CHAPTER 3

Philadelphia (1838–1844)

By early 1838, Poe’s once-promising career as a writer, critic, and editor had stalled in New York City, largely because of the Panic of 1837, which stymied the publishing sector along with the rest of the economy. Although the panic’s effects would radiate from New York throughout the northeast, it was still probably wise to try another city. Poe and family relocated to Philadelphia, hoping to meet with better fortune in what was then the second city of publishing and, arguably, the first for magazine publishing. And, to a great extent, he succeeded: professionally and artistically, Poe hit his stride during the next six years, eventually editing one of the nation’s highest-circulation magazines while writing most of the tales on which his modern reputation rests. He also became part of a professional and social network that surrounded his trade. By his own standards, his domestic life was stable as well, at least for a while: along with Virginia and Maria (“Sissy” and “Muddy”), he apparently managed to stay in the same house for almost four of their six years there. The trio’s devotion to each other deepened: Poe loved his wife dearly, and he came to think of Maria as his own mother. And yet success as a writer and editor did not lift Poe’s family out of poverty; he continued to be thwarted by his alcoholism and professional combativeness, and personal misfortune continued to haunt him throughout his Philadelphia years.

Like New York, Philadelphia saw its rapid economic development temporarily derailed by the Panic of 1837, and the city would continue to experience deflated wages and prices until the mid-1840s. In 1842, one well-off Philadelphian, Sidney George Fisher, would opine, “The streets seem deserted, the largest houses are shut up and to rent, there is no business, there is no money, no confidence & little hope … nobody can pay debts, the miseries of poverty are felt both by rich & poor, [and] everyone you see looks careworn and haggard.”¹ This would have been a familiar scene for Poe, who had not found steady employment in New York. Meanwhile, Harper & Brothers had to delay the publication of his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym for about a year, so the book he began in Richmond and completed in New York would not appear until his first year in Philadelphia.

But Fisher’s description of a penniless, hopeless town tells only part of Philadelphia’s story in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The city’s population was still growing, most rapidly in the new districts to the south, west, and north than in the city center. The metropolitan area (which would become incorporated in 1854) grew dramatically, from 161,410 residents in 1830 to 565,529 in 1860. The population of suburban Spring Garden—the area north of Vine St. where Poe would move in 1843—more than doubled, from just under 28,000 to almost 59,000, in the 1840s alone.² Philadelphia had become an industrial city in the 1830s, embracing coal, steam, canals, and railways; the panic would not stop the revolution that concentrated textile mills and heavy industry near the Delaware River.³ In addition to new factories and mills, Philadelphians took pride in the state-of-the-art waterworks completed in the 1820s on the Schuylkill River, northwest of the city.⁴ A short walk from the waterworks, Eastern State Penitentiary, designed by John Haviland, opened in 1829 and became a controversial model for the modern prison. Haviland and other architects such as William Strickland and Thomas U. Walter had transformed the cityscape in the years before the panic with grand structures of marble and granite, including the Second Bank of the United States, the US Mint, and the Philadelphia Arcade, as well as numerous churches and private homes.⁵

Largely because of these stately structures and the city’s well-established grid streetscape, visitors frequently remarked on the orderliness and “regularity” of Philadelphia and the continuing influence of its Quaker heritage. Charles Dickens invoked both of these tropes—somewhat negatively—in his description of the city in 1842: “It is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street. The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand, beneath its quakerly influence. My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord.”⁶ But profound instability not only lurked beneath that superficial decorum and regularity; it surfaced frequently. Historian Elizabeth Geffen attributes the “unprecedented civic violence” of the period to the rapid increase in population, which threw together disparate racial and ethnic groups, as well as widening inequality and a lack of decent housing.⁷ The city saw frequent strikes and other collective protests—for instance, vandalizing railroads to thwart the routing of new lines through a residential area—as well as violence associated with volunteer firemen’s clubs and street gangs.⁸ Still more disturbing was the sustained terrorist violence rooted in xenophobia and racism, which fueled at least five riots between 1834 and 1844. In May 1838, around the time Poe and family arrived, a mob burned down the newly built Pennsylvania Hall, a center of reform activity that had recently hosted a lecture by abolitionist Angelina Grimké. Firemen protected adjacent buildings but allowed the hall to collapse as a crowd gathered to watch. The following night, an African American orphanage was destroyed by a mob.⁹ The year Poe left for New York, 1844, at least fifteen people would be killed and dozens injured in nativist riots throughout Philadelphia.

Less visible than the dignified public structures, new construction often meant building in back lots while subdividing old houses into tenements, so that the orderly façade of the city’s broader streets hid slapdash architecture and often squalid living conditions.¹⁰ An 1849 Sanitary Commission report describes “badly contrived houses, crowded by occupants, filthy and poor, without ventilation or drainage, or receptacles for refuse, or supply of water, or the common comforts of life.”¹¹ This dynamic of an orderly, “regular” city hiding disorder, struggling to contain its own violent propensities, was at the heart of the most popular American novel of the first half of the century: The Quaker City; or the Monks of Monk Hall, by Poe’s friend and fellow Philadelphian George Lippard. A complex, lurid potboiler, Lippard’s 1844 novel sensationalizes and gothicizes the social conditions of Philadelphia during Poe’s time there. Monk Hall, where much of the novel’s action takes place, symbolizes Philadelphia’s corruption and depravity; frequented by superficially respectable gentlemen, it serves as the hub of the city’s network of dark schemes and sexual violence.¹²

Poe’s life during these years was deeply enmeshed in the flux and contradictions of mid-century Philadelphia. With Sissy and Muddy, he settled into a boarding house at 202 Mulberry (now Arch) Street run by a Mrs. Jones upon his arrival in early 1838. In or around September, they moved to what Poe described only as a “small house,” which he later called the “old place,” located probably in the vicinity of Sixteenth Street and Locust.¹³ The move itself typified a local demographic trend in that Poe left the old part of town, near the Delaware River, which was increasingly commercial and industrial, for the western half of the grid, closer to the Schuylkill. Philadelphia’s population was moving in that direction, shifting the city’s center: the portion of its inhabitants living west of Seventh Street increased from about 40 percent in 1830 to 60 percent in 1840.¹⁴ Poe and his family had moved to an area that for another decade or so might be considered the outskirts, about two blocks east of Rittenhouse Square. As contemporary maps show, the blocks around the square were not yet built up in the early 1840s. Affluent citizens had begun building homes west of Broad Street, but Poe’s part of town remained semirural and working class. When the wealthy lawyer Philip Physick commissioned John Haviland to design a house at Nineteenth and Walnut, the resulting Greek Revival mansion was dubbed “Physick’s Folly” for its incongruity with the undeveloped, hardscrabble surroundings.¹⁵ Poe, Virginia, and Maria lived four or five blocks away and probably watched the grand house being built across the barren Rittenhouse Square. This sparsely populated section of the Eighth Ward was transitioning, however. In the 1830s, gas street lamps and cobblestone pavements had been installed on the more heavily traveled streets from the Delaware to the Schuylkill, and horse-drawn omnibuses ran the length of the east-west thoroughfare of High (now Market) Street starting in 1836.¹⁶

Figure 3.1  This 1857 lithograph depicting a “Bird’s-Eye View of Philadelphia” postdates Poe’s time there by a little more than a decade, but conveys a sense of the city’s movement from the shore of the Delaware River (background) toward the Schuylkill River (foreground) and the northern suburbs (to the left). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-03107.)

