CHAPTER 2
Baltimore (1827–1838)
Having declared his independence and left Richmond and John Allan—forever, he imagined—in the spring of 1827, Poe traveled by ship to Boston, the city of his birth. Over the decade that followed, he would become, as he phrased it in “To Helen,” a “weary, way-worn wanderer.” Accordingly, this chapter follows Poe up and down the East Coast as he repeatedly reinvented himself (as soldier, cadet, poet, satirist, critic, editor) but focuses in particular on his experience in Baltimore, where he lived briefly in 1829 and then returned, in 1831, for four years. It was not so much the length of his residence that makes Baltimore the primary focus of this chapter as it is the significance of his time there: in Baltimore, he taught himself to write fiction for magazines, and he found a family.
Edgar did not stay long in Boston in 1827, and yet he was, in a sense, reborn there, as a published poet, arranging with Calvin A. Thomas to print at most two hundred copies of a slender volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. His first publication went almost unnoticed, and he allowed it to remain “lost” for the rest of his career. His name does not appear on the title page, which reads “by a Bostonian.” An epigraph from the poet William Cowper on the same page—“Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm, / And make mistakes for manhood to reform”—reflects the subject matter of Poe’s early poems, as well as the transitional moment in which he found himself as he temporarily reclaimed his identity as a Bostonian, shedding his Richmond skin. In the long title poem, Poe’s Byronic hero Tamerlane recounts his youthful quest for glory, achieved at the cost of true love and happiness. “I reached my home—my home no more— / For all had flown that made it so” (P 39), he says, upon learning that the woman of his dreams has died while he was conquering the world. Whether casting himself in the role of Tamerlane or, in other poems, adopting a more transparently autobiographical “I,” Poe presents himself as youthful but world-weary, haunted by his own dreams and his belief in a dark personal destiny. In a poem titled “Dreams,” Poe clings to some alternate reality, even one of “hopeless sorrow”:
’Twere better than the dull reality
Of waking life, to him whose heart shall be,
And hath been ever, on the chilly earth,
A chaos of deep passion from his birth! (P 68)
By the time Tamerlane and Other Poems rolled off the press in the summer of 1827, its homeless author had enlisted in the US Army, covering his tracks by using the name Edgar A. Perry; he was assigned to Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. Before the end of the year, his company shipped to Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. While stationed there, throughout 1828, Poe must have visited nearby Charleston, where his mother had performed on several occasions, the last of which was in January 1811, when he was two years old. Some traces of Poe’s time in the South Carolina Lowcountry surface in his later work. If he explored the files of the Charleston Courier looking for references to his mother, he might have found an 1807 poem entitled “The Mourner,” which bears an unmistakable resemblance to “Annabel Lee,” the ballad he would write weeks before his death in 1849.1 He would also use Sullivan’s Island as the setting of his sensational buried-treasure tale “The Gold-Bug” in 1843 and as the landing strip for a transatlantic balloon voyage in a newspaper hoax in 1844. But, throughout his career, when asked for biographical information, Poe chose to substitute stories of foreign adventure in Greece and Russia for his more mundane service as an enlisted man, and with it his year on Sullivan’s Island. Consequently, biographical articles on Poe up until the 1880s contain no references to Private Edgar Perry, and very few people who knew him as Edgar Poe (perhaps only the Allans) were aware of that chapter of his life.
While the mythical Poe whose image we carry around today—the impulsive, undisciplined, and rebellious genius—would seem ill suited for army life, he actually thrived during his two years of enlistment. As one of the few literate soldiers in his company, he was appointed company clerk while at Fort Moultrie, and was later promoted to sergeant major, the army’s highest noncommissioned rank.2 Perhaps more consistent with our contemporary, gothic image, Poe also served as an artificer, a maker of explosive devices.3 His term of enlistment was five years, but, after less than two, he wanted out; just before his company was transferred in December 1828 to Fortress Monroe near Hampton, Virginia, he began asking his foster father to approve his discharge (a condition set by his commanding officer). Lest Allan see this request as a sign of failure or retreat, Poe again played up his ambition and independence: “I have thrown myself upon the world, like the Norman conqueror on the shores of Britain &, by my avowed assurance of victory, have destroyed the fleet which could alone cover my retreat—I must either conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced” (L 1:15). At the same time, Poe needed Allan’s help, but his foster father was in no hurry to provide it; at least three letters from Poe between December and February went unanswered.
A temporary turning point in their relationship came with the death of Frances Allan, at the age of forty-four, on February 28. She had been ill for some time, possibly from tuberculosis, declining while Poe was away. No letters from Poe to his foster mother survive, and he made few references to her later in life, but he must have felt considerable tenderness and gratitude for the woman who had given him a comfortable childhood and some measure of maternal affection. Following her death, Edgar reconciled with Allan, who sanctioned the discharge and paid for a substitute to serve the rest of his enlistment term. He also supported Poe’s new plan: to obtain an appointment to the US Military Academy and return to the army as an officer. Poe’s West Point aspiration might have sprung from this reconciliation; he hadn’t mentioned it in his earlier letters, but now that he once again felt like John Allan’s son, this more conventional, gentlemanly career path seems to have replaced whatever ship-burning, world-conquering scheme he had previously imagined as a way of becoming the next Byron.
Poe had reengaged Allan’s support, but relations between them still must have been too tepid for him to remain at Moldavia, the family mansion, because, after a brief stay in Richmond, he moved temporarily to Baltimore in May 1829, stopping in Washington, DC, to meet with secretary of war John Eaton about the appointment to West Point. The Poe family had deep roots in Baltimore, most auspiciously in the person of Poe’s late grandfather, “General” David Poe, a merchant and wheel manufacturer who held the position of assistant deputy quartermaster general during the Revolutionary War. His widow, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, was living there with her daughter Maria Clemm, also widowed, and Maria’s two children. Edgar may have lived with them for at least part of this stay; he lodged for some (probably brief) period in Beltzhoover’s Hotel at Hanover and Baltimore Streets, the same building where Francis Scott Key had written “The Star-Spangled Banner” fifteen years earlier. In June, trying to explain to John Allan what had become of some money he had sent, he reported that his cousin, Edward Mosher, had stolen forty-six dollars from him at Beltzhoover’s while they were sharing a room (L 1:33). There is no evidence of Poe working for money during this approximately six-month period; temporarily in Allan’s good graces, he expected his foster father to provide for him while he petitioned for a place on the roll at West Point. Introducing himself in a letter to the novelist and editor John Neal, Poe explained that “I am and have been, from my childhood, an idler” (L 1:47). That characterization was partly the pose of a budding Romantic author, but it rings true for this stage of his life. Poe remained in Baltimore for the rest of 1829, with one brief visit to Philadelphia to try to arrange publication of a second book of poems, and another trek—literally on foot, or so he claimed—to Washington, to see Secretary Eaton again in July.
