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Tag: science fiction

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The Poe Museum Blog

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 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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Poe’s First Published Story about a Shipwreck Foreshadows Eureka: A Prose Poem (Part I of II)

“MS Found in a Bottle” by Harry Clarke

By Murray Ellison

Poe’s first important tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” (1833) won the Baltimore Visiter’s first prize for fiction. Poe scholar, Thomas Mabbott calls it a “masterpiece,” contending that “winning the contest set the author on the way to lasting fame” (Tales and Sketches 131). The Visiter wrote that “Poe’s tales are eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous and poetical imagination, a rich style and a various and curious learning” (Thomas and Jackson 137). “MS.” reveals Poe’s interest in a broad range of science-related topics, including secret writing, conundrums, scientific realism, and life after death. Carlson proposes that the story mocks the popular sea voyages of that period, specifically those of Captain Adam Seward’s (pseudonym for Captain John Symmes) 1820 Symzonia-a Voyage of Discovery. Symmes’ “Theory of Concentric Circles” proposed that the Earth was hollow at both Poles (119). It presumed that a ship approaching the Poles would be sucked into an abyss through the earth. Poe’s selection of the story’s setting indicates that he was aware of the public’s interest in this scientific topic.

Poe reports in the style of a science journalist who is intending to submit his story to a travel or nautical magazine: “Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. Isaac Gewirtz contends that, “Poe’s story was never meant to correspond with the world. The location was selected to flaunt transparent and geographic pretense” (23). Poe writes: “We also had on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium” (136), using both scientific and literary language to add to the realism of the story. “The hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equaling the first violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had ever before encountered” (138). As the ship advances, the boundaries between reality and imagination become blurred. The narrator’s invisibility to the crew suggests that the entire journey is taking place in his mind, i.e., he can see the crew and captain of the ship, but they cannot see him. He remarks, “About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence” (143). By being unobserved, the narrator is looking at the relics of science as an outsider. He concludes that much of nineteenth-century science is outdated and largely based on theories of misguided scientists like Francis Bacon and Symmes.

*This article, which is part of Murray Ellison’s 2015 Virginia Commonwealth University M.A. Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science, was first published in www.Litchatte.com on 3/16/2017.

In next month’s Poe Blog, I will discuss the horror of Poe’s tumultuous story as it is experienced by the narrator. I will also comment on how this early Poe story begins to connect his grand theories of the Universe with some of those found in his last published work – Eureka: A Prose Poem.

Works Cited
Gewirtz, Isaac. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, Ed. New York: New York Public Library, 2013.
Levine, Stuart and Susan F. Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka. Eds. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004.
Poe, Edgar A.. Tales and Sketches, 1831-1849. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Poe, Harry Lee. Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012.
Fifty-first Annual Commemoration of the Edgar A. Poe Society, July 7, 1973.
Seaborn, Captain Adam (pseudonym Captain John Symmes). Symzonia-a Voyage of Discovery. New York: Printed by J. Seymour, 1820.
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.

 

Murray Ellison
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Folio Society Releases New Edition of Poe’s Only Novel

The Poe Museum recently received a small slip-cased volume in the mail. While most of the books that cross my desk contain Poe’s tales of terror (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and the like), this case holds an edition of the only novel Poe ever finished, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivers; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Suffering from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of This Latter Vessel in the Antarctic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise. (Let’s just call it Pym.)

The unusual title suggests something of its strange contents which feature cannibalism, a sea voyage to the Antarctic, and a ghostly white figure.

Poe printed the first installments of what was intended to be a serialized novel in the Southern Literary Messenger just before he left the magazine. After moving from Richmond to New York, Poe completed Pym while adding a preface to explain that the parts that appeared in the Messenger had been written by Poe on behalf of Arthur Gordon Pym while the rest of the book was written by Pym himself. The preface, signed by “A.G. Pym,” further confesses that Poe and Pym had previously pretended the first installments were fiction. Since “A.G. Pym” states that all the details in the novel are absolutely true, some readers believed it might be a real account. The Evening Post noted, “The air of reality in the narrative is assumed with no small skill.”

