, as I have focused on in my last several columns on the automated chess machine, seashells, and the Daguerreotype required Poe to explore several of the important scientific issues of the nineteenth century and to write about them in a relatively objective style. As we have seen, though, in the “Balloon Hoax,” he was also having a hard time sticking with that restrictive format. Perhaps, he considered that writing about these topics through the lens of fiction relieved him of the need to be objective.

Writing through fiction allowed him to be more imaginative in the topics, themes, characters, and time periods he selected than would be possible in journalism. It also permitted him to introduce some of his metaphysical thinking and unique theories about the Universe. Poe’s fiction stories focusing on nineteenth-century science themes will be discussed in future columns.

Selected Sources

Carlson, Eric W. Ed. A Companion to Poe Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Kennedy, Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Miyazawa, Naomi. Edgar Allan Poe and Popular Culture in the Age of Journalism: Balloon Hoaxes, Mesmerism, and Phrenology.  Preview copy of Doctoral Dissertation. State University of New Work-Buffalo, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2010.

Poe, Edgar A. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume VII: Poetry. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax – Part 1

This article is an excerpt from Murray Ellison’s VCU MA Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science, ©2015

Near the end of his journalistic career, Poe was likely running out of actual science reports to write about that would excite the public’s interest in science as spectacularly as his fictional stories did. Perhaps, by that time, his imagination far exceeded science’s ability to create new inventions. His 1843 “Balloon Hoax” story demonstrated that sensational quasi-scientific newspaper reports could command the public’s attention in ways that even he could have never imagined. By presenting a fictional narrative as if it was an actual front-page news story, Poe captured the attention of a larger segment of nineteenth-century readers than he did in any of his previous journalistic reports. However, this move also seriously damaged his credibility as a serious science reporter. Poe, in this account, also introduced a more skeptical attitude concerning nineteenth-century science than he displayed in his previous journalistic outputs. Therefore, his “Hoax” is a transitional story linking his earlier journalistic writing to his later fictional science narratives.

The extraordinary story of a Transatlantic Balloon crossing was first written by Poe under the pseudonym of John Wise, and was first published in the June 15, 1843, issue of the newspaper, Spirit of the Times, which reported that a “well-known balloonist plans to take a trip across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1844” (Thomas and Jackson 414). A year after, The New York Sun ran a follow-up news report on the balloon trip without mentioning ‘Wise.’ The newspaper’s April 13, 1844 headline read:

The article further reported on this spectacular adventure:

“We stop the press at a late hour, to announce that, by a Private Express from Charleston, S.C., we are just put in possession of full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by man.” The “Atlantic Ocean has been actually traversed in a balloon, and in the incredibly brief period of Three Days! Eight persons have crossed in the machine. (457).

The Sun also printed a special edition, the Extra Sun, adding that the crossing was a triumph of Mr. Monck’s flying machine. The Extra also included the names of the passengers along with an illustration (below) of the hot air balloon, the Victoria (458):

New York Times Illustration of the Victoria

On the same day as the Extra Sun’s report, the New York Herald countered that the hoax was “blunderously got up,” and “ridiculously put together” (Thomas and Jackson 460). It added: “About 50,000 of the Extras were sold…We think every intelligent reader will regard this attempt to hoax as not even possessing the character of pleasantry. They added that the celebrated ‘Moon Hoax,’ issued from the New York Sun, many years ago was an ingenious essay; but that is more than can be said of the “Balloon Hoax” (461). The Herald was the first newspaper to give this story the presently used title, but still did not connect it with Poe.

The Sun had previously published a presumed news story by Robert Locke 1835 about British astronomer, John Herschel, stating that he had gone to Cape Hope, South Africa to test his new powerful telescope. Neil Harris writes that the Sun reported that, “Herschel’s success had been beyond his wildest dreams, for the telescope had penetrated the secrets of the Moon, claiming that it had trees, oceans, pelicans, and winged men (69).  Locke’s story sold more than 20,000 copies. A newspaper commentator later boasted that many people “absolutely believed the story” (69). Harris is also one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s “Balloon Hoax.”

The next Poe and Science Blog discusses how Poe and “The Balloon Hoax” were exposed and the effect it had on his writing and reputation.

Selected Sources

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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The Poetic Principle: A Rich Intellectual Treat

Written by Rob Velella, August 17, 2009, as part of “The Edgar A. Poe Calendar: 365 Days of the Master of the Macabre and the Mystery“

Edgar Poe presented an evening lecture on August 17, 1849, in Richmond titled “The Poetic Principle.” The lecture, which adapted a similar one presented in Providence, Rhode Island in December 1848, was held at the Exchange Hotel. It began at 8:00 p.m. and admission was 25 cents. Poe spoke to a room filled to capacity.