Meanwhile, having failed to persuade the Philadelphia publisher Carey, Lea & Carey, Poe arranged with a small Baltimore firm, Hatch & Dunning, to print a few hundred copies of a book titled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in December 1829. Like its predecessor, Al Aaraaf mined Poe’s early preoccupation with dreams and youthful, romantic angst; this volume, too, was destined for obscurity, though it did receive a handful of notices in the press. Allan continued to support Poe’s West Point ambition; he kept sending Edgar money through the end of 1829, and Poe in return sent him a copy of Al Aaraaf. Allan brought Poe back into his Richmond household in early 1830, as his name made its way up West Point’s waiting list.
Not surprisingly, the rapprochement between Poe and Allan proved temporary. Poe was finally admitted to West Point, but, before departing in May or June, he received a letter from Sergeant Samuel “Bully” Graves, who had assumed the remainder of his term of enlistment in the army: Poe still owed him money for the arrangement. In his reply, Poe placed the blame on his foster father, claiming, “Mr. A is not very often sober” (L 1:54). Determined to get paid, Graves must have revealed the contents of Poe’s letter to Allan, infuriating him. Frances Allan’s death the previous year had opened the door for reconciliation, but John Allan’s marriage in the fall of 1830—to Louisa Patterson of New York—seems to have closed off any remaining affection he might have felt for Edgar.4 Allan did not visit Poe at West Point while in New York for his wedding, nor was Poe invited to the ceremony; in fact, Allan made it clear that he did not wish to hear from him. Poe’s response, after another long, defensive letter to Allan, was to leave West Point by way of court-martial: in January he simply stopped showing up for drills, roll calls, and class, and, on February 18, he was dismissed. Though briefer than his army stint, Poe’s six months at West Point were similar in that he seemed comfortable enough with military discipline and excelled academically (finishing third in French and seventeenth in mathematics on his exams in a class of eighty-seven) until he abruptly decided to move on. The timing, coupled with Poe’s correspondence with Allan, strongly suggests that his departure was prompted by Allan’s marriage and severance of communication. As a practical matter, the academy did not provide living expenses, and now neither would Allan; more significant, Poe’s vision of himself as an officer and gentleman dissolved, as he once again had no claim to Allan’s name or fortune.
Before leaving West Point, Poe collected subscription funds from his fellow cadets for a third volume of poetry. He had written some satirical verse during his time as a cadet, and his classmates must have been eager to see some of it in print. Poe accordingly had the book printed in New York City when he left the academy, and dedicated Poems by Edgar A. Poe, Second Edition “To the U. S. Army Corps of Cadets.” But the contents, devoid of West Point humor, probably disappointed those first readers. In fact, one cadet inscribed his copy, “This book is a damn cheat.”5 Like Al Aaraaf, the 1831 volume collects some of the stronger previously published verse along with new material, this “second edition” implicitly suppressing the 1827 Tamerlane and Other Poems. While still introspective, the new poems—including “To Helen,” “Israfel,” and “The Doomed City” (later retitled “The City in the Sea”)—are less self-pitying and generally more mature, exhibiting a richer vocabulary and more compelling imagery than his earlier verse. The four years between his first collection and this third, between his eighteenth and twenty-second years, had been full of movement and uncertainty: Boston, Sullivan’s Island, Old Point Comfort, Baltimore, Richmond, and West Point, oscillating between independence and attachment (emotional and financial) to John Allan. Now he found himself in New York, penniless and ill, so he swallowed his pride yet again and appealed to Allan for money. A few weeks later, he wrote to his former superintendent at West Point, asking for a certificate showing his high class rank prior to dismissal—that, and a personal reference letter to anyone he might know in Paris.
Poe never made it to Paris, but instead moved back to Baltimore in the spring of 1831. Though in his desperation he still regarded John Allan as a potential source of cash, there was no going back to Moldavia now, and living anywhere else in Richmond with no means of support, as well as with the stigma of being a rich man’s disowned foster child, would have been unbearable. His closest family, the household headed by his father’s sister Maria Clemm, was in Baltimore.
Like Richmond, Baltimore had established itself in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a hub of regional commerce, thanks to a vibrant shipping trade and, especially as overland transportation developed, access to wheat and other crops. Also like Richmond, local manufacturing was starting to play a larger role in the city’s economy by the 1820s and 1830s, as New York increasingly dominated the European import-export market. Baltimore’s overseas shipping was slumping somewhat in the 1830s, but the port remained vital to the local economy, with over five hundred vessels arriving annually.6 The young city had all but missed out on canal building as a means of connecting raw materials, manufacture, and markets, but the city took the lead in regional rail transportation: work on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad began in 1828 with a combination of horse and steam power, and it was taking passengers soon afterward.7 Meanwhile, new industries included copper and chemical factories as well as iron-rolling mills, while smaller manufactories were producing tinware, gunpowder, cigars, stoves, clothing, and other consumer goods.8
Accordingly, the city was growing rapidly: in the 1830 census, Baltimore passed Philadelphia, becoming second to New York City in population, five times the size of Richmond. Its population increased sevenfold (from 13,500 to 102,300) in the half-century from 1790 to 1840, driven by immigration; in immigrant population, too, it was second only to New York, albeit a distant second.9 Baltimore was a young city, and it must have felt that way, with relatively few “native” residents in the 1830s mixing with thousands of recent arrivals.10 A large portion of the populace—one-fourth as of 1820—was African American, but the number of enslaved Baltimoreans was decreasing as the free black population rose dramatically in the first half of the century.11
Figure 2.1 Plan of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1836, with darkened areas indicating development. Poe’s residences with the Clemm family, Mechanics Row (1) and North Amity Street (2) are marked. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.)
Throughout this expansion, Baltimore’s identity was a work in progress, less defined than other major East Coast cities. Boston was regarded as the cradle of American civilization, Puritan and Revolutionary; New York was already Gotham, the commercial and cultural heart of the nation; Philadelphia was the Quaker City, its patron saint the wise and practical Ben Franklin. Richmond, the capital not only of Virginia but of the upper south, was defined largely by its planter/merchant aristocracy. Baltimore, though, was culturally both north and south. Its economy was not dependent on slave labor but certainly made use of it; even as slavery declined there, abolition would never take hold.
