Kevin J. Hayes
“Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling,” Edgar Allan Poe’s playful dialect tale, amused many contemporary readers, including the popular British novelist, William Harrison Ainsworth. Having taken over the editorship of Bentley’s Miscellany from Charles Dickens, Ainsworth read this story in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and decided to reprint it, along with “The Duc de l’Omelette,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Visionary.” The London setting of “Little Frenchman” and its humorous use of Irish brogue to spoof the gentry made the tale especially appropriate for British readers. Although Ainsworth selected four Poe stories for Bentley’s, “Little Frenchman” was the first he reprinted. Ainsworth did make one key change: he retitled the tale. In the July 1840 issue of Bentley’s, Poe’s story appeared as “The Irish Gentleman and the Little Frenchman.”1
Ainsworth’s enjoyment of the tale verifies the positive British reception of Poe’s humorous tale. Contemporary American readers also appreciated it. When William T. Porter, editor of the weekly sporting paper Spirit of the Times, came across the July 1840 issue of Bentley’s, he liked the story well enough to reprint it in his paper.2 This formerly neglected reprint of Poe’s story affirms its positive reception among contemporary American readers. Neither reprint helped Poe’s personal reputation, however. Bentley’s had reprinted the tale anonymously, and the Spirit of the Times followed suit.
Despite the contemporary response, modern readers have largely failed to appreciate “Little Frenchman.” It is “one of Poe’s poorest” tales according to one, “almost the slightest story that Poe ever wrote” according to another, and “at best witty hack work” according to a third.3 The story is not without modern enthusiasts. Jack Kaufhold, for one, characterized “Little Frenchman” as a “Chaplinesque comedy.”4 Recently, a Pennsylvania teacher had great fun sharing the text with her students. She assigned it in a literary survey course without identifying its date or its author. The story differs so much from Poe’s best-known tales, she argued, that “Little Frenchman” could be used as a pedagogical tool to challenge the preconceptions about Poe that students bring to class.5 Perhaps “Little Frenchman” is not so different from Poe’s other tales as it may seem. Its simplicity is deceptive. This tale embodies many of the same complex issues common to Poe’s most respected works. By taking it seriously instead of maligning the story, its artistry becomes apparent.
Like some of Poe’s other tales and sketches of the late 1830s and early 1840s—“The Philosophy of Furniture,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue”—“Little Frenchman” takes the idea of urban spectatorship as a central theme. Kaufhold’s association between this story and the cinema of Charlie Chaplin suggests not only the importance of visual culture to “Little Frenchman” but also the importance of the modern city to the tale. Cinematic comparisons work well to explicate Poe’s work: much of what he did in words prefigures what filmmakers would do in images in the following century.
“Little Frenchman” develops ideas Poe had been contemplating for years. The story is set in London, specifically in Russell Square, Blooms-bury, where Poe lived as a child with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan. Furthermore, it develops an idea he had suggested in “Metzengerstein” (1832), which predates “Little Frenchman” by eight years. In that story, the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing look with jealousy into the windows of the Chateau Metzengerstein. Some readers have seen the proximity of these two castles as an absurdity that verifies the story’s supposedly satirical nature.6 Alternatively, this detail adds another layer of interpretation to “Metzengerstein,” for Poe draws an analogy between the feudal castle and the modern apartment building. “Metzengerstein,” too, can be interpreted as a clash between neighboring city dwellers. This minor detail, however, may have seemed to Poe insufficient to develop in “Metzengerstein” further. Poe may subsequently have turned the theme into the central motif of “Little Frenchman.”
The title Ainsworth assigned Poe’s tale, “The Irish Gentleman and the Little Frenchman,” gives readers an idea of the story’s characters, the two men who are rivals for a widow named Mrs. Treacle. But Ainsworth ignored the purposefulness of Poe’s original title, which explicitly conveys the story’s aetiological nature. In other words, Poe’s title suggests that the purpose of the story is to explain the cause or causes of one particular phenomenon, namely, why the Frenchman happens to be wearing his hand in a sling. Expressed in the present tense, Poe’s title also suggests that the wearing of the sling and the telling of the tale are simultaneous events. The tale is being told after the little Frenchman has received his injury yet before it has healed.