Others were unconvinced and assumed it was just another hoax by Richard Adams Locke, author of “The Moon Hoax” a few years earlier. In a December 1838 review of Pym in Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine, William Burton declares, “A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised; the voyages of Gulliver were politically satirical, and the adventures of Munchausen, the acknowledged caricature of a celebrated traveller. Sindbad the sailor, Peter Wilkins, and Moore’s Utopia, are confessedly works of imagination; but Arthur Gordon Pym puts forth a series of travels outraging possibility, and coolly requires his insulted readers to believe his ipse dixit.”

Poe saw this criticism and later wrote Burton, “You once wrote in your magazine a sharp critique upon a book of mine — a very silly book — Pym. Had I written a similar criticism upon a book of yours, you feel that you would have been my enemy for life, and you therefore imagine in my bosom a latent hostility towards yourself.”

Some reviewers were more positive in their assessments. The New York Gazette called Pym “a very extraordinary volume purporting to be a narrative of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’ who it is said [is] lately deceased in some melancholy way, and his adventures as well as his death are referred to as of perfect notoriety.” The New-Yorker declared it “a work of extraordinary, freezing interest beyond anything we ever read.” The Morning Courier wrote, “the volume is highly interesting in the story, well written, and to the lovers of marvellous fiction will be quite a treasure.”

Harper and Brothers published an unknown number of copies in New York in 1838, but sales were disappointing. Within a year, the book was reprinted in England where it saw its first success. When the first British edition sold well, a number of British bootleg versions appeared in a multiple editions. Herman Melville’s brother was one of many who bought one of these unauthorized copies for which the author received no compensation.

Although Americans were mainly unconvinced by this apparent hoax, some English readers believed it was a true story. George Putnam recounted, “The grave particularity of the title and of the narrative misled many of the critics as well as ourselves, and whole columns of these new ‘discoveries,’ including the hieroglyphics (!) found on the rocks, were copied by many of the English country papers as sober historical truth”

The edition now on my desk was published earlier this year by the Folio Society, which has been printing finely bound and illustrated books since 1947 because—according to their website—they believe “great books deserve to be printed in a form worthy of their contents.” Their books are designed to be read, collected, and cherished by those who love great literature. With an astute introduction by novelist Marilynne Robinson and illustrations by David Lupton, the Folio Society’s edition is sure to be a collector’s item.

The Folio Society’s Editorial Director Tom Walker explained that this new edition of Pym was originally proposed by a reader. “We then wrote to a large number of our customers about a wide range of novels and this consistently came top of their list of books they wanted to see in a Folio edition. I think that is partly because we have already (some years ago now) published many of Poe’s short stories, and this underpublished novel was seen as a natural next step. Our readers of course admire Poe as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century authors, and the combination of classic status with horror and seafaring was I think irresistible for them!”

An admirer of her work, Walker chose Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson to write the introduction, which he deemed “all I hoped it might be – intense and broad reaching itself, and cleverly bringing the novel into the light of [Poe’s last book] Eureka.” Walker was also pleased with Lupton’s “dark, brooding” illustrations.

Aside from the fine illustrations (see below), the Folio Society’s Pym is notable for its craftsmanship, its sturdy binding designed to be handled and read by generations of readers, and its small size—in imitation of the small size of Poe’s first editions from the 1830s and 1840s. Click here to find out more about the book. To read an interview with the illustrator David Lupton, click here.

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Edgar Allan Poe Hoax Now on Display at Poe Museum

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia recently acquired a rare 1846 British pamphlet Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis, in which Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional story of mesmerizing the dead, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”(1845) is reprinted as a true account for a London audience. The Poe Museum’s new acquisition is a gift from Poe collector and Poe Museum trustee Susan Jaffe Tane. This important piece has appeared in exhibits at the Poe Museum in 1997 and the Grolier Club in New York in 2014. The book retains its original paper cover and is in fine condition. It is now on display in the Poe Museum’s Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building.