Baltimore barely existed as a city prior to the Revolution, in which it played a relatively small role, but recent history, particularly the War of 1812, along with the boosterism surrounding the B&O Railroad, provided a foundation for civic pride. In 1815, the year after the Battle of Baltimore and the defense of Fort McHenry, the city commissioned Maximilien Godefroy to design the Battle Monument: placed on a centrally located square along Calvert Street between Fayette and Lexington, the neoclassical column bore the inscription “Baltimore pledges eternal remembrance to the republican virtue of her sons.”12 That same year, the cornerstone for another, much taller column in honor of George Washington was laid on a hill just north of the city. Designed by Robert Mills, architect of Richmond’s Monumental Church and, later, the more famous Washington Monument, it was a highly visible landmark. These two new monuments were enough for John Quincy Adams to dub Baltimore “the Monumental City,” but Godefroy, Mills, and Benjamin Henry Latrobe also designed a number of imposing neoclassical buildings (both public and private) that enhanced the cityscape’s “monumental” feel.13 The city also boasted five public fountains, set off on landscaped squares.14 Frances Trollope, in her widely read Domestic Manners of the Americans, described the favorable visual impression Baltimore made in the 1830s, calling it “one of the handsomest cities to approach in the Union. The noble column erected to the memory of Washington, and Catholic Cathedral, with its beautiful dome, being built on a commanding eminence, are seen at a great distance. As you draw nearer, many other domes and towers become visible, and as you enter Baltimore-street, you feel that you are arrived in a handsome and populous city.… even the private dwelling-houses have a look of magnificence, from the abundance of white marble with which many of them are adorned.”15
Like other northeastern cities, Baltimore was building local infrastructure in the form of gas pipes to provide streetlights, and sixteen miles of water lines.16 But the “internal improvements” that would bolster commerce with other regions was a greater source of pride. The cornerstone-laying ceremony for the B&O on July 4, 1828, was accompanied by a parade of representatives of various trades and manufacturers, a patriotic celebration of the bright future the railroad promised. The city’s printers mounted a handpress onto a platform, from which they issued copies of the Declaration of Independence.17 A song written for the event shows the public face of a city determined to compete with New York and Philadelphia:
Here’s a rode [sic] to be made,
With the Pick and the Spade,
’Tis to reach to Ohio, for the benefit of trade;
Here are mountains to be levell’d,
Here are vallies [sic] to be fill’d,
Here are rocks to be blown, and bridges too to build.
And we’re all hopping, skipping, jumping,
And we’re all crazy here in Baltimore.18
Figure 2.2 View of Baltimore, William H. Bartlett, 1840. This somewhat idealized painting conveys both the “monumental” image of the city and the encroachment of industrial smokestacks. (Reproduced with permission from Steve Bartrick Antique Prints & Maps.)
Of course, this official can-do, “crazy” spirit was probably not so deeply felt among the working people who made Baltimore’s growth possible. As historian Seth Rockman demonstrates in his book Scraping By, the typical wage for a day laborer, seventy-five cents a day, could not really support a family; households were maintained by pooling meager resources—women’s sewing, for instance, along with men’s wage-earning and children’s scavenging.19 Women were the heads of between 10 and 20 percent of Baltimore households, such as the one Poe joined in the spring of 1831.
Managed by Maria Clemm, the family depended on income from several sources: most significantly, Poe’s bedridden grandmother received a widow’s pension of $240 per year, comparable to what an unskilled male laborer could earn. Maria earned additional money from needlework, and, at some point, the household included Edgar’s brother, Henry, who had a serious drinking problem but was probably still capable of earning some money from day labor. The forty-one-year-old Maria was also the mother of two children: Henry, thirteen, and Virginia, nine. They lived in a two-story house, most likely occupying only the second floor, on a block of Wilks Street—now the 1000 block of Eastern Avenue between Exeter Street and Central Avenue—known as Mechanics Row. Theirs was probably the corner house on a row of eight sharing a single roofline, two-story structures with dormers and small stoops.20 The “Hartford Run,” which ran alongside their house, was in effect an open sewer.21 Historians Mary Markey and Dean Krimmel describe this part of the Fells Point areas as “a solidly respectable middle-class neighborhood” at the time, but the Clemms’ living space was undoubtedly crowded, and they were probably able to afford the rent only because of Elizabeth Cairnes Poe’s annuity.22
According to the 1830 census, conducted the year before Edgar moved in, the Clemm household on Mechanics Row also included an enslaved African American woman.23 She might not have been the only enslaved person to pass through Maria’s ownership: a 1940 Baltimore Sun article claimed the discovery of a bill of sale from December 1829 for a “Negro” named Edwin, in which Edgar Poe acted as Maria’s agent.24 (The actual document has never been produced, but the scenario is hardly far-fetched.) Edwin was sold for forty dollars as a “term slave” who would be manumitted (at least in theory) nine years later at the age of thirty.25 Maria might have purchased Edwin specifically to hire him out as a source of income, but then sold his term in exchange for a larger, one-time sum. If that were the case, she would not have been exceptional as a white Baltimorean of modest means investing in slave labor as a commodity. Like Edwin, the enslaved woman who appears on the 1830 census might have been another income source for the household (which probably could not afford to keep a “servant”) or she might have been owned by someone else while boarding with the Clemms, again to provide additional income. (Of course, none of this mitigates the immorality of Maria’s engagement with slavery; I am merely speculating as to why a household of such limited means would have included an enslaved person.) In any case, the woman’s presence would not have been unusual; seven out of nine households on Mechanics Row in 1830 included either enslaved or free blacks.26 With that in mind, it is entirely possible that Poe crossed paths with a teenage Frederick Bailey, a slave who was hired out to a Fells Point shipbuilder in the early 1830s, and who would soon escape to New York and take the name of Frederick Douglass.27
While living on Mechanics Row, Poe seems to have contributed very little to the family coffers, though documentation of his activities during the early 1830s is so scarce that it is hard to be sure. He had little inclination to seek the kind of manual day labor that was building up the city in these years; some combination of class-consciousness and faith in his calling as an author probably prevented it. Indeed, despite his having been an athletic teenager and having met the physical demands of the army and West Point, it is hard to imagine Poe working in a factory, sweeping chimneys, or toiling on the “mud machine” that continually dredged the silt from Baltimore harbor.
