1. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1941] 1998), 719.
2. Bridget Bennett, “Home Songs and the Melodramatic Imagination: From ‘Home, Sweet Home’ to The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 171–87, quoted from 178.
3. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford, 2007), 526.
4. James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, The Antebellum Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004), 4.
5. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 149.
6. One notable exception in writing for nonspecialists about Poe is Jill Lepore’s New Yorker essay “The Humbug” (2009), which was included in her book The Story of America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 178–96. Lepore asserts that Poe “did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up and down times” (180).
7. W. H. Auden, “Introduction” [Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1950], reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 221.
8. Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” in Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 258; my italics.
9. Voices and Visions: Walt Whitman (film), New York Center for Visual History, Annenberg/CPB Collection, 1988.
10. See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), especially chapter 2, “Hypocrisy and Sincerity in the World of Strangers” (33–55).
11. When he republished the story three years later in a collection of his tales, Poe covered his tracks by adding references that include the possibility of “a fatal accident under the roof of Madame Deluc” (the Parisian equivalent of Frederika Loss). See John E. Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Mysterious Circumstances behind The Mystery of Marie Roget (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967); and Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
12. Brian Nicol, “The Urban Environment,” in Edgar Allan Poe in Context, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 82.
1. Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 6–7.
2. Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), 15.
3. Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” US Census Bureau, https://
4. Quoted in Agnes M. Bondurant, Poe’s Richmond (Richmond, VA: Poe Associates, [1942] 1978), 7.
5. Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan, eds., A Richmond Reader, 1733–1883 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 88.
6. Bondurant, 16.
7. Bondurant, 198–99.
8. Silverman, 12 Bondurant, 196–97.
9. Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe the Man, 2 vols. (Chicago: John C. Winston, 1926), 104; Christopher P. Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond: The Raven in the River City (Charleston, SC: History, 2012), 28.
10. J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Realm of Dream and Memory: Poe’s England,” in Poe and Place, edited by Philip Edward Phillips (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 73–74.
11. See Kennedy, “Realm of Dream and Memory,” 71–96. See also Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 185–86.
12. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1963), 687.
13. Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard, and Jamie McLaughlin, “A Population History of London,” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, version 7.0, March 018, www
14. Kennedy, “Realm of Dream and Memory,” 74. See also Heather Shore, “Mean Streets: Criminality, Immorality, and the Street in Early Nineteenth-Century London,” in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, edited by Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 151–64.
15. The Poetical Works of Shelley, edited by Ford F. Newell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 262.
16. See Porter, 257–78.
17. On the debt of “The Man of the Crowd” to Dickens, see Stephen Rachman, “ ‘Es lässt sich nicht schreiben’: Plagiarism and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 49–87.
18. Killis Campbell, “New Notes on Poe’s Early Years,” Dial 60 (February 17, 1916): 144 (accessed at www
19. Kennedy, “Realm of Dream and Memory,” 86–89.
20. Thomas and Jackson, 26, 31, 42.
21. Eugene L. Dider, Life of Edgar A. Poe (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877), 30–31 (accessed at www
22. J. T. L. Preston, quoted in Silverman, 24.
23. Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 36.
24. David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (New York: Haskell House, [1934] 1970), 41.
25. Didier, 33–34.
26. Silverman, 25.
27. Thomas H. Ellis, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Richmond Standard, May 7, 1881, 2 (accessed at www
28. Virginius Dabney, Richmond: The Story of a City (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 92.
29. Keshia A. Case and Christopher P. Semtner, Poe in Richmond (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2009), 16.
30. Bondurant, 51; Christopher P. Semtner, “Poe’s Richmond and Richmond’s Poe,” in Phillips, Poe and Place, 48.
31. Thomas and Jackson, 61.
32. Silverman, 28.
33. Semtner, “Poe’s Richmond and Richmond’s Poe,” 44.
34. Biographer Hervey Allen asserted that Ellis and Allan were “not above trading in … old slaves whom they hired out at the coal pits until they died.” See Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, [1926] 1934), 27.