About the “Valdemar” Hoax

In Edgar Allan Poe’s time (1809-1849), many of his readers fell victim to his notorious hoax, now titled “The Balloon Hoax,” about a balloon trip across the ocean, but, more amazingly, the public was also willing to believe “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which purports to recount a scientific experiment in which a dead man is mesmerized in order to facilitate communication with him after his death. The story concludes with the dead man awakening from his trance and immediately dissolving into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.”

Although “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” seems outlandish by today’s standards, it was soon reprinted in London’s Popular Record of Modern Science, which stated that “credence is understood to be given it at New York…The angry excitement and various rumors which have at length rendered a public statement necessary, are sufficient to show that something extraordinary must have taken place.” The Poe Museum’s new acquisition, Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis, was printed in London in January 1846—just weeks after the story’s first printing in the United States in the December 1845 issue of the American Review in New York. It is the first separate printing Poe’s important story. In this edition, the story is prefaced with a statement that the account is “a plain recital of facts” and that “credence is given to it in America, where the occurrence took place.”

Shortly after the story appeared, the Boston mesmerist Robert H. Collyer wrote Poe, “Your account of M. Valdemar’s Case has been universally copied in this city, and has created a very great sensation…I have not the least doubt of the possibility of such a phenomenon.” Collyer asks Poe to verify that the story is true “in order to put at rest the growing impression that your account is merely a splendid creation of your own brain, not having any truth in fact.”

Unconvinced of “Valdemar’s” veracity, the editor of the New York Herald wrote, “whoever thought it a veracious recital must have the bump of Faith large, very large indeed.” Poe responded in the Broadway Journal, “For our parts we find it difficult to understand how any dispassionate transcendentalist can doubt the facts as we state them; they are by no means so incredible as the marvels which are hourly narrated, and believed, on the topic of Mesmerism. Why cannot a man’s death be postponed indefinitely by Mesmerism? Why cannot a man talk after he is dead? Why? — Why? — that is the question; and as soon as the Tribune has answered it to our satisfaction we will talk to it farther.”

Despite his adamant defense of the story’s veracity, when he was asked by a London pharmacist if “Valdemar” were true, Poe responded, “‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case . . . Some few persons believe it — but I do not — and don’t you.”

The Poe Museum’s new acquisition, a first printing of Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis, is a vivid reminder of how revolutionary Poe’s fiction was in its time. This semblance of realism based on the scientific knowledge of his day became a hallmark of the fledgling literary genre that would eventually become known as Science Fiction.

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Poe as a Popularizer of 19th-Century Sceince

During the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, there was a need for a new class of writers who could write about emerging scientific information in a way that the new consumers of science information could understand. The emerging class of professional scientists in the United States was neither equipped nor interested in communicating about science with the public. Lightman refers to the nineteenth century literary writers who did attempt to communicate to the public as the “popularizers of science.” He also suggests that “Their success was partially due to their ability to present the huge mass of scientific fact in the form of compelling stories” (188). He contends, therefore, that it is essential for our current understanding of nineteenth-century culture to explore writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who skillfully and prolifically commented on many of the most significant scientific trends of his lifetime. Many other scholars (Gewirtz, Hoffman, Willis, and Tresch) acknowledge that Poe was one of the most important leaders in developing both the genres of science fiction and detective fiction. Similarly, John Limon writes that Poe engaged in literary “negotiation with science,” asserting that his works both foreshadowed and critiqued several emerging scientific developments and trends of the future (19). As such, Paul Faytor argues that “there was a two-way traffic between science and science-writers in the nineteenth century. He notes that many of the inventions and writings of professional scientists helped to shape science fiction and that many ideas imagined by science fiction writers found their way into actual scientific inventions. (256). His works in those areas provide abundant example that he anticipated forecasted future developments in technical areas such as exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, and the forensic sciences.  Limon argues that lay writers like Poe and Hawthorne, or those without “letters” who were interested in writing about science, struggled with professional scientists to establish their authority to speak about the newly emerging scientific issues (19).  Poe had not received much formal training as a scientist but had considerable exposure to technical subjects in his early education, in his technical experiences in the military, and through his exposure to science news as a journalist. He believed that an observant and skilled writer did not need professional science training or to be sanctioned by an official science accreditation organizations before writing about science.