Poe’s appearance was a highly-anticipated event in the city which embraced him as one of their own. One newspaper proudly hailed him as “a native of this city [who] was reared in our midst.” Another hyped up the lecture in advance, advising its readers: “Those who desire to enjoy a real treat, should hear this effort of Mr. Poe’s.” The Richmond Whig newspaper teased that Poe would conclude by reciting “The Raven.”

His audience was not disappointed.

The Whig, despite looking forward to hearing “The Raven,” had apparently not expected much from Poe. After the lecture, they reported: “We attended the Lecture of Mr. Poe… with the expectation of hearing nothing more than the common dissertation upon the poetic faculty… We must say we were never more delighted in our lives.” The Daily Republican reported it was “one of the richest intellectual treats… The clearness and melody of his voice and the harmonious accentuation of his words were soul inspiring.” Novelist John Esten Cooke recalled that Poe “stood in a graceful attitude, leaning one hand on a small table beside him, and his wonderfully clear and musical voice speedily brought the audience under its spell. Those who heard this strange voice once never afterward forgot it… The lecture ended in the midst of applause.”

The content of the lecture on “The Poetic Principle” was distinctly Poe. One contemporary review notes that Poe denounced the didacticism in poetry as the “heresy of modern times” rather than allowing a poem to stand for beauty and nothing more. He spoke about specific authors and both praised and criticized as appropriate. Among those he mentioned was Edward Coote Pinkney, likely the American poet which Poe most admired. He also read from the work of Tennyson. Even journalist John M. Daniel, with whom Poe had once almost dueled, reluctantly admitted: “Mr. Poe is a man of very decided genius. Indeed, we know of no other writer in the United States, who has half the chance to be remembered in the history of literature” (though he rightly predicted his reputation would be based on a small number of works).

The irony might be that Poe lost his lecture notes before he made it to Virginia. That means he had to rewrite it just before taking the center stage.

“I never was received with so much enthusiasm,” Poe reported to his mother-in-law Maria Clemm. The lecture later became the essay of the same name, published posthumously. That manuscript is somewhat controversial; allegedly found after Poe’s death, it was first published by Rufus Wilmot Griswold in his collected works of Poe. The original manuscript was immediately lost after publication.

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Birth of Virginia Clemm

Written by Rob Velella, August 15, 2009, as part of “The Edgar A. Poe Calendar: 365 Days of the Master of the Macabre and the Mystery“

Happy birthday to Virginia Eliza Clemm, who was born August 15, 1822.* She would have been 195 today.

What more can be said about Virginia that hasn’t been said here already? I’ve written about the only surviving letter from Poe to his wife, their unusual marriage (and uncertain anniversary date), and Valentine’s poem she wrote to her husband — just to name a few. Today, I’d like to introduce the Poe work which is most inspired by Virginia. It is not “The Raven,” nor is it “Annabel Lee.” It is, in fact, the short story “Eleonora.”

First published in the 1841 issue of The Gift, the story features an unnamed narrator who lives a life of isolation with his cousin and aunt. The setting is paradisaical, known as the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass. Untrodden by strangers, the land is full of beautiful flowers and trees as well as a River of Silence. In this paradise, the narrator falls in love with his cousin — but she was sick, “made perfect in loveliness only to die.” She worries that when she dies, her cousin will move on and fall in love with another. He promises that would never happen.

Her death, the narrator says, kicks off “the second era of my existence.” This new life, however, is not as idyllic as it had been. The Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass does not survive after Eleonora’s death:

The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared no more. The tints of the green carpet faded, and one by one the ruby-red asphodels withered away… And life departed from our paths; for the tall flamingo flaunted no longer his scarlet plumage before us, but flew sadly from the vale into the hills, with all the gay, glowing birds that had arrived in his company. And the golden and silver fish swam down through the gorge at the lower end of our domain, and bedecked the sweet river never again… And then, lastly, the voluminous cloud uprose, and abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into the regions of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass.

The narrator leaves and moves to an unnamed city. There, he marries Ermengarde, not fearing the vow he had made. Eleonora appears to him and blesses his new union, saying “Thou art absolved… for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven.”

The story clearly references the idealism Poe had with his marriage (the biggest clue that this story is autobiographical is the inclusion of the aunt/mother-in-law character; she plays no clear role in the story but is a definite reference to Maria Clemm). Virginia was just beginning to show signs of tuberculosis — the illness which would kill her in five years. Poe was already feeling guilty that he might have to consider other women as potential second wives. Jumping the gun a bit? Maybe, but the more important aspect of the story is the idealism of the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass, and how this paradise dies with the wife.