35. Thomas and Jackson, 24.
36. Marie Tyler-McGraw and Gregg D. Kimball, In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 62. See also J. Gerald Kennedy, “ ‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 227–57.
37. Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, A Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850), 10–12.
38. Thomas and Jackson, 68.
39. Silverman, 31.
40. Thomas and Jackson, 69–70.
41. Silverman, 34.
42. Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 54.
43. Quoted in Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 58. Mary E. Phillips, in Edgar Allan Poe the Man, suggests that Allan confided to Elmira’s father James Royster that Poe would not inherit any of his property, effectively colluding to block the marriage (226–27). See also Hervey Allen and Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Introduction,” in Poe’s Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 29–30 (accessed at www
44. Allen and Mabbott, 30–31; Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Introduction,” in Merlin (Baltimore, 1827); Together with Recollections of Edgar A. Poe (New York: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints, 1941), xiii–xvi.
45. See Silverman, 35, on the resemblance of Poe’s letter to the Declaration of Independence.
46. Silverman, 9.
1. Robert Adger Law, “A Source for ‘Annabel Lee,’ ” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 21 (1922): 341–46. See also Scott Peeples, “Unburied Treasure: Edgar Allan Poe in the South Carolina Lowcountry,” with photographs by Michelle Van Parys, Southern Cultures 22, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 5–22.
2. Silverman, 42–43.
3. See William Hecker, “Introduction,” in Private Perry and Mister Poe: The West Point Poems, 1831, edited by William Hecker (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), xvii–lxxv.
4. Silverman, 63.
5. Silverman, 69.
6. Camilla Townsend, Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 33.
7. Townsend, 41.
8. Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1790–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 86; Townsend, 38.
9. Campbell Gibson, “Popluation of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” U. S. Census Bureau, June 1998, https://
10. Rockman, 26, 168.
11. Rockman, 34.
12. Mary Ellen Hayward and Frank R. Shivers Jr., eds., The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 80.
13. Hayward and Shivers, 83.
14. Lawrence C. Wroth, “Poe’s Baltimore,” Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 17, no. 4 (June 1929), 303–4.
15. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), edited by John Lauritz Larson (St. James, NY: Brandywine, 1993), 108–9.
16. Wroth, 303.
17. John H. Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall; or Glimpses of the Past (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1877), 133.
18. A Detailed and Correct Account of the Grand Civic Procession, in the City of Baltimore, on the Fourth of July, 1828; in Honor of the Day, and in Commemoration of the Commencement of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail-Road (Baltimore: Thomas Murphy, 1828), 43. The song is also quoted by Rockman, 16.
19. Rockman, 158–93.
20. Mary Markey and Dean Krimmel, “Poe’s Mystery House: The Search for Mechanics Row,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84, no. 4 (1991): 389–90.
21. David F. Gaylin, Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore (Charleston, SC: Arcadia), 34.
22. Markey and Krimmel, 392.
23. Markey and Krimmel, 392.
24. John C. Miller, “Did Edgar Allan Poe Really Sell a Slave?” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 9, no. 2 (1976): 52–53.
25. See Rockman, 57–61, on term slavery in Baltimore.
26. Markey and Krimmel, 394.
27. See Kennedy, “ ‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery.” Townsend uses Bailey/Douglass as a “guide” to 1830s Baltimore (33–46).
28. Silverman, 84–85.
29. Rockman, 185–86.
30. Biographers have hedged on whether Poe was actually jailed, acknowledging the lack of legal records to corroborate what he and Maria told Allan. I find the story credible: while one cannot rule out the possibility that Poe and Maria Clemm were simply lying to John Allan to play on his sympathy, that sort of outright fraud seems unnecessarily risky, especially if Poe had reason to expect that he might again need Allan’s help in the future. The fact that Allan asked a third party in Baltimore, John Walsh, to liberate Poe is an indication of how easily such a fraud could have been exposed.