It is unclear exactly how long Poe’s older brother lived with Maria Clemm and her family, but Henry and Edgar were both members of the household in the spring and summer of 1831. They had not lived together since their mother died, but they had seen each other and corresponded over the years and apparently felt a strong mutual attachment. The overseas travel that Edgar would fabricate in his own biography was borrowed from Henry’s real life in either the navy or merchant marine. Henry, too, was a writer; in fact, a few of Edgar’s early verses are virtually identical to poetry published under Henry’s name, leaving open the question of which brother actually wrote them.28 The circumstances surrounding their reunion were tragic, however; at the age of twenty-four, Henry had fallen victim to alcoholism and tuberculosis. When he died on August 1, 1831, the funeral service was held in the house on Mechanics Row. A few years later, in tribute to his brother, Poe would have his fictional character Augustus Barnard, the adventurous bosom friend of his novel’s narrator, Arthur Gordon Pym (whose name echoes its author’s), die at sea on August 1.
In October 1831, about half a year after moving to Baltimore, Edgar briefly resumed his correspondence with John Allan, making a familiar request for money, which Allan apparently provided. A month later, Poe reported to Allan that he was in jail, “arrested eleven days ago [November 7, 1831] for a debt which I never expected to have to pay, and which was incurred as much on H[enr]y’s account as on my own about two years ago” (L 1:69). Imprisonment for debt was not unusual: it happened to over nine hundred Baltimoreans in 1831, and for less than ten-dollar debts in half those cases.29 Poe asked Allan for eighty dollars; then his aunt Maria followed up, begging Allan for help in “extricating” his foster son. Poe wrote Allan yet again on December 15, and again two weeks after that. Allan eventually aided Poe one last time, but his help did not arrive until mid-January; according to Allan’s own note on one of Poe’s letters, he wrote to an associate in Baltimore to “procure his liberation” in December but “neglected” to send the instructions for over a month.30 Allan never wrote to Poe again. He did scribble on one of Poe’s old letters, referring to its author’s “Blackest Heart & deepest ingratitude,” and prophesizing that “his Talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor.”31 Poe would make just one more appeal to Allan a little over a year later and, having heard that Allan was seriously ill, may have tried to visit him at Moldavia in early 1834. It probably came as no surprise that when Allan died that March, he made no mention of his foster son in his will.
Up until his move to Baltimore, Poe had imagined himself strictly a poet: had he been John Allan’s heir, he could have been a gentlemanly “man of letters” or a rebellious—but still affluent—American Byron. But now, out of economic necessity, he had come to see writing as a profession, in the sense that he would produce texts for an impersonal market of readers and, one would hope, make a living at it. This obviously was not happening with his books of poetry, so Poe turned to the seemingly more marketable genre of prose fiction. In January 1832, perhaps while he was still in jail, he published his first story, “Metzengerstein,” in a Philadelphia paper called the Saturday Courier. The Courier had advertised a contest, soliciting original tales with a prize of one hundred dollars (probably a year’s rent for the Clemm household) going to the writer whose work was judged best by the editors. Literary competitions of this type were common throughout antebellum America. They were a gamble for authors, who would receive a large payment if they won but nothing if they lost, while the sponsoring periodical would acquire the right to publish, for free, any or all submissions.32 Looking to increase his odds, Poe sent five stories, none of which was deemed equal to “Love’s Martyr” by Delia S. Bacon. After “Metzengerstein,” a gothic revenge tale, the Courier would eventually publish the rest of Poe’s entries—“The Duc de l’Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “A Decided Loss,” and “Bon-Bon,” all satires—but he would receive no payment; his name would not even appear as the author of the other four stories. Such was Poe’s introduction to the world he would later call the “magazine prison-house.”
Despite not getting paid for these first five tales, Poe realized that entering competitions was a fairly sensible strategy for an unknown writer delving into a new genre. And although Baltimore was not on a par with New York or Philadelphia as a publishing center, it was a striving city eager to compete with its northern neighbors, and therefore not a bad place to (re)launch a literary career. Magazines and newspapers proliferated there; by one count, Baltimore produced seventy-eight periodicals between 1815 and 1833, although many of them were short-lived.33 More than twenty bookstores, some of which doubled as publishers, opened their doors during the same period, clustered along Baltimore Street, the central east-west corridor. The city also supported five subscription libraries, most notably the Baltimore Library Company, which allowed nonsubscribers like Poe to read its volumes on site, and several theaters offering a range of productions including Shakespeare, light opera, and contemporary melodramas.34 At the same time, literary Baltimore was a small enough world that Poe could become quickly recognized. Even during his brief residence there in 1829, by publishing Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, Poe gained some local attention. One episode, generally credited by scholars, has Poe losing a speed-writing bet at Seven Swans Tavern with a doctor-poet named John Lofland, the “Milford Bard,” over who could crank out more stanzas in an hour.35 The 1830 verse satire “The Musiad, or Ninead” pokes fun at writers from Baltimore and Philadelphia; Poe is gently teased but also praised for his precociousness throughout ten of the poem’s 101 lines: “Next Poe who smil’d at reason, laugh’d at law, / And played a tune who should have played at taw [marbles], / Now strain’d a license, and now crack’d a string, / But sang as other children dare not sing.”36
The roll call of regional poets in “The Musiad” suggests that literary Baltimore was a small world, in which a newcomer like Poe would be noticed. Like other cities, Baltimore was home to at least a few literary organizations that allowed for networking while maintaining a somewhat insular environment. The most prominent of these, the Delphian Club, had disbanded by the 1830s, but it would have been part of local lore, which Poe certainly would have absorbed. Drawing upon the practices of eighteenth-century literary coteries, the Delphian Club was exclusive, made up of writers who shared their work with each other and adopted comical pseudonyms such as Solomon Fitz-Quizz and Jehu O’Cataract. One Delphian, William Gwynn, was among Poe’s best-placed contacts when he moved to the city: Gwynn had known Edgar’s father David and, more recently, had employed Edgar’s second cousin Neilson Poe. Edgar had sent the manuscript of his second collection to Gwynn in 1829, seeking his help in getting it published, and he appealed (unsuccessfully) to Gwynn for a job with his Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser upon moving back in 1831.37
Poe almost certainly had this kind of club in mind as he constructed a fictional frame for a collection of stories he would call Tales of the Folio Club.38 Adding six new stories to the five published in the Saturday Courier, he assigned each one to a comically named author (Solomon Seadrift, Mr. Rouge-et-Noir) and presented the collection as a set of manuscripts seized from a meeting of the club. Poe’s fictional stand-in, outraged at having his own story judged the worst, absconds with the evening’s offerings and has them published to embarrass the group, which he calls a “Junto of Dunderheadism” (T 1:203). Although the collection would never be published as such, the concept highlights Poe’s ambitions and expectations in the early 1830s. For one thing, he was still thinking in terms of books (in this case, a collection of tales) even as he was experimenting with a form whose primary medium was the magazine. Moreover, he wanted to demonstrate his versatility: each Folio Club tale was supposed to have been written by a separate author, but all of them—tales and authors—were clearly Poe’s creations. Finally, he sought to position himself as both insider (he knows how these literary clubs operate) and outsider (he is insulted by them and mocks them). It is a model for the relationship to the publishing establishment that Poe would claim throughout his career.