A couple lines from this story are often quoted, though it doesn’t seem most know the origin of these quotes. This might sound familiar:

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled,whether madness be or be not the loftier intelligence — whether much that is glorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought, from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape the dreamers by night.

Happy birthday, Virginia.

* I have found one source that lists her birthday as August 22. The majority of sources, however, use the August 15 date.

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Poe’s Place In Literary History

Written by Rob Velella, August 14, 2009, as part of “The Edgar A. Poe Calendar: 365 Days of the Master of the Macabre and the Mystery“

Poe’s place in literary history is occasionally questioned. Should he be considered a master of American literature? Does he deserve a place in the canon? Is he really important? I might be biased so take my opinion with a grain of salt (this post will shift away from my more academic tone and may, in fact, turn into starry-eyed gushing over my favorite author). Here’s my argument: even if you remove the quality of Poe’s work from the equation, Poe is one of the most important writers in American history.

The real evidence for this comes on August 14, 1835. It was on that date that the Trustees of the Richmond Academy began selecting their new English teacher. The fact that it was not Poe should solidify Poe’s role in American literary history. Excluding his military stints, Poe only applied for two jobs outside of literature. The first was the job with the Richmond Academy teaching English. The second was a job with the Customs House in Philadelphia in 1841, hoping that a connection to Robert Tyler (brother of President John Tyler) would secure his employment. Neither role worked out. That means that Poe never had a job outside of literature; for his 40 short years, he would have no source of income besides his pen.

This is significant because no other major American writers in the first half of the United States were able to sustain themselves in such a manner. Washington Irving had a couple government jobs and was, for a time, part owner in a mercantile business. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others held full-time teaching positions (at Harvard, in the case of all three). Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to make a living as a farmer for a time before taking government jobs at two different Customs Houses (one in Boston, another in Salem, Massachusetts). Ralph Waldo Emerson had his ministry for a time and, later, a public lecturing career (he was also supported by an inheritance from the family of his first wife). Margaret Fuller struggled as a teacher in Providence before becoming a full-time journalist (and, then, nearly all of her writing was not literature but nonfiction).

Poe’s financial failure is obvious. Nevertheless, his attempt is nothing less than historical, if not extraordinary. The fact that he stood the test of time is minor (so did the other writers I mentioned above) but, coupled with his lack of any other job outside of literature, Poe should be considered a trailblazer.

Odds were stacked against him, of course. The country was young, its literature younger, and the economy was not established for professional authors. Poe’s critical work emphasized that the quality of American literature needed to improve and, as such, he fought against the puffing system which inhibited proper growth. He also railed against the lack of copyright (suggesting authors may as well slit their throats), the culture of republishing without authors’ permission, and the tastes of American audiences which, he believed, did not recognize quality over popularity. All of these factors needed to change before an American could make money solely as an author. Poe missed out on those ideal conditions and did not survive into the American Renaissance of the 1850s. Even with all that, when he died at age 40, he showed no signs of turning away from his desired path.

For the sake of full disclosure, Poe was also hampered by bad decisions. He married before he had an established income and, in doing so, inherited not only a young wife but also a mother-in-law who needed his financial support (though, to Maria Clemm‘s credit, she occasionally provided minor assistance through odd jobs and, of course, begging). He also didn’t stay in one place for too long, constantly moving when he needed to escape overdue rent payments or in an optimistic pursuit of greater opportunities — all the money he spent on rent and moving expenses could have been saved to buy a house. Other than that, he was thrifty, particularly in his clothing choices, but his challenges are already numerous.

Yes, Poe was a financial failure in his pursuit of the life of a professional author. But that failure was unprecedented — and it deserves our praise. Thanks to the Trustees of the Richmond Academy for (inadvertently) making it possible.

* Longfellow should be considered America’s first successful professional poet as of 1854, when he retired from his professorship. However, Longfellow was gifted a mansion at age 35 thanks to his father-in-law and had saved up enough money from teaching for about 17 years before he had the solid footing to become a professional poet. Credit is deserved there as well, certainly, but he did not have the same challenges as Poe.