Poe,however, looked not only to the events of his era to inform his view of truth in his science writing, but he was also inspired and informed by several of the most renown philosophers and science writers of antiquity. In his 1848 culminating science narrative, Eureka: A Prose Poem, he outlined the development of scientific thinking from antiquity through his era. A list of the ancient writers of science and the philosophy of science he commented on in Eureka includes Archimedes, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Newton, Kepler, and Francis Bacon. Also in Eureka, he discussed the works of philosophers and scientists closer to Poe’s lifetime such as Auguste Comte, Sir John Herschel, John Stuart Mill, Pierre Simon La Place, and Friedrich Heinrich Humboldt – to whom Poe dedicated Eureka. This culminating work of Poe’s science narratives will be discussed in a blog that will be written in the future.  However, there are several important contextual influences pertaining to science and literature that were in place by the early nineteenth century that likely influenced Poe’s choice to embark on a career that focused on science narrative writing. These influences will be discussed in the upcoming monthly Poe in Science Blogs.

Contact Murray Ellison at murray@poemuseum.org or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu for comments or questions.

Partial List of Sources:

Faytor, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Ed. Barnard A. Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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

Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Ed.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.19C Printing Press

Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1990

Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

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Poe as a Popularizer of Nineteenth-Century Sceince

Sir Isaac Newton Working on Geometric Problem – 1795 Ink and Water Color by William Blake (Public Domain Image from www.blake.archive)

Poe as a Popularizer of Nineteenth-Century Science

Several important modern-day science historians have conceded that their present understanding of how Industrial Age technologies affected society is limited, and some have started to focus their research on this period. Bernard Lightman argues “Scholars have barely scratched the surface in their attempts to understand the popularization of Victorian [nineteenth century] science” (206). He writes, “As scientists became professionalized [during the nineteenth century] and professional scientists began to pursue specialized research highly, the need arose for non-professionals, who could convey the broader significance of many new discoveries to a rapidly growing…reading public” (187). He proposes that the nineteenth century “popularizers of science” may have been more important than that of Huxley or the Tyndall [important nineteenth-century scientists] in shaping the understanding [of science] in the minds of the reading public…” (188).

During this period, there was a need for a new class of writers who could write about emerging scientific information in a way the new consumers of science information could understand, and in ways that was relevant to their daily experiences. The newly emerging class of professional scientists in the United was neither equipped nor interested in communicating with the public. Lightman refers to those writers who did attempt to communicate to the public about science as the “popularizers of science,” and suggests that “Their success… was partially due to their ability to present the huge mass of scientific fact in the form of compelling stories…” (188). Therefore, he suggests that it is essential for our present understanding of nineteenth-century culture to explore writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who skillfully and prolifically commented on many of the important popular scientific trends of his lifetime. John Tresch asserts, “Poe’s writings force us to reconsider the relationship between science and literature” (The British Journal of Science, 275-276). Also, in Between Science and Literature, Peter Swirski argues that Poe’s “writing may be a suitable barometer of the role that science and philosophy had on nineteenth-century society… and that he threw “literary bridges over to the scientific mainland,” These bridges, he concludes, were just as important in helping is to understand how scientific changes influenced society as they are in helping us to understand how literature started to change to reflect scientific developments (X-XI). John Limon, writing in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science writes that Poe engaged in literary “negotiation with science,” asserting that his works both foreshadowed and critiqued several emerging scientific developments and trends of the future (19). Faytor also argues “there was a two-way traffic between science and science-writers in the nineteenth century. He notes that many of the inventions and writings of professional scientists helped to shape science fiction and that many ideas imagined by science fiction writers found their way into actual scientific inventions. (256). Most scholars acknowledge that Poe was one of the most important leaders in developing both the genres of science fiction and detective fiction. His works in those areas provide abundant examples that he anticipated and forecasted future developments which are accepted today in a variety of technical areas such as exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, replacement of body parts, and the forensic sciences.