William T. Porter’s enjoyment of “Little Frenchman” should come as no surprise. The Spirit of the Times published much of the best literary humor of Poe’s day and greatly encouraged the humorists of the Old Southwest. Poe’s use of dialect in “Little Frenchman” closely resembles the dialect used by his contemporaries further south, who often structured their stories as frame tales. Typically, a frame tale begins in the voice of an outside narrator whose words establish the situation and introduce an inside narrator to relate the main story. As the inside narrator takes over, the outside one shifts from teller to listener and thus serves as a surrogate for the reader. In the end, the outside narrator finishes the story; his final words create the closing narrative frame. Among the humorists of the Old Southwest, the frame tale was particularly amenable because it allowed them to begin their stories in a voice not dissimilar to their own, that of an urbane Southern gentleman, and then indulge their fascination for folk speech by giving the story over to some loose-limbed, slack-jawed rustic, who narrates the main story in dialect.
Throughout his career, Poe continually experimented with different literary forms and genres, always seeking either to invent new genres or, at least, to expand the possibilities of preexisting ones. With “A Descent into the Maelström,” for instance, he experimented with the frame tale by leaving off the closing frame. “Little Frenchman” is even more experimental. It is an implicit frame tale, one that has been completely stripped of its outside narrative. Told by Sir Patrick O’Grandison, a rough-hewn Irishman from Connaught who unexpectedly had become a baron six weeks earlier and who has since come to London to acquire “iddication and the graces” (183), the story begins in a thick brogue, which is maintained through its completion. Sir Patrick’s remarks imply that he is telling the story orally to a houseguest who sits within his apartment and who can see the sling-wearing Frenchman through a window across the way.
Beginning his story by describing himself, Sir Patrick notices that his description elicits an expression of disagreement from his guest and tells him to “be plased to stop curling your nose.”7 Besides indicating the guest’s presence within his apartment, Sir Patrick’s comment reveals his own characteristic behavior. He sees someone make a gesture and quickly assumes that he understands what that gesture means. Excluding an opening frame, Poe forces readers to make up their own minds about this dialect narrative. Whereas the frame tale positions the outside narrator as a surrogate for the reader, Poe’s story works the opposite way. The reader must stand in for the outside narrator. Structuring the story as he does, Poe lends a sense of immediacy to it, placing us in the room with Sir Patrick.
Although stripping his tale of its narrative frame, Poe does make extensive use of another framing device, the window frame. Next door to Sir Patrick lives the widow Mrs. Treacle, and the Frenchman lives across the way. From his apartment, Sir Patrick can look out his window to see Mrs. Treacle, and she, of course, can look out hers to see him. From his window, the Frenchman can see across the way into the apartments of both Mrs. Treacle and Sir Patrick. According to Sir Patrick, the Frenchman spends the whole day at his window “a oggling and a goggling” (184). To know how his neighbor spends each day, Sir Patrick obviously spends his days staring from his own window. The sight of the sling-wearing Frenchman prompts Sir Patrick to explain why the Frenchman appears as he does.
Poe would make use of the window as a framing device again in “The Man of the Crowd,” a tale he published in 1840, soon after “Little Frenchman” appeared as part of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Like the earlier story, “The Man of the Crowd” is also set in London. It begins with the narrator looking onto a busy London street through a coffee-house window, which mediates what he sees.8 The crowded street in “The Man of the Crowd” and the proximity of the neighboring apartments in “Little Frenchman” emphasize how the modern city effectively reduced everyone’s personal space.
“The Man of the Crowd” is the classic tale of the flaneur, the spectator who strolled the city streets and arcades making observations and attempting to discern the meaning of what he observed.9 By definition the flaneur takes the urban public space as both the place and subject of his activities. Though the act of walking is typically associated with the flaneur, “The Philosophy of Furniture” offers a paradoxical variant, the stationary flaneur.10 The narrator of “The Philosophy of Furniture” remains within a private interior space but restricts his gaze to that space. Sir Patrick’s gaze in “Little Frenchman” represents a more intrusive form of urban spectatorship. From the interior of his own apartment, he gazes into the private spaces of others’ apartments. He is a voyeur, not a flaneur. As of 1840, the term voyeur had yet to enter English usage, so a synonym must suffice. Sir Patrick is a Peeping Tom.