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Poe and the Early Development of Photography

*This essay is part of Murray Ellison’s Master’s Thesis from Virginia Commonwealth University on Edgar Allan Poe and Science©

In 1840, Poe became a writer for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and published three essays on the newly emerging image copying process, then known as the Daguerreotype. This technology was the earliest prototype for modern photography. Alan Trachtenberg in, Classic Essays on Photography, reprints Poe’s essays on the daguerreotype and calls them among the earliest commentaries on the processing of film. Trachtenberg writes that as early as 1828, M. Nicephore Niepce succeeded in producing a photographic image using an invention he called the Camera Obscura (4). Louis Daguerre claimed that his process was quicker than Niepce’s and that his image was seventy times sharper than anything that had been developed. “Without any knowledge of chemistry and physics, it will be possible to take in a few minutes the most detailed views, the most picturesque scenery… and replicate images of nature (12-13). Poe exclaims that the Daguerreotype “is, perhaps, the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.”(37). He reports on this subject first as a technical writer:

“A plate of silver upon copper is prepared, presenting a surface for the action of light, of the most delicate texture conceivable. A high polish is given this plate by means of a steatitic cancerous stone (called a Daguerreolite) and contains equal parts of steatite and carbonate of lime…The plate is then deposited in a Camera Obscura, and the lens of this instrument directed to the object which it is required to paint.” (37)

After describing the details needed to manipulate light and exposure time, Poe changes from the style of a technical writer to a writer of narrative prose or poetry. He expresses awe about the new technology: “For, in truth, the Daguerreotype is infinitely…more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.” Upon closer scrutiny, “the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity…with the thing represented.” He declares further: “The variations of shade and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspectives, are those of truth itself, in the supremeness of perfection.” He is amazed that a mechanical technology was invented by that captures the romantic beauty of nature. He challenges readers to look at this innovation and try to imagine how it could change the world of the future. The consequences of such an invention, he exclaims, “will exceed, by very much, the wildest expectations of the most imaginative.”

Perhaps, Poe foresaw that future scientists might be able to view previously “inaccessible locations,” like a “lunar chart,” by using this process (38). Poe’s commentaries appear to be favorable. It can also be conjectured that he was concerned that powerful new technologies might introduce future intrusions on privacy. His essays on the daguerreotype employ both technical and artistic styles to describe one of the most important innovations of his lifetime. Not only was he among the first journalists to write about this emerging technology, but he was also one of the earliest historical figures to have had visual images captured on camera of his likeness. Michael Deas has published a book with “over 70 of Poe’s images and portraits from various periods of his life,” entitled Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe.

Sources

Deas, Michael J. Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Classic Essays on Photography, Ed. New Haven: Leetes Island Books, 1980.

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Edgar Allan Poe: Conchologist?

An excerpt from Murray Ellison’s Master of Arts Thesis © 2015

The Conchologist’s First Book was first published in April 1839, with its author being listed as Edgar Allan Poe. However, Poe was a consulting editor of the book and only wrote the Preface and Introduction. According to Poe documentarians Dwight Thomas and David Jackson, Poe credited much of the work to scientist Thomas Wyatt for “his late excellent Manual of Conchology.” The book was originally meant to be an accessible and inexpensive abridgment of Wyatt’s original textbook (259). The work was published under Poe’s name due to his popularity. It turned out to be the most popular book, in sales, printed under Poe’s name. The fact that Wyatt asked Poe to accept authorship demonstrates that at least one professional scientist identified Poe as a credible authority on science. Poe’s interest in seashells was likely inspired by his service in the United States Army along the coastline of Charleston, South Carolina.

In Poe’s Introduction to the book, he explains that the history of the study of mollusks (seashells) went back to the ancient Greeks, noting the descriptions of seashells by Pliny and Aristotle. He documents that there have been significant historical studies of seashells found on board numerous seafaring vessels, on remote South Sea Islands, in West Africa, Chili, and New Holland. He argues that “Few branches of Natural History… are of more adventitious importance” than Conchology (Poe’s Complete Works XIV 98). A notable feature of this book is that it was one of the first popular scientific books to include color pages, offering “illustrations of two hundred and fifteen shells, presenting a correct type of each genus” (95).

Poe’s book was one of the first scientific publications to offer color plate illustrations.

The first edition was so popular that the publishers printed a second one in the same year. The third version was published in 1845 under Wyatt’s name, but Poe’s initials were only retained in the Preface (Thomas and Jackson 608). Poe’s involvement in The Conchologists First Book demonstrates that he was interested in lending his name to a legitimate scientific work. However, it also shows that he was willing to accept author’s credit for a work that he did not write.

*An excerpt from Murray Ellison’s Master of Arts Thesis © 2015

 

Sources:

Poe, Edgar A.The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume XIV: Essays and Miscellaneous. Ed.Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed.The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849.Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.