During Poe’s lifetime, lay writers or those without “letters” who were interested in writing about science struggled with professional scientists to establish their authority to speak about the newly emerging scientific issues. Poe had not received much formal training as a scientist but had considerable exposure to science ideas in his early education, in his technical experiences in the military, and through his exposure to science news stories as a journalist. He believed that an observant and skilled writer (like himself) was more qualified to interpret and discuss the meaning and impact of the newly emerging sciences and technologies than most professional scientists.

Poe looked not only to the events of his era to inform his view of truth in his science writing, but he was also inspired and informed by several of the most renown philosophers and science writers of antiquity. In his 1848 culminating science narrative, Eureka A Prose Poem, he outlined the development of scientific thinking from antiquity through his era, and provided his own unique theories about the creation, operations, and destiny of humanity and the Universe. A list of the ancient writers of science and the philosophy of science he commented on in Eureka includes Archimedes, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Kepler, Francis Bacon, and Sir Isaac Newton. Also in Eureka, he discussed the works of philosophers and scientists closer to Poe’s lifetime such as Auguste Comte, Sir John Herschel, John Stuart Mill, Pierre Simon Laplace, and Friedrich Heinrich Humboldt – to whom Poe dedicated Eureka. Several contextual influences in the areas of literature and technology likely influenced Poe’s subsequent choice to embark on a career that emphasized science narrative writing. These will be discussed in the November 2014 posting. For comments, contact murray@poemuseum.org or ellisonms2@vcu.edu

Sources:
Faytor, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Ed. Barnard A. Lightman. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997.
Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Ed. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Swirski, Peter. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000.
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. 2013.
_______. The Romantic Machine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Sir Isaac Newton Working on Geometric Problem

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Edgar Allan Poe in Science # 2—September 2014 by Murray Ellison

Illustration courtesy of an M.S Office Royalty Free Clip

Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s most overlooked contribution to English literature is that he is one of the earliest American writers who commented on many of the ways that the emerging technological trends of the nineteenth-century effected everyday citizens.  Poe’s science writing reveals the relationships between a writer who was looking for an audience interested in expressing his attitudes about science writing, and an audience that was looking for a writer who could explain the emerging developments of nineteenth-century science to them. Thus, there was an important relationship between Poe’s science writing and the public: The topics that Poe chose to write about were often influenced by the public’s interests in science, and his writing inspired their continued interest in science. His works, then, not only reflect the range of scientific topics that the public was most enthusiastic about, but they also document their concerns about the ways that technology was changing their lifestyles. Although Poe’s science narratives show that he was excited about many of the new developments of nineteenth-century science, they also express an uncertain attitude about the value he placed in technology. He was also warned readers about the ways that some writers misrepresented the ‘facts of science.’ Interestingly, later in his career he became known as the king of scientific hoax writing. Despite his concerns and ambivalent attitudes, Poe became a significant nineteenth-century professional journalist who had immediate access to the most popular science news stories of the day, and wrote about science in each of his major writing styles, i.e., poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. Despite the existence of these factors, Poe’s importance as a nineteenth-century science writers has not been acknowledged even by his present-day followers, or by many scholars of literature or science history.  Therefore, the present blog will examine the themes and attitudes of Poe’s science narratives in each of his major styles of writing. My hope is that this series will provide both interested readers and scholars of Poe’s work, a clearer understanding of the complex ways that technology effected the lifestyles and culture of the nineteenth-century public.

