The historical circumstances reflected in the journals of the fictional Emmeline Foster are based on research into the New York City literary milieu of the 1840’s. Although the poet Emmeline Foster herself exists only in the pages of this novel, other writers mentioned in her journal—Frances Sargent Osgood, Horace Greeley, Anne Lynch—actually lived, and socialized at the same Manhattan literary salons Emmeline attends. Edgar Allan Poe also frequented these salon gatherings, and, except for his dealings with the imaginary Emmeline, all other tales of his life recounted in The Raven and the Nightingale are based on sound biographical and historical evidence—even a preoccupation with the issue of plagiarism. I have taken the title of Emmeline Foster’s poem “The Bird of the Dream” from a letter published in the Broadway Journal when Poe was editor of that publication. According to Kenneth Silverman, author of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, an anonymous letter published on 1 March, 1845, explicitly raised the issue of “The Raven” and plagiarism, comparing:
“The Raven” with an anonymous poem called “The Bird of the Dream.” [The writer] pointed out fifteen distinct “identities,” such as the existence in both poems of a broken-hearted lover and of a bird at the poet’s window. He made it clear at the same time that no “imitation” by Poe was involved. (251)
Silverman goes on to suggest that “the great likelihood” is that Poe himself, with the aid of a friend, concocted the letter in the first place, thus simultaneously raising the possibility of plagiarism and denying that it ever took place. One can only speculate why Poe might have felt such a ploy was necessary. The verse from Emmeline Foster’s “The Bird of the Dream” is my own creation; it is not based on the Broadway Journal poem.
The chapter epigraphs in The Raven and the Nightingale are taken from the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American poets.