Unfortunately, almost no reliable information survives concerning Poe’s own habitation on Philadelphia’s urban frontier. In fact, a reminiscence of Anne E. C. Clarke, the daughter of publisher and Poe associate Thomas Clarke, is the sole source for locating the family at Sixteenth and Locust. In letters from this period, Poe reports that he is still at “the old place,” then later refers to having moved in 1842 from “the old place.” An 1875 magazine article by Amanda B. Harris, who knew a woman who had known the family, describes a “little rose-covered cottage on the outskirts of Philadelphia,” but it isn’t clear whether she is referring to the “old place” or to one of Poe’s later residences. The more significant detail Harris provides is that the family was reluctantly accepting charity from a group of women (which included her acquaintance) who had organized relief efforts for neighbors in need.17

Poe had been in difficult, often desperate financial straits since leaving West Point in 1831, his time as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger having provided the only brief respite. His frustration over the family’s poverty is underscored by a request he made in July 1838 to James Kirke Paulding, an author and newly appointed secretary of the navy with whom Poe had corresponded while working at the Messenger:

Could I obtain the most unimportant Clerkship in your gift—any thing, by sea or land—to relieve me from the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I now, with a breaking heart, submit, and for which neither my temper nor my abilities have fitted me, I would never again repine at any dispensation of God. I feel that I could then, (having something beyond mere literature as a profession) quickly elevate myself to the station in society which is my due. It is needless to say how fervent, how unbounded would be my gratitude to the one who should thus rescue me from ruin, and put me in possession of happiness. (L 1:175)

Figure 3.2  Title page for a six-month volume of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, which included Poe’s stories “William Wilson,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While Poe would complain throughout his career about the mistreatment of authors in the publishing marketplace, the Paulding letter is rare in its suggestion that he would actually abandon “literature as a profession” if he could. At this point, Poe just wanted a “white collar” job that would provide for his household. Not that a clerkship would preclude literary writing altogether, but his anguish at this point seems to have been as dire as it had been in Baltimore. Paulding did not come to Poe’s rescue.

Though he might have been willing to give up the literary life for a decently remunerative clerkship, Poe had moved to Philadelphia to advance his career as a writer and editor, and he had come to the right place. By 1838 Philadelphia supported over a dozen daily and weekly newspapers, including the Pennsylvania (later Philadelphia) Inquirer, the North American, and the city’s first penny paper, the Public Ledger.18 Prominent weeklies included the Saturday Museum, Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, the Dollar Newspaper, and the Saturday Courier, all of which published Poe’s work in the late 1830s and early 1840s. While manuscripts could be sent by mail, Poe would have wanted to establish a physical presence among local publishers. He had moved to the west side of town for cheaper rent, but Philadelphia was still enough of a walking city that he could easily reach the offices of the city’s book, newspaper, and magazine publishers in less than half an hour—including Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most successful national monthly magazine of the period, and Lea & Blanchard, the firm that reluctantly issued Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840.¹⁹

In May 1839, over two years after leaving the Messenger, Poe finally found steady work with a recently launched Philadelphia monthly, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. William E. Burton, its founder, was a popular actor for whom editing and publishing proved to be a temporary sideline. As had been the case at the Messenger with Thomas White, at Burton’s Poe was employed to assist someone with less understanding of magazines and literature than himself. Not surprisingly, similar frictions came into play, and the arrangement lasted only about a year. Still, the job was what Poe needed at the time, even if it paid less than a government clerkship. Burton’s provided Poe with an outlet for his acerbic literary criticism and innovative new stories, notably “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and “The Man of the Crowd” (all published in 1839–40). He also reprinted many of his previously published tales and poems, bringing them to a new audience. While the image of Benjamin Franklin on the magazine’s title page attested to its Philadelphian origin, Burton’s was not at all provincial in its content, which included essays on history, travel, and pastimes as well as fiction, poetry, and criticism. Like other monthlies, it included full-page engraved illustrations (or “plates”), was printed on good quality paper, and would typically be bound handsomely in six-month volumes to be preserved by its subscribers.

The job of Assistant Editor at Burton’s gave Poe an entrée into the publishing, legal, and political worlds of Philadelphia. In fact, these “worlds” were essentially one old-fashioned boys’ club, as the periodical press and partisan politics were inextricable. Poe’s friend Jesse E. Dow, a frequent contributor to Burton’s, was a prominent Locofoco (i.e., radical) Democrat. A poet, editor, and journalist, Dow (like Nathaniel Hawthorne eight years later) lost his Custom House appointment in 1841 after the election of a new president—in this case, William Henry Harrison, of the more conservative, pro-business-and-banking Whig Party. George Lippard was a socialist journalist-editor as well as a novelist; he wrote regularly for the Democratic newspaper Spirit of the Times, then edited his own short-lived Citizen Soldier. Poe was also friendly with Spirit of the Times’s editor, John Stephenson DuSolle.

Figure 3.3  This 1840 map by Henry S. Tanner Jr., represents Philadelphia two years after Poe moved there. The locations of Poe’s first boardinghouse (1), the “old place” near Rittenhouse Square (2), the house in Fairmount (3), and the house in Spring Garden (4) are marked. (Courtesy of David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.)

On the Whig side, where Poe’s political sympathies generally resided, there was Frederick W. Thomas, a Cincinnati novelist and editor who befriended Poe on a visit to Philadelphia and became a frequent correspondent. Thomas Dunn English, a friend who would later become a bitter enemy, was a lawyer and writer prominent in local Whig politics. Henry Beck Hirst—horticultural merchant, lawyer, poet, and a close friend of T. D. English—was described by engraver and publisher John Sartain as Poe’s “rollicking companion”; Lippard would satirize English and Hirst in the Spirit of the Times, renaming them Thomas Dunn Brown and Henry Bread Crust.²⁰ On at least one occasion, Poe rubbed elbows with the most eminent Philadelphian of his day: Nicholas Biddle, who had been a magazine editor himself early in his career, served as president of the Second Bank of the United States, squaring off against president Andrew Jackson in the “Bank War” that led up to the Panic of 1837. In 1841, when Poe wrote to Biddle asking him to write an article for his prospective magazine, he referred to “the kind manner in which you received me when I called upon you at [Biddle’s suburban estate] Andalusia” (CL 1:254).