“The Man of the Crowd” has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).11 “Little Frenchman” may make for a better comparison. After all, Sir Patrick’s behavior is much the same as that of L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies, the character Jimmy Stewart plays in Rear Window. Stationed in their apartments, both Jeff and Sir Patrick look through their own windows into their neighbors’ apartments and assume that they know what the others are thinking. Furthermore, both make their guests complicit in their intrusive gaze. Through his manipulation of point of view and other cinematic techniques, Hitchcock makes the audience complicit in Jeff’s voyeurism. Much the same can be said about Poe. Through his clever manipulation of narrative techniques, he makes his readers complicit in the acts of a Peeping Tom.
The similarity between the situations of “Little Frenchman” and Rear Window allows further generalizations regarding the relationship between Poe’s story and the cinema. The Frenchman’s window frame anticipates the motion picture frame, and the sight of him in his window is not dissimilar to an opening shot in a motion picture. Since this image triggers Sir Patrick’s narrative, the story itself works like a voiceover narration. The events Sir Patrick narrates resemble a long flashback sequence.
Reading “Little Frenchman” in terms of its relationship to the frame tale, the window frame, and the motion picture frame offers three different ways of understanding how the story is mediated. Seeing it as a frame tale stripped of its outside narrative emphasizes its immediacy. As a crucial motif in the story, the window suggests that physical circumstances mediate Sir Patrick’s perception. Seeing the story as a kind of voiceover narration emphasizes that the tale of the Frenchman is being mediated by Sir Patrick. Poe complicates matters further by making Sir Patrick an unreliable narrator, which is obvious from the first paragraph.12 The dichotomy between what Sir Patrick says and how he says it reveals that his perception of reality cannot be trusted. For example, he calls himself the leader of London’s haut ton or, in his words, “the laider of the hot tun in the houl city o’ London,” but his colloquial dialect reveals that he is certainly not a member of London’s high society (183). The story about the injured Frenchman is being mediated by a narrator who bends the truth to cast himself in the best possible light.
Perhaps the events Sir Patrick describes never occurred. Think about it. He is entertaining a houseguest. Together they look across the way and see a man with his arm in a sling. Sir Patrick invents a humorous episode, which he tells for his guest’s amusement. (Another comparison here might be to the film, The Usual Suspects (1995)—frame tale, unreliable “narrator” spinning a wild tale, gazing at objects in the police detective’s office that give him launching points for storytelling. That film’s “Keyser Söze” might, in turn, be compared to Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, the element that we think is the central goal of the hero’s quest but is really secondary.) Though plausible, this particular interpretation does little to advance our understanding of the tale. In the name of critical appreciation, we must assume that some kind of encounter between Sir Patrick and the Frenchman did occur and that now Sir Patrick is telling a tale based on his personal experience regardless of how much his prismatic ego has refracted the truth.
The unreliability of Sir Patrick’s narration encourages readers to scrutinize his perception and make sense of how he interprets what he sees. With this character, Poe takes the opportunity to explore one of his favorite topics, the relationship between surface appearance and the truth beneath the surface. Physiognomy, phrenology, autography, apparel, home decor: all are exterior indicators of personality, and Poe used each, separately or in combination, as crucial building blocks to construct his stories. To what extent, Poe wondered, do exterior signs represent personality?
Using Sir Patrick’s visiting card as the story’s opening motif, Poe makes the theme of representation explicit. After all, the visiting card is a device deliberately intended to represent the person it identifies. Sir Patrick begins to describe himself to his guest by describing his card. The information it contains verifies his social status: “It’s on my wisiting cards sure enough (and it’s them that’s all o’ pink satin paper) that inny gintleman that plases may behould the intheristhing words, ‘Sir Pathrick O’Grandison, Barronit, 39 Southampton Row, Russel Square, Parrish o’ Bloomsbury.’” After mentioning the pinkish hue of his visiting cards, he attempts a clever play on words, telling his guest, “And shud ye be wantin to diskiver who is the pink of purliteness quite . . . why it’s jist mesilf” (183).