But Poe hadn’t given up on poetry entirely, and, in early 1833, he began publishing poems in a Baltimore weekly, the Saturday Visiter. That summer, when the Visiter advertised another contest with cash prizes of fifty dollars for fiction and twenty-five dollars for poetry, he sent all six of his new “Folio Club” tales as well as the poem “The Coliseum.” The three judges were impressed; when they announced the winners in October 1833, they made it clear their task amounted to choosing which of Poe’s tales should win the fiction prize. They wisely chose “MS. Found in a Bottle,” Poe’s most immersive and provocative early story. The judges were also taken with Poe’s poem, a rather conventional tribute to the famous Roman ruin, but awarded that prize to “The Song of the Winds” by one Henry Wilton. When Poe heard that he had been denied the poetry prize because he had already secured the honors for fiction, and—even worse—that “Wilton” was actually John H. Hewitt, the editor of the Saturday Visiter, he was outraged, and confronted Hewitt, who later claimed to have “dealt [Poe] a blow which staggered him, for I was physically his superior.”39
“Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other”: so begins Poe’s prize-winning “MS. Found in a Bottle.” These sentiments reflect not just the “ill usage” he certainly felt at the hands of John Allan but the general estrangement he experienced during these pivotal years. Of course, the narrator is not Poe; in fact, at the outset of his adventure he is, in one important sense, Poe’s opposite: “I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime” (T 1:135). In other words, this is not the hyperimaginative, haunted speaker of Poe’s early poetry—not yet, anyway. As a passenger on a voyage to the Malay Archipelago, he encounters a seemingly supernatural storm, which eventually hurls his ship into “some watery hell,” specifically a giant whirlpool, where it is destroyed by another, much larger vessel, onto which the writer miraculously lands. Gradually, he deduces that he has boarded a ghost ship, like the Flying Dutchman, and that he has crossed over to a liminal afterlife: “We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss” (T 1:143). Before the “manuscript” breaks off, he conjectures that “we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction” (T 1:145).
Figure 2.3 The October 19, 1833, issue of the Saturday Visiter included Henry Wilton’s (John Hewitt’s) prize poem “Song of the Winds” (left column) and Poe’s prize story “MS. Found in a Bottle.”
“MS. Found in a Bottle” is thus a parable of a quickening imagination—appropriate for a young man discovering his powers as a fiction writer—and a speculation on postmortem consciousness. It should come as no surprise that Poe, who had recently lost his brother and was still no doubt haunted by earlier deaths—Helen Stanard, Frances Allan, and, most significant, his mother—would turn repeatedly to scenarios in which death is not the end. But, keeping in mind the tale’s opening sentences, we might also see it as a reflection of Poe’s own marginal existence. A year earlier, alone in New York, he had described his condition to Allan as delirious and near death: “I have no money—no friends—I have written to my brother—but he cannot help me—I shall never rise from my bed—besides a most violent cold on my lungs my ear discharges blood and matter continuall[y] and my headache is distracting—I hardly know what I am writing” (L 1:64). More recently, he had been jailed for debt. And, until this very story won its prize, he was a professed writer who had made no money whatsoever from his publications, and who was dependent on the generosity of relatives. Like that ship, Poe was living on the edge; like his narrator, he was writing for an audience that might never find him.
Poe wasn’t writing directly about Baltimore, but the anxieties he was experiencing there—particularly the possibility that, like Henry, he could die young (and what then?)—surface in these early imitations and satires. In various ways, the dead return or remain alive in the tales from the early 1830s: in his first published story, “Metzengerstein,” a murdered nobleman reappears as a horse to carry off his nemesis; in the comic “Duc de l’Omelette,” the effete title character successfully cheats in a card game with the Devil to preserve his soul. In “The Assignation,” two lovers carry out a suicide pact in order to be together for eternity. “Shadow.—A Parable” begins, “Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows” (T 1:188).40
His most trenchant early comic story, “A Decided Loss,” not only straddles the line between living and dead but also dramatizes the indignities of urban life, where an anonymous human body is completely depersonalized. As the story begins, the narrator is yelling at his wife, until he discovers that he can no longer speak, or exhale, because he has literally lost his breath. He is therefore taken for dead, a scenario that leads to his being abused—violently, repeatedly—for comic effect. Crushed by passengers on a mail stage, he is thrown out of the coach; while awaiting burial, his nose is chewed off by a couple of cats. He escapes from that predicament only to be mistaken for a condemned criminal and hanged; in the deliberately absurd logic of the tale, he can’t defend himself because he can’t speak, but neither can he perish on the gallows, having already lost his breath. Purchased by a physician for twenty-five dollars, his body is subjected to dissection and experimentation: his tormentor attributes his “kicking and plunging” (in an effort to prove “my existence”) to the electric charge of a galvanic battery. The story’s humor is grotesque and cartoonish, but underneath the slapstick is a man who has become an object, stripped of his dignity, unsure whether he’s dead or alive.
Another story added to the Folio Club lineup, “King Pest,” is set during the Black Plague in the fourteenth century, but its more immediate inspiration was probably the cholera pandemic of 1832, which struck Baltimore as well as other northeastern cities.41 A pair of seaman exploring a disease-ravaged London discover a macabre, drunken gathering presided over by the dead-alive figures of King and Queen Pest: drinking toasts to Death in a chamber decorated with skeletons, the assembled “royalty” (the Arch Duke Pest-Iferous, the Duke Tem-Pest, the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest) are both victims and personifications of pestilence. This grotesque dark comedy is yet another instance of Poe’s preoccupation, from the beginning of his career as a fiction writer, with a basic, inescapable question—what is it like to be dead?—something he must have contemplated often during these desperate years.