Magazine work was essential to the social and political culture of Philadelphia and the nation; moreover, it was a vital sector of the economy. The explosion of magazines and cheap newspapers was driven by an urban population that was increasing at a rate three times that of the population as a whole.²¹ The market for periodicals, which provided everything from news and commercial information to history lessons and musical scores, could barely keep up with the demands of city dwellers. Newspapers and magazines provided not only a way to fill short periods of time throughout the day but also the possibility of community in an urban “world of strangers.”²² At the same time, printing newspapers and magazines in greater quantities became easier and less expensive thanks to improvements in technology, including steam-driven presses and machine-made paper. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which includes Poe’s entire career, 2,871 magazines were founded in the United States; most were short-lived, but even so, the number of magazines in print rose from 212 in 1825 to 776 in 1850.²³

We tend to associate the word “magazine” with general-interest, middle-brow publications (the best example in Poe’s time being Godey’s), but their proliferation was driven by a wide range of specialized interests, suggesting a parallel with the cultural impact of the internet at the dawn of the twenty-first century. As early as 1831, one editor described the medium’s pervasiveness:

Nothing can be done without them. Sects and parties, benevolent societies, and ingenious individuals, all have their periodicals.… Every man, and every party, that seeks to establish a new theory, or to break down an old one, commences operations, like a board of war, by founding a magazine. We have annuals, monthlys, and weeklys—reviews, orthodox and heterodox—journals of education and humanity, of law, divinity and physic—magazines for ladies and for gentlemen—publications commercial, mechanical, metaphysical, sentimental, musical, anti-dogmatical, and nonsensical.²⁴

These claims sound familiar: a revolution in information technology democratizes publishing while creating seemingly countless niche audiences. And yet, one significant respect in which the “first golden age of magazines” (as the period has frequently been called) does not resemble the internet age is that the means of production and dissemination in the 1830s and 1840s were still concentrated in just a few large northeastern cities—namely, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.²⁵

Having cut his teeth writing for periodicals while living in Baltimore and Richmond, Poe now thrived—artistically, if not financially—as a writer of riveting tales, made for magazines. “Ligeia,” “William Wilson,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” all published within the first eighteen months of his arrival in Philadelphia, are ingeniously constructed gothic stories that defy simple interpretation. Each one deploys a supernatural motif (a dead woman’s revivification; a doppelgänger; a living, sentient house) to explore the workings of obsession, conscience, guilt, and self-loathing. While in Philadelphia, Poe articulated a theory of the short story based on “unity of effect”: the brevity of a tale would become, for Poe, its great asset, its mechanism for the author’s control over the reader. He would demonstrate this theory through stories such as “Ligeia,” “William Wilson,” and “Usher,” as well as “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” All were written in Philadelphia in the early 1840s, and all were sold to magazines, the medium that for Poe had come to define a new kind of literature: “The curt, the terse, the well-timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and ponderous & the inaccessible” (L 1:467).

Along with stories steeped in gothicism or otherwise eliciting terror, Poe continued to devise other “effects” through fiction, particularly satire. Several of Poe’s stories from his first years in Philadelphia reflect the contradictions and anxieties gnawing at the culture of order and success that periodical publishing reflected and participated in. Published in Burton’s in November 1838, “The Psyche Zenobia” (later retitled “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament”) lampoons women writers as well as the “sensation tales” associated with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, but it also contains this description of how the magazine’s “political articles” are “managed”: “Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor’s-shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the ‘Times,’ another the ‘Examiner,’ and third a ‘Gulley’s New Compendium of Slang-Whang.’ Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done—nothing but Examiner, Slam-Whang, and Times—then Times, Slam-Whang, and Examiner—and then Times, Examiner, and Slam-Whang” (T 1:338). Poe implies that political articles are composed through a combination of plagiarism and chance; no actual writing takes place. Instead, Mr. Blackwood “manages” content, imitating a machine in the production of text that is either a collage of recycled opinion or, more likely, total nonsense. Public discourse in the mass media age of the mid-nineteenth century is presented here as a humbug: there is no need to write when readers won’t know the difference between individual expression and a cut-and-paste, assembly-line product—they look alike on the printed page.

Poe’s 1840 satire “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man” is more overtly tied to Philadelphia; written in imitation of the Philadelphia writer John Neal’s Charcoal Sketches, its narrator also caricatures that shrewd entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin. Peter Pendulum (significantly, renamed Peter Proffit in later versions) insists that he is “a methodical man,” and repeatedly uses the words “method” and “system” as the touchstones of his business success; he disdains “genius,” which he regards as their opposite. The joke is that Pendulum’s “method” is always petty and dishonest. He first freelances as a walking advertisement for a tailor’s shop, attracting customers by modeling clothes in public but also lying about the quality of the material. The bill he presents to “Mssrs. Cut and Comeagain, Merchant Tailors,” itemizes the lies he tells to customers; he also charges more for bringing fat customers to the store than medium or small ones. His subsequent ventures are even more blatant perversions of free enterprise, as they amount to being paid to remove nuisances of his own creation. He builds “eye-sore” hovels next to sites of grand new construction so that the owners will pay him to take down the offending structures. He goads men into assaulting him so that he can sue them or settle out of court. Finally, he takes up “mud-dabbling,” stationing himself on a muddy street corner with a broom in order to collect protection money from passersby who prefer not to be splattered. Under cover of smug businessman’s cant about adhering to a method, Poe’s Mr. Pendulum equates getting ahead in business with swindling or extortion, the inverse of creating value or contributing to society. His last sentences liken Pendulum’s petty maneuvers to the institutions that were actually reshaping the American economy. He boasts that his “method” exempted no one from mud-dabbling: “Never imposing upon any one myself, I suffered no one to play the possum with me. The frauds of the banks of course I couldn’t help. Their suspension put me to ruinous inconvenience. These, however, are not individuals, but corporations; and corporations, it is very well known, have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned” (T 1:488–89).

In other words, the economic effects of bank failures trickled down even to his profession, but in broader terms, Mr. Pendulum recognizes that as frauds go, he is no match for banks and corporations, against whose bodiless, soulless entities no retribution can be taken.

A more complex satire, “The Man That Was Used Up”—also first published in Burton’s—focuses on a different sort of bodiless, soulless entity, but it, too, exposes the paltry con game behind a grandiose façade. The universally admired Indian fighter Brevet Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith displays physical perfection, described by a fawning narrator fascinated by the General’s “fine shoulders,” the “handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun,” “the ne plus ultra of good legs,” and so on (T 1:379). General Smith tirelessly celebrates “the rapid march of mechanical invention” and the superiority of contemporary Western culture: “We are a wonderful people, and live in a wonderful age. Parachutes and railroads—man-traps and spring guns! Our steam-boats are upon every sea, and the Nassau balloon packet is about to run regular trips (fare either way only twenty pounds sterling) between London and Timbuctoo” (T 1:381). Not surprisingly, the General turns out to be a mechanical contrivance himself, an impossible assemblage of manufactured body parts: he had been dismembered (“used up”) by the Kickapoo and “Bugaboo” Indians. But it turns out that, in Philadelphia, a used-up man can purchase the finest cork leg from (John F.) Thomas on Race Street, shoulders from the tailor Nicholas Pettitt, a wig from De L’Orme’s, teeth from Parmly’s, the list goes on.²⁶ General Smith invokes these names and others—at least some of them real Philadelphia tradesmen—as his “negro valet” assembles him before the narrator’s eyes. The story has several satirical angles, as it implicitly criticizes US Indian policy and the unquestioning embrace of technology, but at its heart is another exposure of deceptively respectable appearances. Like Blackwood’s political articles, which are actually cut-and-paste plagiarisms, and Peter Pendulum’s business methods, which are actually petty swindles, General Smith is an expedient, artificial construction; to the extent that there is a “man” underneath the store-bought prostheses, he is actually “a large and exceedingly odd-looking bundle of something,” which the narrator kicks out of the way, not recognizing it as the General. Without commenting directly on Philadelphia’s orderly grid and disorderly back alleys, its embrace of industrial progress amid resistance from laborers, Poe, in his first years there, seems to have assumed a cynical distrust of dignified appearances, Franklinian self-assurance, and Quaker probity.

