With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we thought the Poe Museum’s Object of the Month for February should be a memento of Poe’s “first and last love.”
Edgar Allan Poe was a distasteful subject in Elmira Royster Shelton’s home. In fact, her daughter forbade her to mention his name in her presence. For decades, the widow Shelton refused requests for interviews about her famous fiancée, and, when she finally agreed to answer some questions from Richmond historian Edward Valentine in 1874, she denied that she and Poe had ever been engaged. Scholars eventually questioned whether they had ...
history
Artifact Shows Nineteenth Century Fascination with Murder and Violence
The public’s fascination with crime and violence existed long before today’s cop shows and horror movies. Even in Edgar Allan Poe’s time, readers could not get enough true tales of murder and madness. Ample evidence of this fact is to be found in a curious little volume in the Poe Museum’s collection.
The Poe Museum’s next Object of the Month is The Tragic Almanack for 1843, published in 1842 by the New York Sun. Like many popular almanacs, this annual publication contains astronomical information, the dates of religious holidays, and weather predictions. Unlike those other almanacs, this ...
Edgar Allan Poe Comes to Life this October
The Poe Museum and St. John’s Church have teamed up to bring Edgar Allan Poe back to life in the very place he often came to visit his beloved mother’s grave. Join us on Saturday, October 17 at 5 p.m. at St. John’s Church at 2401 East Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia for a walking tour of the historic graveyard where you will meet some of our most famous spirit before you join Edgar Allan Poe in the church for a performance of some of his ghostly tales. Among the spirits represented are Edgar’s mother Eliza Poe, George Wythe and his murderous nephew, Daniel Denoon and his killer James ...
New Exhibit Examines Poe’s Secret Code
Armies have been sending sensitive information through encoded messages for thousands of years to protect that information from falling into enemy hands, but it was Edgar Allan Poe who popularized the use of these cryptograms as a form of entertainment and in fiction with his story “The Gold-Bug.” Even before the publication of this trailblazing treasure-hunt mystery, Poe was so interested in cryptograms that he challenged the readers of his magazine to send him codes to solve. From September 24 until December 31, the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia will explore Poe’s love of cryptography in ...