In addition to providing much-needed income, the Saturday Visiter contest introduced Poe to one of its judges, who proved to be a valuable mentor: John Pendleton Kennedy, a former Delphian Club member, one of Baltimore’s most prominent writers (he had recently published a popular novel, Swallow Barn) and one of its leading citizens. In a November 1834 letter, Poe provided Kennedy with an abridged (and not entirely accurate) version of his relationship with John Allan, ending with what he now described as a disinheritance: “I am thrown entirely upon my own resources with no profession, and very few friends. Worse than all this, I am at length penniless” (L 1:79). The following year, when Kennedy invited Poe to dinner, Poe replied by requesting a loan of twenty dollars so that he could buy clothes decent enough to make himself presentable. Kennedy later reported, “I gave him clothing, free access to my table and the use of a horse for exercise whenever he chose; in fact brought him up from the very verge of despair” (L 1:83). Kennedy tried to help Poe with his Folio Club volume, sending the manuscript to the publishing firm of Carey & Lea. Probably out of deference to Kennedy, Henry Carey said he would publish Poe’s book, even though “I do not expect to make anything.” Meanwhile, Carey advised Poe (via Kennedy) to sell his stories to magazines and gift books, though virtually all of them had already appeared in either the Saturday Courier or the Visiter.42 Carey stalled when Kennedy followed up on Poe’s behalf, and “Tales of the Folio Club” was never published.
While living on Mechanics Row, Poe became romantically involved with a woman from the neighborhood named Mary Starr, also known as Mary Devereaux. She was about seventeen at the time, about five years younger than Edgar. Because Starr gave her account of the relationship over fifty years after the fact, there is reason to question the accuracy of her details, but she provided an unusually vivid portrait of Poe during a period for which there is little other biographical evidence. She described him as passionate, impulsive, and jealous, suggesting that being Poe’s girlfriend was a tough job:
My intimacy with Mr. Poe isolated me a good deal. In fact my girl friends were many of them afraid of him, and forsook me on that account. I knew none of his male friends. He despised ignorant people, and didn’t like trifling and small-talk. He didn’t like dark-skinned people.… He was not well balanced: he had too much brain. He scoffed at everything sacred, and never went to church.… He said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom. He believed he was born to suffer, and this embittered his whole life. Mrs. Clemm also spoke vaguely of some family mystery, of some disgrace.43
While none of Starr’s assertions is shocking, Poe does come across as unusually irascible and judgmental in her portrait. Does “dark-skinned people” refer to African Americans? “Negroes” would have been a much more common term (in both the 1830s and 1889, when the interview was published); and why would she even mention that Poe didn’t like black people, given the pervasive racism of the time? It suggests to me that Poe’s prejudice extended to other “dark-skinned” ethnic groups or to immigrants generally. The sense of mystery and the belief that he was “born to suffer” are certainly echoed in Poe’s early poetry, and, given the tragedy and disappointments he had already experienced, that outlook is not too surprising.
Starr’s account also supports the assumption that Poe did not hold down a steady job, at least not in the year or so that they were seeing each other.44 “Eddie was never educated to work,” she remembered. “He was very proud and sensitive.” He was also sober for the most part, a claim made not only by Starr but also by another friend from Baltimore, Lambert Wilmer.45 However, drinking did contribute to Poe’s breakup with Starr: he showed up at her house much later than expected one night, intoxicated. They argued; then Mary got scared and tried to get away from him. According to Starr, when her mother intervened, Poe claimed he had a right to see her because “she is my wife now in the sight of Heaven.” In attributing this statement to Poe, her insinuation seemed to be that they had had sexual relations; she also said that “he would just as lief have lived with a woman without being married to her.” Though much of her reminiscence of Poe is sympathetic, she believed she had made “a narrow escape” by not marrying him.
Starr mentioned that in the aftermath of their breakup, Poe had his young cousin Virginia deliver messages to her. In fact, Poe was becoming increasingly attached to Virginia, and to his Aunt Maria. Starr described Virginia, who was probably ten or eleven years old at the time, as “delicate.… Her sole beauty was in the expression of her face. Her disposition was lovely. She had violet eyes, dark brown hair, and a bad complexion that spoiled her looks.” People who knew Virginia later in life do not say that her looks were in any way spoiled, but otherwise suggest that she remained much as Starr described her: graceful and childlike, with dark hair and dark eyes. She added that an Virginia already was very fond of Poe, “as any child would be of anybody that paid her attention.”46 The fondness was mutual: regarding her as more sister than cousin, Poe began calling Virginia “Sissy.” Poe’s friend Lambert Wilmer later recalled walking with him and Virginia “in the neighborhood of Baltimore” when they encountered a funeral. While listening to the obsequies, “Virginia became affected and shed more tears than the chief mourner. Her emotion communicated itself to Poe” and he too became greatly moved at the service for a stranger.47 Especially after the death of Henry, Poe must have been more inclined to cling to his young cousin, who in turn looked up to him.
At some point in 1833, the family moved from Mechanics Row to No. 3 North Amity Street in West Baltimore (now numbered 203 N. Amity, one of the three Poe houses that have been preserved). The reason for the move is uncertain, but it seems likely that cheaper rent was a motivation, given the family’s strained finances. The Clemm-Poe family’s new residence, half of a recently built duplex, was on the edge of town, about a mile and a half west of central Baltimore. Although they had the entire house, two floors and an attic, the structure was very small—about six hundred square feet—possibly no larger than the upper-floor living space of their previous home. The family endured a Spartan existence on the urban frontier: streetlights did not extend that far from the city center, and water would have to be carried from a nearby well or canal.48 The first-floor fireplace was surely inadequate for providing heat to upstairs bedrooms.
Living in poverty, Poe was determined to advance his career. Lambert Wilmer later recalled that his friend was “constantly occupied with his literary labors” during this period, but, again, he was bringing in almost no income.49 In the spring of 1835, he asked his friend Kennedy to recommend him for a teaching position at a public school, telling him that “in my present circumstances such a situation would be most desirable.”50 Poe did not get the teaching job, but Kennedy proved helpful in making another connection: with Thomas Willis White, the editor of a new Richmond magazine called the Southern Literary Messenger. Kennedy told White about Poe’s still unpublished “volume of very bizarre tales” and informed him that he had “turned [Poe] to drudging upon whatever may make money.”51 Poe began corresponding with White, promoting the Messenger with blurbs in other publications and contributing new stories.
Figure 2.4 The house where Poe and his family lived in Baltimore for more than two years, 1833–35 (left); Poe’s bedroom as it is displayed today.