31. Silverman, 96.
32. See Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 186–234, on literary competitions and Poe’s involvement with them, discussed specifically on 218–30.
33. John Earle Uhler, “Literary Taste and Culture in Baltimore: A Study of the Periodical Literature of Baltimore from 1815 to 1833,” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1927, 7.
34. Uhler, 119, 133, 204; Floyd Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet: Essays New and Old on the Man and His Work (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969), 42–43. See also Jeffrey A. Savoye, “Poe and Baltimore: Crossroads and Redemption,” in Phillips, Poe and Place, 103.
35. The story was first printed in an early Poe biography, William Fearing Gill’s Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Appleton, 1877), 46–49. Gill attributes it to a “Baltimore acquaintance” of Poe. See also Mary E. Phillips, who picked up the story, with some differences, from a biography of Lofland (Edgar Allan Poe the Man 1:461). Thomas Ollive Mabbott surmises that the story has “some basis in fact” (P 502).
36. Quoted from Stovall, 70. Stovall explicates “The Musiad” at length and conjectures that Poe wrote it himself, but Mabbott and other editors have not accepted the poem as Poe’s.
37. Stovall, 84–85.
38. John C. French, “Poe’s Literary Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine 32, no. 2 (1937): 101–12; French provides details about the Delphian Club and its resemblance to Poe’s Folio Club on 109–12. See also Alexander Hammond, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club: The Evolution of a Lost Book,” in Poe at Work: Seven Textual Studies, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978), 13–43.
39. Thomas and Jackson,134.
40. Although “Shadow—A Parable” was not published until 1835, Mabbott believes it was written before May 1833, as a companion piece to “Silence” (“Siope”), which was one of the eleven 1833 Folio Club tales (P 188).
41. Townsend, 35.
42. Thomas and Jackson, 142–43.
43. Augustus Van Cleef, “Poe’s Mary,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1889, 686 (accessed at www
44. There is a secondhand report, from a West Point classmate, of Poe working in a brickyard in Baltimore in 1834: Robert T. P. Allen, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Scribner’s Monthly, September 1875, 143 (accessed at www
45. Lambert A. Wilmer, “Recollections of Edgar A. Poe,” Baltimore Daily Commercial, May 23, 1866, 1 (accessed at www
46. Van Cleef, 635.
47. Wilmer, 1.
48. Gaylin, 44.
49. Wilmer, 1.
50. Thomas and Jackson, 148.
51. Thomas and Jackson, 149.
52. Silverman, 107. See also Michael R. Haines, “Long Term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, no. 80, 1996, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, https://
53. N. H. Morrison, a friend of Neilson Poe, told early Poe biographer John Henry Ingram, “To prevent so premature a marriage, Nelson [sic] Poe offered to take the young lady, his half-sister-in-law, into his own family, educate her, & take care of her—-with the understanding that, if, after a few years, the two young people should feel the same towards each other, they should be married” (John Carl Miller, Building Poe Biography [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977], 52). Burton R. Pollin argued that it was Maria Clemm who most needed to keep the family together in the face of Neilson Poe’s offer, and that she manipulated Poe into marrying Virginia. See Pollin, “Maria Clemm, Poe’s Aunt: His Boon or His Bane?” Mississippi Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 211–24.
54. Savoye, 100.
55. Thomas and Jackson, 175.
56. Thomas and Jackson, 192.
57. Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 65–66. Whalen discusses the history and effects of the exaggerated circulation figures throughout chapter 3 (“Fables of Circulation: Poe’s Influence on the Messenger”), 58–75.
58. Silverman, 108.
59. Thomas and Jackson, 242.
60. Quinn, 267.
61. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 611–14.
1. Quoted in Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 17.
2. Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [1968] 1987), 50–51. See also Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis, 1841–1854,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley (New York: Norton, 1982), 309.
