“Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” wrote Novalis, a remark Penelope Fitzgerald chose as the epigraph to her novel about him, The Blue Flower. The history of Edgar Allan Poe is littered with shortcomings and also richly overlaid with myths, speculations and contradictions. It would be irresponsible wilfully to add to them: hence this attempt to describe where the history ends and the novel begins.
Poe’s grandfather, David, Sr, was born in Ireland in about 1742. The family emigrated to America, eventually settling in Maryland. David became a shopkeeper and manufacturer of spinning wheels. During the Revolutionary War he was commissioned as Assistant Deputy Quartermaster General for Baltimore, and given the rank of major. In 1781 he used his own money to buy supplies for American forces under Lafayette, and his wife is said to have cut 500 pairs of pantaloons with her own hands for the use of his troops. In David Poe’s old age he may have taken part in the defence of Baltimore against British attack in 1814, during the War of 1812.
Poe’s father, David, Jr, was born in 1784. He made an abortive attempt to study law but in 1803 became an actor. In 1806 he married Elizabeth Arnold, a widowed Englishwoman who had made her debut as an actress ten years before in Boston, Massachusetts. Edgar, the second of their three children, was born on 19th January 1809. What evidence survives (mainly from hostile theatre critics) suggests that David Poe was a mediocre actor, hot-tempered and often intoxicated. On the other hand in his six years on the stage he played one hundred and thirty-seven parts, some of them important ones, which suggests that he was neither incompetent nor unreliable.
David Poe was commended by the editor of a Boston theatrical weekly in December 1809. Afterwards we are left with hearsay. He was reported in New York in July 1810. It is probable, but by no means certain, that he deserted his wife in 1811.
Elizabeth Poe died in Richmond, Virginia, on 8th December 1811. No one knows where or when her husband died, which has not prevented biographers from providing at least three specific dates for his death over a period of approximately fourteen months. All we know for sure is that David Poe drops out of recorded history at some point after December 1809.
In other words, Edgar Allan Poe’s life began with a mystery, still unsolved.
After his mother’s death, Edgar took the fancy of a childless couple, Mr and Mrs John Allan. Born in Scotland, Allan was a prosperous citizen of Richmond, and a partner in a firm of tobacco exporters and general merchants. Though the Allans never formally adopted Edgar, he took their name and it was generally understood that he was not only their son but their heir.
In June 1815, John Allan sold Scipio (one of his slaves) for $600 and set sail for Liverpool with his little family. He intended to set up a London branch of his business. For five years, between the ages of six and eleven, Edgar Allan Poe lived in England. He was the only important American writer of his generation to spend a significant part of his childhood in England, and the experience marked him profoundly.
At first Allan prospered. He took a house in Southampton Row – number 47; in the autumn of 1817, the family moved to number 39. It is clear from surviving correspondence that Mrs Allan’s health was a constant source of worry – and perhaps, for Mr Allan, a source of irritation as well. The Allans paid at least two visits to Cheltenham, on the second of which they stayed at the Stiles Hotel. Here Mrs Allan could take the waters and benefit from the country air.
While they were at Cheltenham in 1817, a parrot ordered for Mrs Allan arrived at Liverpool. This was a bird reputed to speak French, and was designed to replace a parrot left behind in Virginia (who had been able to recite the alphabet in English). In his “Philosophy of Composition”, the adult Poe revealed that when he was planning “The Raven” his first thought was that the bird should be a parrot.
At some point in the first six months of 1818, John Allan withdrew Edgar from his school in London and, despite business reverses, transferred him to a more expensive establishment, the Manor House School in the nearby village of Stoke Newington. The schoolmaster was the Reverend John Bransby. “Edgar is a fine boy,” Allan wrote to one of his correspondents in June that year, “and reads Latin pretty sharply.”
The Manor House School is long since gone, but we know what the roadside façade looked like from a contemporary sketch and a photograph of 1860. We also have a photograph of a portrait of Bransby. Several of Master Allan’s school bills have survived, which reveal among other things that Allan paid an extra two guineas a term for Edgar to have the privilege of a bed to himself. We know from other sources a good deal about life in English private schools of the period.
Best of all, we have Poe’s own short story, “William Wilson”, which contains a fictional version of the Stoke Newington school, complete with its own “Reverend Dr Bransby”. The story is particularly interesting, because it concerns a boy haunted by a schoolmate who appears to be his double.
Years afterwards, a former pupil at the Manor House School questioned John Bransby about the school’s most illustrious old boy and, in 1878, published his memory of those conversations. Mr Bransby was reluctant to talk about Poe, perhaps because of the way he had been portrayed in “William Wilson”. But he is reported as saying: “Edgar Allan was a quick and clever boy and would have been a very good boy if he had not been spoilt by his parents, but they spoilt him, and allowed him an extravagant amount of pocket money, which enabled him to get into all manner of mischief – still, I liked the boy – poor fellow, his parents spoilt him!” On another occasion Mr Bransby added: “Allan was intelligent, wayward and wilful.”
John Allan’s firm continued to suffer from financial difficulties. On 2nd October 1819, Allan’s landlord in Southampton Row dunned him for rent. But Allan was still willing and able to pay Edgar’s school bills – the last one that survives is for 26th May 1820. On 16th June 1820 the Allans and their foster son sailed for New York aboard the Martha from Liverpool. The American boy was going home.
Lafayette did indeed visit Baltimore in 1824, where he asked after his old comrade and called on Edgar Allan Poe’s grandmother. According to a later account in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum (4th March 1843), the General knelt beside the grave of David Poe, Senior, and said, “Ici repose un coeur noble!” A few weeks later Lafayette was in Richmond, where Edgar’s friend Thomas Ellis recorded his pride in seeing Edgar among the distinguished visitor’s guard of honour.
Edgar Allan Poe’s life began with the mystery of his father’s disappearance and ended with the mystery of his own. The account given in the Appendix to The American Boy is substantially accurate. No one knows where Poe was between 26th September and 3rd October 1849. When he reappeared in Baltimore, he had lost his money and he was wearing cheap, dirty clothes which were not his own; but he was still carrying a malacca cane he had borrowed from a Richmond acquaintance.
The most detailed evidence, and probably the most reliable, comes from the earliest accounts of Joseph Snodgrass, the friend who rescued Poe, and of Dr Moran, the physician who attended him in his last illness. Neither was an unbiased witness. Snodgrass was an ardent Temperance campaigner and regarded the story of his friend’s death as an illustration of the perils of alcohol. Moran was one of Poe’s posthumous supporters, and his story became increasingly embroidered as the years went by. However, he wrote the passage quoted only a few weeks after Poe’s death; it uses the plainest language of all his accounts; it mentions both Poe’s cries for “Reynolds” and his desire for death. Moran is also the earliest source for the suggestion that when Poe arrived in Baltimore he fell in with “some of his old and former associates”.
Several theories have been advanced to explain Poe’s condition. The main ones are: the effects of alcoholism; “cooping” – a violent electioneering practice which involved intoxicating voters and then forcing them to vote repeatedly; and – an imaginative late entry into the field – the bite of a rabid dog. They are no more than theories.
After his death, as Poe’s reputation continued to grow, the facts of his doomed and mysterious life continued to be obscured by the enthusiastic modifications of his many supporters and detractors. His work has found admirers all over the world, including Abraham Lincoln and Josef Stalin.
Anyone wishing to know more about him cannot do better than to start with Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1941 and still the best biography available. A hoard of essential biographical source material relating to Poe has been assembled in The Poe Log (1987) by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson. Finally, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland, maintains an admirable website at www.eapoe.org: scholarly, detailed and well-organised, it is a pleasure to use.