In March, White published Poe’s “Berenice,” a macabre tale that continued to display his fascination with death proving to be other than what it seems. The story’s narrator develops an obsession with his dying wife’s teeth. The night following her burial, in a kind of somnambulist trance, he disinters her, and, upon waking, discovers not only that he has extracted her teeth but also that he did the hideous deed while she still lived, for she had been mistakenly buried alive. White worried about publishing such a cringe-inducing story, but Poe, even as he apologized for it, insisted that weird, sensational fiction would attract readers to the magazine. He described this popular mode as “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (L 1:84). Indeed, along with plots that straddle the line between life and death, these extreme stylistic mash-ups characterize almost all of Poe’s early fiction. In “Morella,” his next story for the Messenger, the title character is an unloved wife who dies in childbirth; as her daughter reaches puberty, the father recognizes her as a kind of replica of her mother. He loves his daughter dearly, but, when he acknowledges the uncanny resemblance, speaking the name “Morella,” it is as if he has resurrected his wife. “I am here!” answers the daughter, just before she dies. “With my own hands,” the father tells us, “I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first, in the charnel where I laid the second—Morella” (T 1:236).
Back in the real world, Poe’s grandmother Elizabeth Carines Poe died on July 8, 1835, and the annuity she had been receiving for her husband’s Revolutionary War service went with her, creating a true financial crisis for the household. Maria’s son Henry (not to be confused with Poe’s brother) had set out on his own, either in Baltimore or at sea, leaving just Edgar, Maria, and Virginia. Poe could hardly continue to draw on the family’s meager resources now, but, fortunately, he had recently received an offer from Thomas White to help edit the Messenger in Richmond. He moved there in late July or early August, but he did not want to live apart from Maria and Virginia. Having lost his parents in early childhood and, more recently, his foster parents, Poe was desperate to keep the familial love and support that had grown throughout the four years he had lived with the Clemms. Maria, whom Poe called “Muddy,” now regarded him as a son, and his affection for Virginia had developed into a romantic attachment. He broached the possibility of marriage, despite her being only thirteen, half his age.
Poe wanted his aunt and cousin to move to Richmond, but he now faced a new obstacle. Neilson Poe, Edgar’s prosperous second cousin and a Baltimore resident, volunteered to take in Virginia, support her and educate her. When Maria informed Poe of Neilson’s generous offer, he replied from Richmond with a frantic, pleading letter:
I have procured a sweet little house in a retired situation on [ch]urch hill … I have been dreaming every day & night since of the rapture I should feel in [hav]ing my only friends—all I love on Earth with me there, [and] the pride I would take in making you both comfort[able] & in calling her my wife—But the dream is over[.] [Oh G]od have mercy on me. What have I to live for? Among strangers with not one soul to love me. (L 1:102–3)
He added a postscript to Virginia: “My love, my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey, thi[nk w]ell before you break the heart of your cousin. Eddy” (L 1:104). There is no getting around the strangeness of Poe’s determination to marry his young cousin. While marriage between first cousins was not taboo in 1830s America, marriage between a twenty-six-year-old man and a thirteen-year-old girl was certainly unusual.52 Neilson might have made his offer specifically to block Poe’s marriage plans, assuming he knew of them, but it is also possible that Poe proposed the marriage to counter the possibility of Virginia joining Neilson’s family. Either way, was Poe clinging to a sister (“Sissy”) and mother (“Muddy”) or to a prospective wife and her mother? These relationships were not clearly delineated for Poe, as suggested by his use of the cloying phrase “my darling little wifey.”53
As his stunningly dramatic letter to Maria suggests, Poe was deeply shaken by the possibility of living without her and Virginia. Two weeks later, he wrote to Kennedy, thanking him for his help in getting the Messenger job but also confiding that he was seriously depressed, even hinting at suicide. He didn’t point to the possible family rupture as the cause, but he sounded as desperate as he did in his letter to Maria: “Write me immediately. Convince me that it is worth one’s while—that it is at all necessary to live, and you will prove yourself indeed my friend” (L 1:107). Soon after, Poe left White and Richmond, heading back to Baltimore, where he and Virginia may have been married privately: a license was issued on September 22. Poe then prevailed upon White to reinstate him and moved, with Virginia and Maria, back to Richmond in early October. Although he would never live in Baltimore again, he would visit many times, and would even claim the city, at least implicitly, as another hometown: providing biographical information for a publication years later, he wrote, “Born January, 1811. Family one of the oldest and most respectable in Baltimore.” Poe seems to have encouraged the belief that he was not only two years younger than he was, but also a Baltimorean.54
Edgar, Virginia, and Maria would spend the next fifteen months in Richmond. They moved into a boarding house run by a Mrs. Martha Yarrington on Bank Street, facing the state capitol. At nine dollars a week, this was relatively expensive lodging. They hoped Maria could establish a boardinghouse of her own: Poe secured funds from two distant cousins, William Poe in Alabama and George Poe Jr., in Georgia, for that purpose. At one point he made an agreement with his boss, Thomas White, to rent a house from him and board both his and White’s family, but the house proved too small. There is no record of the family having lived anywhere else in Richmond. On May 16, 1836, Edgar and Virginia, who was now fourteen, were married publicly at the Yarrington house. Having blocked Neilson Poe’s plan to shelter Virginia back in Baltimore, Poe had effectively become the head of the household. In a letter to William Poe soon after their arrival in Richmond, Maria described herself and Virginia as “entirely dependent on Edgar,” who was “indeed a son to me.”55 To George Poe a few months later (but still before the marriage ceremony), she described them as “under the protection of Edgar.”56
Living literally in the center of town, Poe surely saw and felt traces of his former life in Richmond, with all its losses and disappointments, wherever he turned. Mrs. Yarrington’s house was just a few blocks from the house where, as a child, Poe had lived with the Allans before their English sojourn, and about half a mile east of Moldavia, the urban mansion where John Allan’s widow and her family still resided. Shockoe Hill Cemetery, the burial place not only of Helen Stanard and Frances Allan but now also of John Allan, was about a mile and a half to the north, while St. John’s Churchyard, where his mother was interred in an unmarked grave, was about a mile to the east. He could walk to the Messenger office at Fifteenth and Main in less than five minutes.