Having Sir Patrick use the word “pink” to describe both the color of his visiting cards and the essence of his personality, Poe reinforces the connection between the visiting card and the person it identifies. Sir Patrick’s fascination with the color and quality of the paper on which his cards are printed anticipates Patrick Bateman’s fascination with his handsomely printed business cards in American Psycho (2000). In both instances, the elegant appearance of the card bears little resemblance to the person it identifies. In Sir Patrick’s case, the falseness of the impression is revealed as soon as Sir Patrick opens his mouth. The spoken word exposes what the printed word masks.
Characterizing the impression he strikes in public, Sir Patrick describes how his personal presence affects women: “But it’s the iligant big figgur that I have, for the reason o’ which all the ladies fall in love wid me. Isn’t my own swate self now that’ll missure sure the six fut, and the three inches more nor that in me stockings, and that am excadingly will proportioned all over to match?” (183–84). Asserting that he is well proportioned all over, Sir Patrick engages in a little sexual boasting. His bawdy humor is not without serious implications. This bit of vulgarity reveals how widely accepted was the idea that a person’s appearance in public accurately indicated what was hidden from public view.
Besides his rough-hewn diction and coarse humor, Sir Patrick’s opening words supply other details about him. His name, O’Grandison, recalls the title character of Samuel Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Since the book’s publication in the mid-eighteenth century, Richardson’s title character had become a masculine ideal among English and American readers. Only in the most ironic sense can Poe’s O’Grandison be considered a masculine ideal. Poe uses the character to spoof the whole notion of a masculine ideal.
Sir Patrick’s speech is liberally peppered with proverbial comparisons, which impugn the character even further. Describing his new lifestyle as a baron, for example, Sir Patrick explains that for the past six weeks he has been living “like a houly imperor” (183). Unlike other contemporary American authors—Herman Melville comes to mind—Poe generally avoided incorporating traditional sayings in his work. His obsession with originality often prevented him from using proverbs in earnest. Calling “the whole race of what are termed maxims and popular proverbs,” Poe identified “nine-tenths” of them as “the quintessence of folly.”13 When he did use proverbs, he usually put them in the mouths of characters he intends to ridicule. Think of all the clever sayings Peter Proffit spouts in “The Business Man” (and General John A. B. C. Smith in “The Man That Was Used Up”).14 Sir Patrick’s use of proverbial comparisons in the early parts of “Little Frenchman” offers an indication that he, too, will become an object of the author’s ridicule during the story.
Sir Patrick’s opening words also provide an initial impression of the Frenchman, whom he calls “the three fut and a bit that there is, inny how, of the little oul furrener Frinchman” (184). Poking fun at the Frenchman’s diminutive stature, Sir Patrick implicitly denigrates his sexual prowess. Poe’s use of a little Frenchman is typical of the times. In American culture, the little Frenchman had already become an object of humorous derision. A tall tale entitled “A Prodigious Nose,” which appeared in the May 1835 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, for example, makes a little Frenchman the victim of a large-nosed man with whom he must share a room. Poe reviewed this issue of the Messenger for the Baltimore press and said that it was “upon the whole the best yet issued.”15 In “The Character of a Native Georgian,” Augustus Baldwin Longstreet includes “a gay, smerky little Frenchman.”16 The author who most strongly influenced Poe in this regard was George P. Morris. A story of his entitled “The Little Frenchman” was reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1838 as part of a biographical sketch of the author.17 Morris’s little Frenchman was a recurring character. His most famous tale was “The Little Frenchman and His Water Lots,” which initially appeared in the New-York Mirror in 1836 and was reprinted in a collection of his stories.18 In North and South American culture, the little Frenchman would continue to be a stock humorous character. Consider the role Arduíno Colassanti plays in the Brazilian film, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman.