William Burton fired Poe in May 1840. According to his employer, Poe had become unreliable and was planning to launch a competing magazine; according to Poe, Burton was planning to sell the publication without consulting him, leaving him jobless. Poe also claimed that Burton took advantage of authors by advertising premiums—prize contests like the ones Poe had entered while living in Baltimore—then canceling them, but still keeping the entries as unpaid submissions (CL 1:229–30). And it probably didn’t help that Poe had borrowed a hundred dollars from Burton (Poe claimed it was only sixty), which Burton had begun garnishing in small amounts from his pay.²⁷ Meanwhile, Poe was planning a new magazine, and Burton was planning to sell his, but, even if the two men had been on better terms, Poe did not have the money to purchase a successful magazine with a substantial subscription list. Burton sold Burton’s in October 1840 to a young, ambitious publisher, George Rex Graham, who combined it with that of another publication, the Casket, to create Graham’s Magazine.

Having lost his position with Burton, Poe immediately began pursuing his professional dream. He circulated a prospectus for his own magazine, whose punning title—the Penn—evoked his adopted state. Throughout the summer and fall of 1840, he solicited literary contributors and subscribers, using the prospectus as stationery: “THE PENN MAGAZINE, A MONTHLY LITERARY JOURNAL, TO BE EDITED AND PUBLISHED IN THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, BY EDGAR A. POE.” Poe mentioned his prior connection to the Southern Literary Messenger three times but made no reference to Burton’s. He promised “honest,” “fearless” literary criticism, and suggested that literature rather than politics would predominate: “Its aim, chiefly, shall be to please; and this through means of versatility, originality and pungency.” Poe’s magazine would have an elegant, professional look and feel: “the paper will be equal to that of The North American Review [a highly regarded Boston magazine]; the pictorial embellishments will be numerous, and by the leading artists of the country, but will be introduced only in the necessary illustration of the text” (E 1026). Each issue would contain about eighty pages, and the price would be five dollars per year: all of these details signified a high-quality publication. The Penn would commence publication in January—the same month Graham’s was to debut—and, from the notices Poe’s project received from friendly publications, including one by Graham himself in the Saturday Evening Post, the literati of Philadelphia fully expected it to happen.

But it didn’t. A December 29 notice in the Daily Chronicle, a paper owned by Poe’s friend Charles Alexander, reported that, because of a “severe and continued illness,” Poe had been forced to postpone publication until March.²⁸ Then, on February 4, the unstable economy took another sudden downturn as Nicholas Biddle’s US Bank suspended specie payments, setting off a chain reaction throughout Philadelphia and beyond. Two weeks later, George Rex Graham wrote in the Saturday Evening Post:

Mr. Poe, we are sorry to say, has been forced, at the last moment, to abandon finally, or at least to postpone indefinitely, his project of the Penn Magazine. This is the more to be regretted as he had the finest prospects of success in the establishment of the journal—such prospects as are seldom enjoyed—an excellent list of subscribers, and, what is equally to the purpose, the universal good-will of the public press.… In the present disorder of all monetary affairs, however, it was but common prudence to give up the enterprise—in fact it would have been madness to attempt it. Periodicals are among the principal sufferers by these pecuniary convulsions, and to commence one just now would be exceedingly hazardous. It is, beyond doubt, fortunate for Mr. P. that his late illness induced the postponement of his first number; which, it will be remembered, was to have appeared in January.

It is with pleasure we add, that we have secured the services of Mr. Poe as one of the editors of Graham’s Magazine.²⁹

Graham was right that the timing was prohibitively bad. Poe explained to his friend Thomas Wyatt that he had entered into partnership with a Philadelphia publisher, J. R. Pollack, and that he was “putting the first sheet to press” when the banking crisis struck “like a clap of thunder” (L 1:267). Of course, Graham had launched his own magazine just before the same thunderclap, but he had considerably more capital than Poe, as well as the subscription lists of the Casket and Burton’s to sustain his enterprise.

So it made sense for Poe to swallow his pride and settle for another assistant editor’s job with Graham in early 1841. He earned a decent salary of eight hundred dollars per year, with additional pay for literary contributions. Graham knew more about running a magazine than White or Burton, which meant Poe had less editorial control but a more competent and understanding boss. Moreover, Graham seemed to support Poe’s goal of establishing the Penn when conditions were more favorable, and, as early as June of that year, Poe was writing to a select group of authors, including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom he hoped would become regular monthly contributors to a magazine that would launch in January 1842 with Graham’s financial backing. But this plan never materialized either; Poe was asking for too great a commitment from famous writers who generally had no personal connection to him and were likely put off by the severe, “tomahawking” book reviews that had been his calling card since his days at the Messenger.

Poe’s $800 salary in 1841 was significantly higher than the $50 per month he had been earning with Burton, and he supplemented it with a little over $200 that year from his writing, primarily for Graham’s.³⁰ It was the most he would ever make in a single year. Using the admittedly imprecise measure of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ calculation of average yearly inflation (1.88 percent), Poe’s $1,000 would equate with about $27,600 in 2019.³¹ To add some perspective, unskilled factory workers made about 63 cents per day in 1841 in Philadelphia, which would amount to less than $200 per year. Carpenters in 1851 earned about $10.50 for a sixty-hour week, probably about $500 per year, so, in 1841, at least, Poe was doing better than most manual laborers.³² On the other hand, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the writer Poe most envied, was making probably three times as much: he was paid an average of about $1,700 per year as a professor of modern languages and belles lettres at Harvard during the same period, supplemented by well over $1,000 per year from poetry and other writing.³³ Although Graham and others were starting to improve the terms of payment for authors, few writers earned enough strictly from book and magazine publications to support a comfortable household, and Poe was not one of those few.³⁴ By 1840 he had earned enough of a reputation to convince Lea & Blanchard to issue a volume of his first twenty-five stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, but the publishers saw little chance of the book turning a profit, and offered him no payment other than “a few copies for distribution among your friends.” And they were right: no one made money on Poe’s collection, which, despite strong reviews, failed to sell its modest print run of 750 copies.³⁵

Poe’s single biggest payday for a story or poem came from “The Gold-Bug,” which in June 1843 won a $100 prize from a Philadelphia weekly, the Dollar Newspaper. (Poe had sold the story to Graham for $52, but Graham allowed him to exchange it for “some critical articles” so that he could enter the prize contest.)³⁶ While the newspaper’s title refers to its subscription price, it also provides a fitting gloss on Poe’s treasure-seeking story; in fact, the editors seemed especially interested in stories with pecuniary themes, as suggested by the second- and third-place entries, “The Banker’s Daughter” and “Marrying for Money.”³⁷ The protagonist of “The Gold-Bug,” William Legrand, shrewdly discerns that a piece of seemingly blank parchment is actually a set of coded instructions, written in invisible ink, that lead to a treasure chest buried on a South Carolina barrier island (specifically Sullivan’s Island, where Poe had been stationed throughout 1828). With the help of the narrator and a black servant named Jupiter, Legrand unearths the pirate fortune. Poe probably fantasized about an analogous reward for his creative and intellectual skill: significantly, the treasure chest contains “no American money”—at a time when the Bank War had called into question what counted as American money and what any of it was worth—but instead is crammed with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and gold.³⁸

The cryptographic plot of “The Gold-Bug” grew out of a journalistic sideshow Poe had operated in the pages of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and, later, Graham’s. Starting with a discussion of “enigmas” and “hieroglyphical writing” in December 1839, Poe vowed to decode any piece of writing that employed the substitution of symbols for letters. He then proceeded to publish the seemingly inscrutable cyphers while bantering with correspondents, professing the ease of cracking their codes. By February 1840 he was already complaining (in the pages of Alexander’s), “Do people really think that we have nothing in the world to do but to read hieroglyphics?”³⁹ Poe set up this challenge in a way that would require him to solve only relatively simple cryptograms, but the gimmick still added to his reputation as a kind of intellectual wizard. He had cultivated that image earlier in his career with his exposé of Maelzel’s automaton chess player and painstaking literary reviews, and he would soon enhance it further with his detective stories.