From that small office, Poe launched the next phase of his career as an editor and critic, with a series of reviews and articles that drew national attention. His justification of the gory “Berenice” applied equally to his take-no-prisoners approach to book reviewing. Combining sarcasm, overstatement, and close reading, he made literary reviews entertaining and comic, while raising the hackles of old-fashioned editors. “Well!—here we have it! This is the book—the book par excellence—the book bepuffed, beplastered, and be-Mirrored”: so begins Poe’s take-down of the novel Norman Leslie by Theodore S. Fay, an editor of the New York Mirror and thus a well-connected figure in Gotham’s literary establishment. Poe goes on to mock the hype and the pretense of anonymity surrounding Fay’s novel, referring specifically to what was known as “puffing,” or indiscriminately praising the work of writers within one’s circle: “For the sake of everything puffed, puffing, and puffable, let us take a peep at its contents!” (ER 540). Poe takes more than a peep, ridiculing the novel mercilessly as he summarizes its plot, pronouncing it “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly or so villainously insulted!” (ER 546). The young editor had nothing to lose, attacking a powerful New York literary clique from the distant cultural outpost of Richmond. His attacks won him the attention he craved: magazines and weekly papers regularly exchanged copies to ensure that editors knew what their competitors were up to, and they commented regularly in print, essentially reviewing each other. Though opinions were divided over Poe’s tactics, he embraced the image of the “Tomahawk Man,” as he would soon be known.
Figure 2.5 An archival photograph of the building at Fifteenth and East Main Streets, Richmond, Virginia, that housed the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe’s workplace from 1835 to early 1837, blended with a contemporary photograph of the corner. (Archival photograph courtesy of the Valentine, Richmond, Virginia.)
Poe wrote little new fiction while editing the Messenger, but he republished most of the stories he had written in Baltimore, giving them a second, wider audience. And, along with his reviews, he embraced other attention-grabbing forms of nonfiction writing. In April 1836, he published a detailed exposé of a chess-playing automaton, a “machine” constructed to look like a man, with human reasoning skills. Although Poe’s conclusion—that a lever-pulling assistant was hidden inside the contraption—was no great revelation, his point-by-point analysis of the presentation and the architecture of deception reinforced his image as a rigorous critic while prefiguring the “raciocinative” method of his later detective fiction. In another feature, he decoded the signatures of well-known writers, posing as an autograph collector who deduces authors’ personal characteristics and abilities from the way they sign their names. Thus, the combative outsider-insider pose that he adopted with “The Folio Club” was on display throughout his writing for Messenger.
But, by the close of 1836, Poe and Thomas White were already near the end of their productive collaboration. Although Poe would later claim to have increased the Messenger’s subscription list almost eightfold during his editorship, the magazine’s growth, while healthy, was a more modest 40 percent, from about 1300 to 1800 subscribers.57 That margin might not have been enough to calm White’s concerns about Poe’s irascible editorial persona; White, who was more publisher than editor, and much less of a writer, also tussled with Poe over questions of editorial control. But it was probably Poe’s personal behavior that bothered White the most. In some ways, their relationship mirrored that of John Allan and his foster son: impressed as he was with Poe’s abilities, White recognized what he regarded as character flaws—most significant, occasional drunkenness—not long after Poe joined him in the office. Poe left him in the lurch when he returned temporarily to Baltimore in late 1835, and White made his staying sober a condition of reinstatement, suggesting that Richmond itself was a bad influence: “Edgar, when you once again tread these streets, I have my fears that your resolve will fall through,—and that you would again sip the juice, even till it stole away your senses.”58 By this point in his life, at age twenty-six Edgar was well aware that he had a low tolerance for alcohol and was unable to drink moderately, safe only when he abstained altogether. But as White pointed out, the “social” drinking endemic to Richmond (and any other US city) was a constant temptation.
A year later their relationship was again at the breaking point, and White wrote to another associate, the novelist and jurist Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, “Poe pesters me no little—he is trying every manoeuvre to foist himself on some one at the North.… He is continually after me for money. I am as sick of his writings, as I am of him,—and am rather more than half inclined to send him up another dozen dollars in the morning, and along with it all his unpublished manuscripts.”59 For his part, Poe referred to White in an 1840 letter as “illiterate and vulgar, although well-meaning” (L 1:236). Much as he had done ten years earlier in his break with Allan, Poe set out from Richmond for an unknown future. In both 1827 and 1837, he effectively disappeared—the first time into the army, where he became Edgar Perry, this next time into poverty and obscurity in New York City.
Whether Poe was fired by White or quit, he was willing to give up a steady-paying editorial position and try his luck in New York. Perhaps Richmond harbored too many ghosts for him. Poe had certainly come to feel underpaid and underappreciated by White, but he also must have sensed that bigger things were happening in his chosen profession up north, where, as White said, he would try to “foist himself” upon some other magazine proprietor. Unfortunately for biographers, 1837 and early 1838 offer few clues as to his whereabouts or activities. What is known is that he, Virginia, and Maria left Richmond for New York in February, and that they lived first in a house at Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place, near Washington Square, and then moved a few blocks further down Sixth Avenue to 113 ½ Carmine Street. One of these dwellings might have been a boardinghouse run by Maria; a bookseller named William Gowans later recalled living with the family for eight months, and reported that Poe was “one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and intelligent companions I have met with during my journeyings and haltings through divers divisions of the globe.”60
But early 1837 turned out to be a particularly bad time to move to New York: a financial panic ushered in an almost decade-long recession, of which Gotham was the epicenter. New York banks suspended specie payments for paper currency in May. The real-estate bubble burst, businesses folded, and the city’s dizzying growth temporarily ground to a halt.61 Before leaving the Messenger, Poe had begun what was supposed to be a serialized sea adventure, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but he gave White only two installments. Harper & Brothers agreed to publish the complete novel not long after Poe arrived in New York, announcing it as “nearly ready for publication” in April. But the novel did not appear for another fifteen months, as the Harpers curtailed their publications in the wake of the panic. Poe might have been writing steadily, but he published almost nothing in the year after leaving Richmond. Prior to the financial panic, still hopeful that his reputation as a fearless critic would lead to greater fame as a “magazinist,” he attended a New York publishers’ dinner for booksellers and proposed a toast “to the Monthlies of Gotham.” Almost nothing else is known of Poe’s first New York residence (he would return in 1844; see chapter 4), but that very lack of evidence suggests that it was a difficult year. Having transformed himself into a fiction writer in Baltimore and a caustic reviewer in Richmond, he had developed the skills to succeed in the literary marketplace. But, throughout 1837, all he could do was survive, along with his teenage bride and her doting mother, until it was time to start a new chapter in a new town.