Before finishing his introduction to the story, Sir Patrick mentions the pretty widow Mrs. Treacle or, as he says, the “purty widdy Misthress Tracle.” Calling Mrs. Treacle his “most particuller frind and acquaintance,” Sir Patrick reaffirms his unreliability as a narrator. She is certainly no friend of his and can scarcely be called an acquaintance. He knows her almost solely from seeing her at her window. According to him, Mrs. Treacle fell in love with him at first sight. Looking through her window toward his, she saw him and then, in order to get a better look, quickly lifted her window and raised a gold spyglass to her eye. Sir Patrick considers himself so adept at reading people’s gestures that he can instantly tell what her eyes are saying: “Och! the tip o’ the mornin to ye, Sir Path-rick o’Grandison, Barronitt, mavoureen; and it’s a nate gintleman that ye are, sure enough, and it’s meself and me fortin jist that’ll be at yur sarvice, dear, inny time o’ day at al at all for the asking” (184).
Sir Patrick’s depiction of Mrs. Treacle provides a good indication of how his mind works. As he sees people, he knows what they are thinking from their appearance, particularly from their gestures. Their thoughts seem so real to him that he can convert their physical gestures directly into words. Both the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” and the narrator of “The Philosophy of Furniture” possess similar abilities to understand personality by reading external signs. One understands people by their apparel, physiognomy, and mannerisms. The other understands people by their home decor. Sir Patrick thinks that he can understand people by their appearance and physical gestures. Of course he cannot, but much of the tale’s humor stems from the incongruity between reality and Sir Patrick’s perception and articulation of reality. Sir Patrick is an ironic precursor to Auguste Dupin, for whom all men have “windows in their bosoms.”
The next day, while considering whether he should send a love letter to Mrs. Treacle, he receives a visit from the little Frenchman. Though Sir Patrick has difficulty understanding the Frenchman’s words “excipting and saving that he said ‘pully wou, woolly wou,’” he does get the message that the Frenchman “was mad for the love o’ my widdy Misthress Tracle” (185). Furthermore, the Frenchman leads him to understand that the widow had a penchant for him—“a puncheon,” Sir Patrick calls it. Upon learning this information, Sir Patrick becomes angry, but, refusing to show his anger, he feigns friendship. As he tells his guest, “I made light o’ the matter and kipt dark, and got quite sociable wid the little chap” (186). The cleverness of Sir Patrick’s expression reveals the artifice underlying his story. Furthermore, his words reveal an inconsistency in his thinking. While he acknowledges his own ability to make light while keeping dark, he does not recognize this ability in others. He can mask his true feelings from them, but they cannot mask their true feelings from him.
To keep an eye on the Frenchman, Sir Patrick must accompany him to Mrs. Treacle’s apartment. Suddenly, Sir Patrick is forced from the safety of his own private space and into the dangerous space of the widow’s apartment, where he can no longer control what will happen. Once inside, the Frenchman takes a seat to her right. Not to be outdone, Sir Patrick sits to her left. As they converse, Sir Patrick imagines he has the upper hand in the matter of her affection because he has “divarted her leddyship complately and intirely, by rason of the illigant conversation that I kipt up wid her all about the swate bogs of Connaught” (187). He becomes so confident of her affection that he makes an effort to hold her hand. For safety’s sake, she puts her hands behind her back to avoid both his grasp and the Frenchman’s.
The rest of the story is predictable. The Frenchman reaches behind her with his left hand, Sir Patrick with his right, and they squeeze one another’s hands, each thinking the other has hold of the widow. As they argue over her, she rises from the sofa. Only then do they realize they have hold of one another. Mrs. Treacle’s footmen soon roust the two suitors from her apartment. Sir Patrick ends his tale as follows:
Ye may jist say, though for its God’s truth that afore I lift hould of the flipper of the spalpeen, (which was not till afther her leddyship’s futmen had kicked us both down the stairs,) I gived it such a nate little broth of a squaze, as made it all up into raspberry jam.
“Wouly-wou” says he “pully-wou” says he “Cot tam!”