I will consider a science narrative to be a work of Poe’s poetry, non-fiction, or fiction in which Poe provides an account of scientific inventions or issues, or where he tells a story that highlights popular scientific themes which he presented in journals or newspapers. For example, in his earliest published work of fiction, “MS Found in a Bottle,” Poe recounts a narrator’s experiences during a sea expedition. His vessel is dramatically propelled to the then unexplored waters of Antarctica and the South Pole. He records the scientific details of this story in the realistic style of a technical journalist assigned to the voyage, and at the same time explores issues of the uncertainties of this voyage and of the unexplored spaces between reality and imagination. Poe also added a touch of suspense and Gothic-style horror in his story, which likely helped help to generate additional strong public interest in this already popular topic. “M.S. Found in a Bottle” was first published in 1833 by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor Newspaper. This story first thrust Poe into national notoriety after it won the paper’s first place prize for fiction writing. This recognition undoubtedly encouraged him to write many other science narratives in each of his major styles of writing. In this Blog, I will explore Poe’s themes and attitudes about science as he expressed them in each of these styles, i.e., poetry, non-fiction, and fictional works. In addition, I plan explore: Poe’s educational background; his little-known experiences in the United States Army related to science; the scientific and literary contexts which were in place at the beginning of his writing career; his experiences as a journalist in Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; and the extraordinary culminating and enigmatic science book he wrote at the end of his career and life—entitled, Eureka A Prose Poem. Poe believed that Eureka was the most important work of his career, and considered it “the culmination of his life’s work” (Broussard 52). He boasted that “Newton’s discovery of gravity was a mere incident compared to the discoveries revealed in this book” (Thomas and Jackson 731). He also wrote a letter to his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, on July 7, 1848 stating, “I have no desire to live. Since I have done Eureka, I could accomplish nothing more” (Ostram 820). Ironically, Eureka also turned out to be the last work he published under his own supervision. There have been several attempts to evaluate the complex language and puzzles posed in Eureka, but most have come up short because the work is written in a complex, and almost cryptic language. When I get around to discussing Eureka, I plan to use some of the “code-keys” provided in several of Poe’s other writings to help unravel some of its mysteries. Please send comments and suggestions to me about this blog through murray@poemuseum.org or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu

Works Cited:
Broussard, Louis. The Measure of Poe. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.
Poe, Edgar A. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. John Ward Ostram. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1948.
Thomas, Dwight, and David Jackson, Eds. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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Poe and Science by Murray Ellison

Edgar Allan Poe lived at the perfect time in history to be able to observe and to write about many of the most dramatic technological changes that had taken place in world history. Scientist Sir Alfred Russell Wallace called the nineteenth century “The Wonderful Century” because of its “marvelous inventions and discoveries,” which he regarded as immensely superior to anything which had been developed up until that time by “our comparatively ignorant forefathers”(1). Suddenly, within the span of a few decades, the introduction of new Industrial Age technologies such as electricity, telegraphic communications, cross-country railroads, photography, astronomy, and high- speed printing presses dramatically altered the culture and lifestyle of the American public in ways in which few people who lived at the time could ever have expected. In 1903, Sir Norman Lockyer, the then President of the British Association echoed Wallace’s remarks, stating that, “The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one which the influence of science was first fully realized in western countries; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of a nation” (Nature). By the time that Poe started writing professionally (in the early 1830s), the literacy rate was higher than it had previously ever been in America, and the average person could read and understand most articles written in the newspaper. A person could travel to distant parts of the country by rail, and communicate almost instantly via the telegraph to almost anyone in the United States. Through the development of the daguerreotype (an early prototype of photography), people could obtain realistic and long lasting images of their family members to remember for generations. Many of those taken at that time may still be clearly visible today. The introduction of a new class of highly powerful telescopes and microscopes also demonstrated that the Universe of space and the unseen space within objects are much more expansive than anyone had previously imagined.

Peter Swirski argues that it is essential for our present understanding of nineteenth century culture to explore popular writers like Edgar Allan Poe because his “writing may be a suitable barometer of the role that science and philosophy had on nineteenth century society. Poe’s science narratives are perhaps most important because he was the first American authors who was able to distill the important information and ideas that were developed by professional scientists and publish them to a national and international audience in the form imaginative poems, non-fiction essays and journalistic stories, fiction, and science fiction stories.

The next entry of the “Poe and Science” blog will discuss how a studying the stories of the non-professional science writer helps us to have a better understanding of nineteenth-century society. Please send comments or questions to murray@poemuseum.org or ellisonms2@vcu.edu
Sources Used
Lockyer, Sir Norman. “Inaugural Address as President of the British Association.” Nature. 10 September 1903: 439.
Swirski, Peter. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000.
Wallace, Alfred Russell. The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Failures. Toronto: George N. Morang, 1898 (digital reproduction).