Poe’s back-and-forth with puzzle enthusiasts was ideal for creating a virtual community of readers in Philadelphia and beyond. Furthermore, his decoding skills would have been particularly associated with city life, which continually presented new phenomena to interpret, and where, according to conventional wisdom, appearances were nearly always deceiving.⁴⁰ Poe’s friend Lippard would make false appearances the central trope of his blockbuster The Quaker City in 1844, and by the mid-1850s the “city mystery” novel, with its focus on the criminal underworld—along with George G. Foster’s guidebooks to the hidden pleasures and dangers of the new metropolis (among them New York by Gaslight and Philadelphia in Slices)—would heighten readers’ perception of the city as an agglomeration of signs to be decoded. In these exposés, well-dressed men and women are likely swindlers and prostitutes, oyster bars are fronts for dens of vice, and stately mansions conceal treachery and ill-gotten fortunes.

First published in December 1840, Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” encapsulates the mystery and fear that attended the rapid development of cities and the influx of “strangers.” Though set in London, where Poe had lived as a child and whose density and growth exceeded those of American cities in 1840, the tale reflects the future shock of mid-nineteenth-century urban experience generally. For the first third of the story, the narrator, recuperating from an unnamed illness, sits alone at the “large bow-window” of a coffee house, watching the parade of pedestrians at the workday’s end. A shrewd taxonomist of urban types, he identifies the professions and social stations of passersby. The first group includes “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers … men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own.” He proceeds down the social ladder, calling attention to visible clues:

The tribe of clerks was an obvious one and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses [pubs that engaged in various illicit activities]—young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class. (T 1:508)

The “upper clerks” are similarly identifiable from appearance, as are “gamblers,” “Jew peddlars,” “sturdy professional street beggars,” “feeble and ghastly invalids,” “modest young girls,” “women of the town,” “drunkards innumerable and indescribable,” and, finally, “pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibiters and ballad mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and still all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (T 1:509–10). This extraordinary inventory suggests that the city and its inhabitants, however mysterious to the uninitiated, are decipherable, like a cryptographer’s alphabet of arbitrarily selected symbols.

But the narrator eventually spies an enigmatic old man, and feeling “singularly aroused, startled, fascinated,” he pursues this “man of the crowd” over the course of an entire night. The list of emotions and dispositions the man suggests to the narrator (“ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair”) is so varied, even contradictory, that we might see the man as embodying the crowd, somehow reflecting its very diversity, and for that reason escaping the narrator’s classification. Indeed, the defining feature of the man’s movements throughout the night is his effort to remain within a crowd, as if he could exist nowhere else. Literally, the man of the crowd might simply be trying to avoid a solitary encounter with the narrator—another “man of the crowd”—if he realizes he is being followed, but even that precautionary maneuver suggests that the densely populated city is the water he swims in, that he is perfectly acculturated to his environment. In fact, he becomes less at ease whenever the crowd thins. Entering a street “not quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted,” he “walked more slowly and with less object than before—more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly without apparent aim” (T 1:512). When a bazaar closes for the night and he jostles a shopkeeper closing his shutter, he shudders (Poe can’t resist the pun), perhaps in fear of having nowhere to go. But then “he hurried into the street, looked anxiously around him for an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness” before melting into a crowded thoroughfare. If the man is agitated when not in the crowd, he evinces no joy or contentment upon reuniting with the urban throng; he never smiles, and he speaks to no one.

London, the city that Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s may soon become, never sleeps, but the all-nighter it offers “the crowd” isn’t much fun. The pursuit of a crowd through the small hours leads the man, and his pursuer, to the slums, described in terms similar to those of the Philadelphia Sanitary Commission quoted earlier. Here “every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall” (T 1:514). As night turns to day, the narrator can interpret the man only as “the type and genius of deep crime,” although, aside from his possession of a dagger, he exhibits no criminal behavior. His unreadability, ultimately the unreadability of the urban crowd itself, is what terrifies the narrator, who opens the tale with the epigraph “Ce grand Malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul” and ends it speculating that “it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’ ” The French and German, at least, are translatable—“The great evil, not to be able to be alone,” and “it does not permit itself to be read”—but, to the narrator, the untranslatable man of the crowd is not only a mystery but also a horror. Poe seems to have recognized that there was something about the modern city that could not be explicated. Treasure maps could be decoded and cryptographs could be solved, but this coded text remained unreadable. In what could reasonably be called Poe’s first detective story, then, the detective fails: if he’s looking for a crime, he doesn’t find one, and if he is trying to decode the appearance of the man of the crowd, he concludes by admitting, gratefully, that it can’t be done.

But, for most fans of the genre, the modern detective story begins not with “The Man of the Crowd” but with Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published the following year.”⁴¹ As Amy Gilman notes, the detective story is “a form generally associated with urbanization and the development of mass culture,” and Poe established that form with “Rue Morgue.”⁴² Although the city itself is not particularly menacing in this story, it is the site of a violent home invasion resulting in the grisly deaths of two innocent women. This time, the seemingly insoluble mystery permits itself to be read by Poe’s ingenious detective C. Auguste Dupin, who succeeds largely through an ability to interpret evidence overlooked or misinterpreted by the police. Dupin recognizes that the “murders” in the Rue Morgue are, legally, not murders at all, but the actions of an orangutan that escaped the possession of a sailor.

“Rue Morgue” takes place in Paris, but, as with “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe provides few significant local details, while general characteristics of vibrant, rapidly changing cities prove crucial. Again, Poe emphasizes the diversity of urban trades, as the list of witnesses includes a laundress, tobacconist, silversmith, restaurateur, banker, clerk, tailor, undertaker, and confectioner (in addition to the gendarme, physician, and surgeon called to the crime scene). As if to emphasize the anonymity of city life, in the story none of these neighbors really knows the victims, Mme. and Mlle. L’Espanaye, except on business terms. Another sign that the neighborhood is in flux, and becoming more crowded, is the detail that Mme. L’Espanaye had previously leased their house to a jeweler but objected to her tenant’s subleasing portions of it: “She became dissatisfied with the abuse of the premises by her tenant, and moved into them herself, refusing to let any portion” (T 1:539). More significant, Dupin comes to realize that the culprit might not be human because, in their depositions, neighbors who hear the incident disagree as to which language the intruder with the “shrill” voice is speaking. In this multicultural environment, the witnesses themselves speak different languages, and they consistently report hearing a language they do not understand. In each case, the supposed language is one that might plausibly be heard in a Paris neighborhood: the French witnesses identify the “language” as Spanish or Italian, the Dutchman believes it is French, and the Englishman hears German.⁴³