3. See Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle, 1825–1841,” in Weigley, Philadelphia, 265–69 and 275–77.
4. Edgar P. Richardson, “The Athens of America, 1800–1825,” in Weigley, Philadelphia, 230.
5. Wainwright, 281–85.
6. Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Penguin, [1842] 2000), 110. See Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13.
7. Geffen, 307–8.
8. Michael Feldberg, “Urbanization as a Cause of Violence: Philadelphia as a Test Case,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940, edited by Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [1973] 1998), 53–69. David Johnson reports that a survey of a single newspaper from 1836–78 “uncovered fifty-two gangs which were identified by name” (also in Peoples of Philadelphia, 97).
9. Otter, 135.
10. Geffen, 315.
11. Quoted in Geffen, 318.
12. See Otter, 165–80; David S. Reynolds, Introduction to The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, by George Lippard, edited by David S. Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), vii–xli; and Scott Peeples, “The City Mystery Novel,” in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 5: The American Novel to 1870, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 548–63.
13. Dwight Rembert Thomas documents the evidence for these locations in “Poe in Philadelphia, 1838–1844: A Documentary Record,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978, 13, 25–27, 825–28 (accessed at www
14. Wainwright, 281.
15. Heinzen, 27–28.
16. Nancy M. Heinzen, The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 24.
17. Anne Clarke’s reminiscence is quoted in the engraver John Sartain’s memoir The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man (New York: Appleton, 1899), 216–17. Harris’s article was published in Hearth and Home, January 9, 1875, 24 (accessed at www
18. Wainwright, 300.
19. Over the course of his career, Poe published seven tales, a number of book reviews, and the series “The Literati of New York City” in Godey’s; however, he did not publish in Godey’s while in Philadelphia, with the exception of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” in April 1844, the month he left for New York. For a detailed description of Poe’s likely walk across town to the Burton’s office, see Amy Branam Armiento, “Poe in Philadelphia,” in Poe Places, edited by Philip Edward Phillips (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 125.
20. Sartain, 224; Thomas, 353–57.
21. Heather A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015),75.
22. Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26; Susan Belasco Smith and Kenneth M. Price, “Introduction,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 6. See also Lyn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
23. Haveman, 57–61, 26.
24. Haveman, 27.
25. Haveman, 31. See also Susan Belasco, “The Cultural Work of National Magazines,” in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 3: The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 258–70.
26. See Mabbott’s notes in T 1:391; also Armiento, 129.
27. Thomas and Jackson, 297–98.
28. Thomas and Jackson, 312.
29. Thomas and Jackson, 318–19.
30. See John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe: His Income as a Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15, no. 1 (1982): 1–7.
31. An analysis of prices by the website 24/7 Wall St. in 2010 provides an estimate similar to that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. See Charles B. Stockdale, Michael B. Sauter, and Douglas A. McIntyre, “A History of What Things Cost in America: 1776 to Today,” 24/7 Wall St., September 26, 2010, http://
32. Geffen, 335.
33. Robert L. Gale, A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 119.
34. For a nuanced discussion of the economies of writing during Poe’s time, see Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
35. Thomas, 73, 90.
36. Thomas and Jackson, 409; Mabbott’s introduction to “The Gold-Bug,” T 2:803.
37. Whalen, 197.
38. Whalen, 216–24; Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 5–23; J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 370–74.
39. Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, edited by Clarence S. Brigham (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1943), 37.
40. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1–32; and David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
41. In his introduction to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” T. O. Mabbott writes that “it may not be the first detective story, but it is the first story deliberately written as such to attain worldwide popularity” (T 1:521).
42. Amy Gilman, “Edgar Allan Poe Detecting the City,” in The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination in American Culture, edited by James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan M. Scott (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1993), 73.