And that’s jist the thruth of the rason why he wears his lift hand in a sling. (191)
Sir Patrick’s closing sentence brings the tale to the present and reminds his guest what had initiated the story in the first place, the sight of the Frenchman in his window.
As Sir Patrick stands at his window looking toward the Frenchman and the Frenchman stands at his window looking back, they create mirror images of one another. The Frenchman’s physical injury is matched by Sir Patrick’s psychical injury. As he tells the story to his guest, Sir Patrick replicates the behavior he evinced while in conversation with the Frenchman. He makes light of the encounter with Mrs. Treacle but keeps dark the hurt he feels from her rejection. Restored to the safety of his own apartment, he once more can see the Frenchman and Mrs. Treacle from a distance, both framed by their windows. He can now reestablish control over what he sees.
The action of “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling” anticipates the action of “The Man of the Crowd.” The Frenchman’s behavior forces Sir Patrick to leave his apartment window to enter the perilous world of Mrs. Treacle’s parlor; the sight of a mysterious old man jars the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” from his complacency and compels him to leave his comfortable coffeehouse window seat to enter the mean streets of London to follow the old man in an attempt to read his personality. Poe gives Sir Patrick an option he withholds from the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd.” Poe almost wears the narrator out by making him wander the London streets for a day and a half, but he never lets him return to the comfort of his coffeehouse window. After forcing Sir Patrick from his apartment and showing him the difficulties and uncertainties that lurk beyond its bounds, Poe lets him return to his apartment window. Home from his adventure at Mrs. Treacle’s, he can now recapture his previous fantasies. He looks in one direction to see the woman he loves and who, he imagines, loves him. He looks in another direction to see his wounded rival and imagines himself a triumphant lover. The fantasy is complete. It will remain so—providing Sir Patrick O’Grandison no longer ventures outside. Perceiving the world from his apartment, he has imprisoned himself within his own window lattices.
1. [Edgar Allan Poe,] “The Irish Gentleman and the Little Frenchman,” Bentley’s Miscellany 8 (1840): 45–48.
2. [Edgar Allan Poe,] “The Irish Gentleman and the Little Frenchman,” Spirit of the Times 10 (1 August 1840): 254–55.
3. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941; reprinted, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 289; Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969–1978), 2: 462; J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Limits of Reason: Poe’s Deluded Detectives,” American Literature 47 (1975): 186.
4. Jack Kaufhold, “The Humor of Edgar Allan Poe,” Virginia Cavalcade 29 (1980): 143.
5. Beverly Peterson, “Inviting Students to Challenge the American Literature Syllabus,” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 28 (2001): 379.
6. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine, eds., The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition (1976; reprinted, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 295.
7. Edgar Allan Poe, “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling,” in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840), 183. Subsequent references to this story come from this edition and will be cited parenthetically.
8. Kevin J. Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56 (2002): 450–51.
9. Kevin J. Hayes, “Early-Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1998, ed. David Nordloh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 221–22.
10. Kevin J. Hayes, “The Flaneur in the Parlor: Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture,’” Prospects 27 (2002): 103.
11. Dana Brand, “Rear-View Mirror: Hitchcock, Poe, and the Flaneur in America,” in Hitchcock’s America, edited by Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–34; Dennis R. Perry, Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 146–56.
12. Daniel Royot, “Poe’s Humor,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (2002; reprinted, Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2004), 61.
13. Poe, Essays and Reviews, 679.
14. J. A. Leo Lemay, “Poe’s ‘The Business Man’: Its Context and Satire of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 33.
15. Democritus, Jr., pseud., “A Prodigious Nose,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1835): 468; David K. Jackson, “Four of Poe’s Critiques in the Baltimore Newspapers,” Modern Language Notes 50 (1935): 254.
16. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c. in the First Half Century of the Republic (Augusta: S. R. Sentinel, 1835), 41.
17. “Biographical Sketch of George P. Morris,” Southern Literary Messenger 4 (1838): 663–71.
18. George P. Morris, The Little Frenchman and His Water Lots with Other Sketches of the Times (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1839).