But, of course, the voice, and the violence, come from an orangutan, which provides “Rue Morgue” with a distinctly Philadelphian context. In the summer of 1839, the Masonic Hall on Chestnut Street exhibited a female chimpanzee, which was erroneously referred to as an “ourang outang” in the press. The advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette described the animal as “lately brought from Africa,” the genuine ‘Troglodytes Niger’ of Naturalists, or ‘Wild Man of the Woods.’ … It bears a most striking resemblance to the human form, and in natural sagacity far exceeds the description of Naturalists.” The Pennsylvania Inquirer affirmed the advertisement’s claim, calling the orangutan “in all probability the nearest approach of any animal to the human form.” Poe’s friend John DuSolle was more specific, writing in the Spirit of the Times that “the color of the skin, when examined closely, is seen to be that of a bright mulatto. She evinces a degree of intelligence but little behind that of the human species, which in appearance and actions she so much resembles.”⁴⁴ Poe would certainly have been aware of the exhibit, which, bolstered by newspapers and magazines, seems to have created a sensation. He would have also known of, and perhaps attended, a performance advertised in the Gazette the following April, by Signor Hervio Nano, a “dwarf” actor, in the role of “Bibboo, the Island Ape, or Ourang Outang,” in a play called The Shipwreck. Elsewhere, the Gazette promised that Nano’s “strength and agility, notwithstanding his peculiarities of figure, are very extraordinary, and his feats, especially as the ape, are of a surprising character.”⁴⁵

As the publicity for those exhibitions suggests, nineteenth-century Americans’ fascination with apes had much to do with their seemingly uncanny resemblance to humans and their place in the primate hierarchy that included racial divisions. Calling African orangutans (or chimpanzees) “wild men of the woods” and likening their skin color to “mulattos” invoked a well-established racist comparison of African people—and their American descendants—to apes.⁴⁶ Almost certainly, Poe’s contemporaries would have made that association while reading “Rue Morgue,” whether consciously “interpreting” the story as racially coded or not.⁴⁷ Literary scholar Elise Lemire situates the story’s use of an orangutan within two phenomena specific (though not exclusive) to antebellum Philadelphia: the prevalence of black barbers in the city and fears of race mixing or “amalgamation.” The barbering profession was a highly visible vehicle of economic advancement for African Americans in Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s, engaging about 5 percent of the total black workforce by mid-century.⁴⁸ The black barber became a stereotype, sometimes a humiliating one: for instance, Lemire notes that, in the 1830s, the stuffed monkeys in Peale’s museum in Philadelphia were depicted as barbers, posed as if shaving each other with razors.⁴⁹ And, because of African Americans’ success as barbers, the stereotype tended to ridicule their supposed pretentious and inappropriate social climbing, which in the mind of most whites was never far from the threat of sexual race mixing. Indeed, the riot that destroyed Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 had been fueled by those fears; a lithograph titled The Evening Before the Conflagration represented the hall as an “interracial brothel.”⁵⁰ Poe’s use of a razor-wielding orangutan, imported from Borneo, who escapes from a white master, enters the abode of two white women, and ultimately kills them, clearly invokes a set of racist associations set in place by the time of the story’s publication. Poe had no apparent reason to stoke racial resentment and violence, and, having read the story many times, I find it hard to imagine that he wrote it with that explicit motive. At the same time, he clearly didn’t mind using the racist tropes that were already in circulation, and that, he well knew, provided a pretext for real violence on the streets of Philadelphia.

Decoding cryptographs, inventing the literary detective, and writing a handful of the most enduring gothic tales in the English language, Poe continued an incredible creative streak that began almost as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia. Moreover, while working for Graham’s in 1841–42, he was at the helm of one of the most widely circulated magazines in the country. If he was not one of the most famous literary figures in America, he was becoming better known, and he had developed a strong reputation for his intellect and versatility. His friend Jesse Dow proclaimed in the Philadelphia paper the Index, “Mr. Poe is a wonderful man. He can read the hieroglyphics of the Pharoahs, tell you what you are thinking about while he walks beside you, and criticise you into shape without giving offence.”⁵¹ When Dickens visited Philadelphia during his highly publicized US tour in March 1842, Poe was granted a private meeting, possibly two sessions, at Dickens’s hotel. (Poe asked Dickens for his help in securing a British publisher for his tales; Dickens politely assented but seems to have made only a half-hearted effort to fulfill the promise.)

Figure 3.4  Anthony Imbert, wrapper for “Life in Philadelphia” cartoons, ca. 1830. Many of the single-panel cartoons (created by E. W. Clay) were racist caricatures of African Americans. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania Digital Library.)

Despite the stability and renown that came from his work at Graham’s, Poe left the magazine in the spring of 1842, perhaps a few weeks after his meeting with Dickens. He had held the job for just over a year, approximately the same duration as his employment with the Messenger and Burton’s. But this separation seems to have been far more amicable than his breaks with White and Burton, and the evidence suggests that Poe, not Graham, instigated it.52 Poe had certainly contributed to the magazine’s impressive growth—having started with a circulation of 5,500 less than two years earlier, Graham boasted of printing 40,000 copies in March 1842, just months before Poe’s departure—but it was Graham who was getting rich from the enterprise, while Poe’s dream of his own magazine was repeatedly deferred.⁵³ He told Frederick Thomas in May 1842, “My reason for resigning was disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine—a character which it was impossible to eradicate—I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales. The salary, moreover, did not pay me for the labor which I was forced to bestow. With Graham who is really a very gentlemanly, although an exceedingly weak man, I had no misunderstanding” (L 1:333).

Though he did continue to sell stories, to Graham and others, at a steady pace, Poe could not replace even the modest income he derived from editing Graham’s. His earnings for the remainder of his time in Philadelphia would place him below the poverty line. Meanwhile, his successor at the magazine, Rufus W. Griswold, would receive a thousand-dollar salary, two hundred dollars more than Poe’s. Griswold, a twenty-seven-year-old editor who had recently worked for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, would soon become known as a leading anthologist of American writing. The year before joining Graham’s, Griswold had edited The Poets and Poetry of America, which included three poems by Poe—a rather slight representation. According to Poe, Griswold bribed him to write a positive review of the book; perhaps as revenge for his underrepresentation, Poe delivered a less-than-bribe-worthy product, complimenting but also insulting the volume’s editor. It marked the beginning of a rivalry, sometimes masked in friendship, that would continue, infamously, even after Poe’s death.

Poe’s decision to leave Graham’s followed closely upon a harrowing development in his personal life: Virginia had contracted tuberculosis. One evening in early 1842, while singing at home, she began coughing up blood. Virginia was only nineteen years old; with this incident, she went from a prolonged childhood, petted and protected by Edgar and Muddy, to a condition in which she would again be treated much like a child. The best evidence that she and Edgar enjoyed some brief period of mature romantic love between those phases comes from a story he wrote in 1841, when Virginia still appeared healthy. “Eleonora” presents a fairy-tale version of Poe’s household: the narrator, named Pyrros in the first version, his cousin Eleonora, and her mother form a world unto themselves in a “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.” When Eleonora is fifteen and Pyrros twenty (shrinking the age difference between Edgar and Virginia), they fall in love. At that moment, their physical world comes to reflect the change, implicitly sexual, in their relationship:

The passions which had for centuries distinguished our race came thronging with the fancies for which they had been equally noted, and together breathed a delirious bliss over the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. A change fell upon all things. Strange brilliant flowers, star-shaped, burst out upon the trees where no flowers had been known before. The tints of the green carpet deepened; and when, one by one, the white daisies shrank away, there sprang up, in place of them, ten by ten of the ruby-red asphodel. (T 1:640)