43. See Gilman, 77.
44. Thomas, 57–58.
45. Thomas, 118–19.
46. See, for instance, Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 15.
47. On the inevitability of racial subtext of “Rue Morgue” and reader participation in the story’s meaning, see Ed White, “The Ourang-Outang Situation,” College Literature 30, no. 3 (2003): 88–108. Other important essays on race and “Rue Morgue” include Nancy Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe’s Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection,” in Agonisties: Arenas of Creative Contest, edited by Jane Lungstrum and Elizaebth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); and Lindon Barrett, “Presence of Mind: Detection and Racialization in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 157–76.
48. Elise Lemire, “ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Amalgamation Discourses and the Race Riots of 1838 in Poe’s Philadelphia,” in Romancing the Shadow, 184.
49. Lemire, 183. Her source for the detail about the Peale’s Museum exhibit is Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs (New York: Appleton, 1893). Leland fondly recalls visiting Peale’s Museum as a child—“And the stuffed monkeys—one shaving another—what exquisite humour, which never palled upon us!”—before noting that “ ‘stuffed monkey’ was a by-word, by the way, for a conceited fellow” (38).
50. Lemire, 195.
51. Thomas, 278.
52. See Quinn, 340; Silverman, 174–75.
53. Silverman, 174. Graham’s income was estimated at fifty thousand dollars per year in the 1840s, according to Joseph Jackson, Literary Landmarks of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1939), 150.
54. Quoted in J. H. Whitty, “Memoir,” in The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), xliii; Thomas, 442.
55. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe the Man, 1:749. Here Phillips drew on an unpublished manuscript, “Poe’s Philadelphia Homes,” by Philadelphia historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, who interviewed several people who had lived near Poe. Oberholtzer’s manuscript is apparently lost.
56. Elizabeth Milroy, “Assembling Fairmount Park,” in Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape: The Sartain Family Legacy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 72–73; Phillips, 746–48.
57. John E. Reilly, “A Source for the Immuration in ‘The Black Cat,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 1 (1993): 93–95.
58. See Armiento, 135–36; and Jason Haslam, “Pits, Pendulums, and Penitentiaries,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 50, no. 3 (2008): 268–84.
59. Oberholtzer, quoted in The Rose-Covered Cottage of Edgar Allan Poe in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Anthony J. Frayne, 1934), 2.
60. Rose-Covered Cottage, 2.
61. Phillips, quoting Poe’s neighbor Lydia Hart Garrigues, who was interviewed by Oberholtzer.
62. The North Seventh Street house’s cellar evokes the murder scene of “The Black Cat”; though it was published in August 1843, Poe probably wrote the story before moving from Coates to North Seventh Street, according to Mabbott (TS 2:848).
63. Thomas, 877, 881.
64. Rose-Covered Cottage, 10.
65. W. J. Rorabauch, The Alcoholic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press), 8.
66. Geffen, 335; Rose-Covered Cottage, 12.
67. Geffen, 342; Thomas, 158. Burton did not mention Poe by name but referred to “the person whose ‘infirmities’ have caused us much annoyance,” at a time when most subscribers would know that he was referring to his former coeditor.
68. Thomas Dunn English, “Reminiscences of Poe [Part 2],” Independent, October 22, 1896, 3–4 (accessed at www
69. English, “Reminiscences of Poe [Part 2],” 3.
70. Thomas and Jackson, 371.
71. Thomas and Jackson, 405.
72. Thomas, 534.
73. Silverman, 193–95; Thomas, 533–34.
74. Thomas and Jackson, 433–34.
75. Thomas and Jackson, 420–32.
76. Quinn, 401–2. Tomlin sent Poe the letter, which ended Poe’s friendship with Wilmer.
77. Thomas and Jackson, 452.
78. Thomas and Jackson, 441–51.
1. Edwin G Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds., Empire City: New York through the Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 102.
2. Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” US Census Bureau, http://
3. David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 33.
4. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 600.
5. Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt, [1994] 2005), 82.