Then Eleonora becomes fatally ill, and Pyrros pledges that his faithfulness will endure after her death. She promises to watch over him, and to return to him visibly or at least “give me frequent indications of her presence” (T 1:642). After she dies, they both stay true to their words, until Pyrros falls hopelessly in love with another woman, Ermengarde. Poe had written other stories (“Morella,” “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”) about women who die and come back, and they do not come back to comfort the men who bury them. But Eleonora gives her blessing to Pyrros: “ ‘Sleep in peace!—for the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth, and, in taking to thy passionate heart her who is Ermengarde, thou art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora” (T 1:645). The implication of the phrase “reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven” is that Ermengarde is Eleonora. Possibly Poe knew or suspected that Virginia was ill before the singing incident; otherwise, “Eleonora” is eerily prophetic of her sickness and death, Poe’s subsequent need to find another wife, and the guilt that would accompany that quest. If read autobiographically, the story also suggests that there was, perhaps, a happy, brief interval in Edgar and Virginia’s marriage between her childhood and her invalidism—or that Poe dearly wished there had been. Virginia’s health would fluctuate over the next five years, as she endured extended bouts of fatigue, coughing, and chills.

Although the family lived in the less crowded western portion of Philadelphia, they must have had reason to believe the northern suburbs would be healthier for Virginia than the city proper. Or perhaps they were just seeking cheaper rent. But not long after her illness became apparent, and around the same time Poe left Graham’s, the family moved from the “old place” near Rittenhouse Square. They might have stayed temporarily in a boardinghouse, location unknown, but by September 1842 they had settled into what is now the Fairmount district at the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Coates Street (Fairmount Avenue) near the waterworks (within a few blocks of what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art). This location put Poe farther from the publishing center—about two and a half miles—but, no longer working at Graham’s, he would not have had to make the trek as frequently. Frederick W. Thomas, who visited Poe there in September 1842, described it as “a rural home on the outskirts of the city.… [S]mall, but comfortable inside for one of the kind. The rooms looked neat and orderly, but everything about the place wore an air of pecuniary want.”⁵⁴

A later reminiscence by John S. Detwiler, who as a boy had been Poe’s next-door neighbor, identifies their landlord as Michel Bouvier, a prominent cabinetmaker and importer of marble and mahogany (and great-great-grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). Detwiler also recalls hunting birds with his older friend: “When Poe asked me to go with him and reed birds I went.… We got into a boat and paddled down to Gray’s Ferry [2–3 miles south on the Schuylkill]. I rowed while he loaded and shot. For many of the birds I waded in water up to my chin. We brought home a big bag.”⁵⁵ Close to the river and far from the city center, the Fairmount district was nonetheless well traveled and hardly undeveloped: a (horse-drawn) railroad ran directly behind Poe’s house; breweries and iron foundries were among the industries moving into the area. The family lived within a few blocks of the city hospital for contagious diseases, the Great Western Hotel, and Eastern State Penitentiary.⁵⁶ This “modern” prison made solitary confinement and silence the norm for inmates, on the theory that solitude and reflection would induce penitence. The imposing structure, which still stands, featured a neo-gothic exterior and a widely imitated hub-and-spoke design to make it easier to monitor cellblocks. In its long shadow, Poe wrote two classic confession narratives, written or voiced from prison cells: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” both composed in late 1842. In fact, the latter story might have been inspired by a news item reprinted in a Philadelphia paper about the bones of a murdered woman discovered in a cellar in Greenfield, Connecticut.⁵⁷ Poe had recently completed another story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” set in Spain during the Inquisition but evocative of the new model prison, with its emphasis on isolation and the subjection of prisoners to constant surveillance.⁵⁸ “My every motion,” recalls Poe’s imprisoned narrator, “was undoubtedly watched” (T 1:695).

Figure 3.5  Eastern State Penitentiary, a new “model” prison located about two blocks from Poe’s residence for about half a year, 1842–43.

In late spring 1843, Poe, Virginia, and Maria moved about two miles east and slightly south, to the area known as Spring Garden. Philadelphia historian Ellis Oberholtzer describes the expanding suburb’s situation at the time: “Some six squares (from town) along a well-traveled highway leading into the centre of the city, a locality of market commerce, but where a number of well-to-do Quaker families had their homes.”59 While still semirural, the new location was closer to the commercial and publishing center, where Poe—or Maria, his sometime emissary—still had literary business to conduct.⁶⁰ Here, too, one might presume that rent played a role in the decision: although there is no record of his being evicted from the Coates Street house, Poe must have struggled to pay the rent and probably fell behind. The new home, on North Seventh Street just above Spring Garden Street, was owned by a successful plumber named William Alburger. According to Alburger’s daughter and another neighbor, the Poes were always behind on rent, but the new landlord “was not disposed to cause him distress.”⁶¹

The Spring Garden house, now the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, must have seemed luxuriously large for the small family: three stories, six rooms, plus a cellar.⁶² The most detailed description when Poe lived there is a somewhat unreliable account of Thomas Mayne Reid, a writer of adventure novels who spent time with Poe in Philadelphia. Writing approximately twenty-five years after the fact, Reid recalled the house as “a lean-to of three rooms, (there may have been a garret with a closet,) of painted plank construction, supported against the gable of the more pretentious dwelling”; elsewhere he referred to it as a “ ‘shanty’ supported against the gable of the rich Quaker,” stressing the contrast between Poe’s poverty and his landlord’s wealth.⁶³ Since Reid was writing to defend Poe’s posthumous reputation, he might have thought the contrast would highlight the injustice of Poe’s (very real) poverty—or he might have simply misremembered (he also thought Poe’s Quaker landlord was a cereal maker). The term “lean-to” might technically apply, since the building Poe and family lived in was constructed against the larger house, with a slanted roof attached to a wall, but the rest of the description, in particular the word “shanty,” will strike any visitor to the National Historic Site as misleading. At some point the family acquired some decent furniture, including a horsehair sofa and “prized red carpet,” which they eventually left with Alburger in lieu of back rent.⁶⁴

Figure 3.6  Poe, Virginia, and Maria lived in the smaller attached house on North Seventh Street. This house in Spring Garden was their last residence in Philadelphia before they moved to New York City.

The onset of Virginia’s illness and Poe’s departure from Graham’s not only led to the family’s move from the “old place” to the northern suburbs; the disruption also spawned frequent episodes of drunkenness, after a long period of relative sobriety. Genetically predisposed to alcoholism and low alcohol tolerance, Poe wasn’t helped in having come of age at a time when men typically drank throughout the day, every day, and by living in cities with drinking establishments on nearly every block. Per capita alcohol consumption in the United States seems to have peaked around 1830, when Poe was twenty-one.65 And there were over nine hundred taverns in Philadelphia in 1841, including one run by C. W. House a block away from Poe’s Spring Garden abode.⁶⁶ Meanwhile, the temperance movement was changing attitudes toward drinking, reducing alcohol sales dramatically by the 1840s. The movement’s success also meant that there were now many men and women making a point of abstaining and seeking to reform others, which is probably one reason reports of Poe’s drinking appear as often as they do in the documentary record. Poe’s sober contemporaries were not likely to dismiss or normalize his drinking problem, nor were they likely to regard it as an illness, but as a character flaw. For example, when Poe’s employer William Burton opened his own theater in 1840, he took the principled step of banning the sale of alcohol on the premises; not surprisingly, Burton clashed with Poe over his drinking and publicly referred to his former editor’s “infirmities” in apologizing for a subscription error in his magazine.⁶⁷ Thomas Dunn English, another teetotaler, had been Poe’s friend when he worked for Burton’s, but when the two men had a falling out, largely as a result of an alcohol-fueled insult, English broadcast Poe’s drinking problem through a thinly veiled caricature in his novel The Doom of the Drinker, serialized in the Cold Water Magazine in 1843. This is not to say that Burton or English exaggerated Poe’s drinking problem; rather, that, as temperance men, they judged him for it and had no compunction about publicly shaming him.

In reminiscences published long after Poe’s death, English elaborated on his history with Poe, corroborating other claims that Poe managed to stay sober for significant periods of time (“His offenses against sobriety were committed at irregular intervals”) but was incapable of drinking moderately (“He had not that physical constitution which would permit him to be a regular drinker”).⁶⁸ English recalled one occasion when he found Poe “struggling in a vain attempt to raise himself from the gutter.” He guided his staggering companion home:

The house stood back, and was only a part of a house. They had a habit at that time in Philadelphia of building houses so that there was a stairway between dining room and kitchen back, and the parlor in front. The owner of this house had only built the rear portion, and the ground where the front was to stand in future had been turned into a grassplot, with a flower border against the adjoining brick wall. I knocked at the door, and Mrs. Clemm opened it. Raising her voice, she cried, “You make Eddie drunk, and then you bring him home.” As I was turning away Poe grasped me by the shoulder and said: “Never mind the old________; come in.”

I shook myself from his clutch and, merely telling Mrs. Clemm that if I found Eddie in the gutter again I’d leave him there, went on my way.

Three days after when I saw Poe—for if I remember rightly the next two days he was not at the office—he was heartily ashamed of the matter, and said that it was an unusual thing with him, and would never occur again.⁶⁹

If English’s remarkably detailed account is accurate, the incident probably occurred at “the old place,” since he situates it during Poe’s self-proclaimed sober period, when he worked for Burton—in which case, it provides at least a little information about the house near Sixteenth and Locust. But it is also noteworthy for the disdain English expressed, half a century after the fact, toward drunken Edgar, as well as Maria’s insinuation that he, English, was a drinking companion.

The cost of alcoholism to Poe’s social life and career were enormous. Knowing that he should abstain altogether, Poe probably felt trapped by invitations to have a drink: he could either appear antisocial by declining or become truly antisocial by drinking to excess. He probably did not drink at home; in fact, being away from home for an extended time increased the likelihood of an embarrassing episode. In the summer of 1842, during the crisis period following Virginia’s first hemorrhage, Poe traveled to New York looking for work, probably contemplating a relocation of cities after leaving the “old place” near Rittenhouse Square. He became intoxicated, apparently for several days, and was eventually found in the woods near Jersey City, “wandering about like a crazy man,” according to his former girlfriend Mary Starr, who saw him on that trip.⁷⁰ In March 1843, Poe made a week-long trip to Washington, DC, to solicit subscriptions and contributions for his prospective magazine, now called the Stylus—and, more important, to try to attain a government appointment with the help of Frederick Thomas, who was a friend of President John Tyler’s son Robert. But Thomas fell ill and was unavailable as a guide; Poe made the rounds with his friend Jesse Dow, but he began drinking and behaving badly. Dow reported back to Thomas Clarke, Poe’s business partner for the Stylus, that Poe had become “quite unreliable” and that he “exposes himself here to those who may injure him very much with the President.”⁷¹ Among the men Poe insulted in Washington was none other than Thomas Dunn English. Not only did Poe not get the clerkship he sought, but in the aftermath of the Washington episode he also lost the financial support of Clarke, who, like English, was a temperance advocate.⁷² Poe’s drinking and (consequent) erratic behavior might not have been the sole cause, but it seems to have troubled Clarke; in any case, the breakup of the short-lived partnership of Clarke & Poe (as their names appeared on the prospectus) dashed Poe’s renewed hopes for establishing a Philadelphia-based magazine.⁷³

Poe stayed in Spring Garden for another year after the Washington debacle, contributing literary criticism to Graham’s and writing new stories. The success of “The Gold-Bug” in the summer of 1843 provided a financial boost and some measure of fame; the story was even adapted for stage performance at the Walnut Street Theatre on August 8, a “farewell benefit” for the actor-playwright Silas S. Steele, with another popular performer, J. H. “Coal” White, performing the part of Jupiter in blackface.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, the story itself became a local controversy that summer, as suspicions were aired about the contest having been rigged and the story plagiarized.⁷⁵ At this point, Poe didn’t need any bad press, with friends in the Philadelphia publishing world expressing concern and frustration with him privately. Lambert Wilmer, a longtime Poe associate, wrote to a mutual friend that Poe “has become one of the strangest of our literati. He and I are old friends,—-have known each other since boyhood, and it gives me inexpressible pain to notice the vagaries to which he has lately become subject. Poor fellow! He is no teetotaler by any means, and I fear he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical and intellectual.”⁷⁶ In early 1844, George Graham, who remained on nominally good terms with Poe, complained to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, promising not to print a “savage” review that Poe had written of Longfellow’s latest book: “I do not know what your crime may be in the eyes of Poe, but suppose it may be a better, and more widely established reputation. Or if you have wealth … that is sufficient to settle your damnation so far as Mr Poe may be presumed capable of effecting it.” Graham clearly felt this sort of resentment from Poe himself, as he proceeded to tell Longfellow that he recently loaned Poe some money, then learned that within an hour Poe “abused” him to another acquaintance “as an exclusive” (that is, a snob).⁷⁷

Poe moved the family from Philadelphia to New York in April 1844. Many years later, T. D. English suggested that there was a specific, disreputable cause for Poe’s departure: “I am the sole possessor of this scandalous secret, and as its recital would do no good to any one, the whole affair shall be buried with me.” There might have been a scandalous explanation for Poe’s departure from Philadelphia, but none is necessary. Poe wasn’t making enough money, he was drinking too much, and he was alienating his friends; he needed a new start in a new environment, a city with prospects for steady income. Down but not out in the months before leaving Philadelphia, he began lecturing on American poetry, capitalizing on the popularity of Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America while taking the opportunity to criticize it. He spoke to an overflow crowd at the Juliana Street Church, not far from his Spring Garden home, on November 21, 1843; a week later at Temperance Hall (ironically enough) in Wilmington, Delaware; on December 23 at Newark Academy in Delaware; at the Philadelphia Museum on January 10; and in Baltimore on January 31.⁷⁸

Figure 3.7  Walnut Street Theatre, where a production of “The Gold-Bug” was staged on August 8, 1843. Archival image blended with contemporary photograph. (Archival image: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Art Resource, NY.)

His six years in Philadelphia had not radically changed Poe, but they had advanced his career significantly as an editor, critic, and cryptographer, while giving rise to his full development as a writer of tales. Though his identity had largely been formed in Richmond, Poe was no southern stranger in a strange northern land: he adopted Philadelphia for as long as he lived there, made friends and enemies, and generally immersed himself in the city’s print and periodical culture. At the same time, he responded, mostly in fiction, to some of the mid-nineteenth-century city’s defining characteristics: alienation, ethnic diversity, racial tension, and the inscrutability of the urban landscape and its inhabitants.