6. Burrows and Wallace, 565.
7. Bayard Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 99.
8. Still, 127.
9. Burrows and Wallace, 694–95.
10. See Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830–1875 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) 19–24.
11. Still, 159–60, 143.
12. See Harold H. Scudder, “Poe’s ‘Balloon Hoax,’ ” American Literature 21, no. 2 (May 1949): 179–90.
13. A search on the American Periodicals Series database yields other examples from 1844–45, including the Lowell Offering, the Christian Reflector, and the New York Observer and Chronicle.
14. “New York Letter Writers,” editorial, Herald (New York), February 28, 1844, 1.
15. See Scott Peeples, “ ‘To Reproduce a City’: New York Letters and the Urban American Renaissance,” in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 101–22.
16. Although they already knew each other’s work, Poe introduced himself to Willis in a letter dated May 21, 1844, three days after the publication of the first “Doings” installment (Thomas and Jackson, 462). See also T. O. Mabbott’s introduction to Doings of Gotham, xvii. On Poe’s relationship with Willis, see Scott Peeples, “ ‘The Mere Man of Letters Must Ever Be a Cypher’: Poe and N. P. Willis,” ESQ 46 (2000): 125–47.
17. On August 2, 1845, Poe published, in the Broadway Journal, a revised and expanded version of his sketch “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man,” not only shortening the title and changing the narrator’s name but also adding six paragraphs and making dozens of small revisions. The fact that Poe took this much interest in the story, rather than simply dumping a lightly revised text into the Journal, suggests that on Broadway in 1845 he saw a heightened relevance for its satire of the business world and descriptions of comically exaggerated petty swindles.
18. See, for instance, Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe the Man: “Poe no doubt thought country air would help Virginia and benefit them all” (882).
19. Mary Maloney Brennan, quoted in William Fearing Gill, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Appleton, 1877), 149, 150 (accessed at www
20. James R. O’Beirne, quoted in “Poe and ‘The Raven’: Circumstances Recounted to Prove Where He Wrote the Poem,” Mail and Express, April 21, 1900, 1.
21. The case for Poe’s authorship of this sketch, “A Moving Chapter,” is not conclusive, but the evidence is strong enough to have earned Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s acceptance.
22. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 35. Jackson’s description of omnibus travel is consistent with the impression made by Poe’s satire.
23. Maura D’Amore, Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 83. Throughout the book, D’Amore discusses several antebellum male writers who in various ways promoted the new suburban ideal.
24. This letter is the crucial evidence that Poe moved in late January or early February. A letter dated March 20 includes the address 154 Greenwich Street (L 2:500).
25. In a letter to James Russell Lowell dated May 28, 1844, Poe lists five of these then-unpublished stories among his completed tales: “The Oblong Box,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “ ‘Thou Art the Man!’ ” He also lists “The System of Doctors Tar and Fether,” which was not published until 1845. Since he had been living in New York only about six weeks at the time, it seems likely that some or all of these stories were written in Philadelphia.
26. Thomas and Jackson, 437.
27. John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe: His Income as Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 5.
28. “Poe and ‘The Raven,’ ” 1.
29. Thomas and Jackson, 495.
30. Thomas and Jackson, 497.
31. Thomas and Jackson, 491.
32. See Scherzer, 25–26, 49–50.
33. Thomas and Jackson, 498.
34. Thomas and Jackson, 497.
35. See Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 70–71 and 107–8; Meredith McGill, “Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 271–304; and J. Gerald Kennedy, The American Turn of Edgar Allan Poe (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society & the Library of the University of Baltimore, 2001).
36. Thomas and Jackson, 507.
37. According to Perry Miller, for instance, “All February and March the Longfellow business was the talk of a town that had little but politics to talk about” (The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956], 129). See also Sandra Tomc, “Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (New York: Oxford, 2019), 559–75, for more on Poe’s strategic use of personal literary warfare.
38. Thomas and Jackson, 515–16.
39. Thomas and Jackson, 513.
40. “Introductory,” Broadway Journal, January 4, 1845, 1.
41. Thomas and Jackson, 528.
42. Thomas and Jackson, 536.
43. Silverman, 259–61.
44. Phillips, “Poe-Plan of New York City,” endpaper of Edgar Allan Poe the Man.
45. Thomas and Jackson, 582.
46. Chivers’ Life of Poe, edited by Richard Beale Davis (New York: Dutton, 1952), 61. Chivers first heard from Maria Clemm that Poe had been at home “in bed for a whole week … pretending to be sick,” then, on a visit the next day, witnessed it himself.
47. Thomas and Jackson, 529.
48. Thomas and Jackson, 622.
49. John Ward Ostrom, “Edgar A. Poe: His Income as a Literary Entrepreneur,” Poe Studies 15 (1982): 5.
50. Thomas and Jackson, 625.
51. Phillips, 2:1110–11.
52. Reginald Pelham Bolton, The Poe Cottage at Fordham, Transactions of the Bronx Society of Arts, Sciences, and History, vol. 1 (n.p., 1922), 2.
53. John Carl Miller, Building Poe Biography (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1971), 101.
54. Thomas and Jackson, 640.
55. Thomas and Jackson, 641.
56. Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1860), 31–32.
1. Miller, Building Poe Biography, 163.
2. Thomas and Jackson, 726.
3. Silverman, 350.
4. Thomas and Jackson, 750.
5. Quoted in Christian Wolmar, The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America (NY: Public Affairs, 2012), 51.
6. John F. Stover, American Railroads, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1961] 1977), 31.
7. See George W. Hilton, The Night Boat (Berkeley, CA: Howell-North, 1968), 65.
8. Thomas and Jackson, 757.
9. James Russell Lowell, Lowell’s Complete Poems (New York: Houghton, 1898), 142.
10. Quoted in John E. Reilly, “Poe in Pillory: An Early Version of a Satire by A. J. H. Duganne,” Poe Studies 6 (1973): 9.
11. Thomas and Jackson, 786.
12. Silverman, 414.
13. See Silverman, 414.
14. John Sartain, “Reminiscences of Edgar Allan Poe,” Lippincott’s 43, no. 3 (1889): 411–15 (accessed at www
15. Thomas and Jackson, 817.
16. Silverman, 419, 422; Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 105.
17. Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 92.
18. Susan Archer [Talley] Weiss, “The Last Days of Edgar Poe,” Scribner’s, March 1878, 714 (accessed at www
19. Susan Archer [Talley] Weiss, The Home Life of Poe (New York: Echo Library, [1907] 2011), 85.
20. See Poe’s letters to Maria Clemm, August 29, 1849 (L 2:830–32) and September 18, 1849 (L 2:837–38).
21. “She Lives Over an Evening with Poe,” New York Herald, February 19, 1905, 4 (accessed at www
22. Thomas and Jackson, 839.
23. Quinn, 629.
24. Thomas and Jackson, 844. The quotation is Snodgrass’s reconstruction of the note.
25. On these possibilities and additional careful research on the events leading up to Poe’s death, see Matthew Pearl, “A Poe Death Dossier: Discoveries and Queries in the Death of Edgar Allan Poe,” in two parts: Edgar Allan Poe Review 7, no. 2 (2006): 4–29; and 8, no. 1 (2007): 8–31. Pearl argues that Neilson Poe’s account of Poe being returned to Baltimore by train is much more plausible than the “cooping” theory, though they were often presented together in biographical accounts.
26. “Edgar A. Poe: Zolnay’s Bust of Him Unveiled at the University of Virginia—Mr. Mabie’s Address,” New York Times Saturday Review, October 14, 1899, 698.
27. Semtner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Richmond, 114–18.
28. “History of the Cottage,” Bronx County Historical Society, http://
29. “The House through the Years,” Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, National Park Service, https://
30. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, [1925] 1956), 216, 219, 220.