We're Taking Poe Back

For years, Baltimore has laid claim to one of our greatest writers. Nevermore!

by Edward Pettit

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Published: Oct 2, 2007

Michael T. Regan

This is a literary grave-robbing.

On Sunday, Oct. 7, Edgar Allan Poe will have been dead for 158 years. His critical reputation has waxed and waned, and there have been many generic claims for Poe's works. He was a gothic writer, an inventor of the detective story, and a pioneer of science fiction. He was a poet, short-story writer, satirist and literary critic. Many places have claimed him as their own literary son: Richmond, Baltimore, New York, Boston. He was buried in Baltimore when he died.

But I want to exhume his body and translate his remains to the City of Brotherly Love, the once unironically named "Athens of America." That's because Poe is ours. He belongs to Philadelphia.

In 1838, Poe moved to Philadelphia with his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. He had been living in New York City for a little over a year, but was unsuccessful in securing enough editing and writing work to support his small family. Poe had been living a gypsy existence for most of his life. As an infant, his actress mother brought him along on her theatrical tours. Orphaned at 3, he was adopted into a Richmond, Va., family that moved to England for five years of his childhood. After brief stints at university and in the army, Poe made stops in Boston and Baltimore, as well as New York.

Poe followed the same overall pattern in each city he lived in: editorships, critical battles with other writers, strange behavior, indigence. In a letter in 1841, he wrote, "I am a Virginian — at least I call myself one." That qualifier at the end sums it up. He is a Virginian in name only, as a place where he spent most of his childhood. Interesting that Poe made this claim while living in Philadelphia. He may have been a good ol' Southern boy, but now he had to qualify his geographical identity. Philadelphia had imprinted itself onto his heart.

The Poe family lived in several residences in Philadelphia from 1838 until 1844. Only their last home still stands. At Seventh and Spring Garden streets, it is now run by the National Park Service. According to Helen McKenna-Uff, park ranger at the Philadelphia Poe House, "Philadelphia was Poe's much-needed second (or third or fourth) chance. By the time he got to this city, he had burned a few bridges. By the time he leaves Philadelphia, he has invented one of the most popular genres of writing [the mystery/detective story], has helmed two successful magazines, published three books, been sought as America's most controversial literary critic and delved into being a lecturer."

Poe originally moved to the city because it was still one of the publishing centers of the country. Aspiring writers needed to be near the publishing houses that edited and printed the nation's books and magazines. Philadelphia was still the leader in magazine publishing, although soon it would be overtaken by New York City. "Poe's first engagement in Philadelphia [was] a part-time editorial job with Burton's Magazine," continues McKenna-Uff. "He parlayed that position into becoming editor for Graham's Magazine, one of the most successful magazines in the country. Between his reputation for writing imaginative fiction and withering reviews, his writings were sought after by many other periodicals around the nation." Poe's initial successes in the city diminished by 1844. Poe's irascibility and drinking problems, exacerbated by his wife's tuberculosis, began to alienate the editors whom Poe needed to court for work.

However, while living in Philadelphia, Poe wrote the bulk of his greatest work.

That's not to say he didn't write great things while living in other cities. Much of his poetry was written elsewhere. His most popular poem, "The Raven," was begun in Philadelphia, but finished and published on his return to New York. The short stories "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Purloined Letter" are written post-Philly. However, if you are compiling a greatest-hits collection, or if you are making up an all-star team of his greatest works, "The Raven" might be batting cleanup, but most of the other positions will be covered by stories Poe wrote and published here.

The doomed family of the House of Usher was conjured by Poe here. William Wilson and his evil doppelganger also took form. The madman of "The Tell-Tale Heart" made his murderous confession under the dark skies of the Quaker City. C. Auguste Dupin, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and all fictional detectives to follow, sprung from Poe's fertile pen while the author was reading the daily criminal mysteries that plagued the city. The detective/mystery story was invented in Philadelphia! In 1842, Poe's last full year in the city, he composed "The Black Cat," "The Gold-Bug," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Oval Portrait" and "The Pit and the Pendulum." No Philadelphia writer has ever produced a corpus to rival this.

So what was it about Philadelphia in the late 1830s and early 1840s that so inspired Poe? Usually, it is the historical icons of the city that inspire visitors (and natives): Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell (popularized especially by George Lippard's apocryphal story of its being rung on July 4, 1776) and George Washington.

But while Poe took great pride in the patriotic role his grandfather, "General" David Poe, played in the Revolutionary War, his works are not concerned with ideas like liberty and self-government. Poe's stories and poems are about murder, paranoia, madness, the afterlife. Philadelphia could have inspired him to set his stories on green battlefields and in stately halls. Instead, Poe's characters wander graveyards and decrepit mansions. Violence lurks around corners, then rushes forth and overwhelms its victims. Characters plummet through hellish pits of their own disordered minds. How did the Athens of America, the young nation's first political capital, fail to influence Poe with its lofty democratic ideals?

Poe's Philadelphia was one older historians didn't want to talk about, tried to hide for a hundred years or so. It was a Philadelphia of race and labor riots, poverty and crime. A stinking effluvia of corruption and decadence rolled down its streets, dimming the lights, stifling its development (sound familiar?). In First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory, Gary Nash writes of Philadelphia from the years 1815-1860, "Historians now believe this was the most violent era of the city's history." The first general strike in American labor history occured in 1835. An economic depression gripped the country from 1837 to 1842. In 1842, the weavers of Philadelphia struck and battled in the streets of Kensington. One of the city's newspapers called the dire labor conditions "the awful doctrine of 'blood and bread.'" Had Poe remained in Philadelphia beyond 1844, would he have joined his friend George Lippard in his proto-muckraking social crusades? Unlikely. Poe was devoted to shaping the aesthetic principles of America, not its economic conditions. While Lippard campaigned in the penny newspapers on behalf of filling the workers' stomachs with bread, Poe, in the magazines, called for poetry for their souls.

In the early 19th century, urban landscapes were rife with death and oppression. Most murders went unsolved. Criminal activity plagued the streets. Grave-robbers patrolled the cemeteries at night. Prisons stonily dominated certain neighborhoods with their grim walls. Poe, if we define him by his macabre works, felt right at home. Could he have experienced all of this in other cities? He most certainly could have, but it was in Philadelphia that he wrote most about these kinds of experiences. Before living in Philadelphia, his horror tales were more grounded in a European Gothicism. Post-Philadelphia, Poe's personal problems — erratic behavior, sporadic drunkenness, poverty, his wife's illness and death — take over his life, diminishing his creative output until his own early death a mere five years later.

We can even identify some of the public crimes that inspired his work. In 1839, Philadelphian James Wood was found not guilty by reason of insanity of murdering his own daughter. Poe was fascinated by this case and, in 1840, wrote that Wood was "characterized by an entire self-possession — a remarkable calmness — an evenness of manner ... [h]is replies were cool, and without the slightest trepidation." The killer of Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" asks his listeners to hear "how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story." In "The Black Cat," the narrator brags how "soundly and tranquilly [I] slept; aye even with the burden of murder upon my soul."

Race riots between Philadelphia's free African-American community and their main labor competition, the growing Irish immigrant population, happened on an almost-yearly basis between 1834 and 1844. Although Poe left just before the deadliest riot in the city in the fall of 1844, he was a daily witness to violent social unrest. And remember, there was not yet an organized police force. Even the fire companies were generally composed of rival ethnic gangs, more likely to battle their enemies in the bloody streets while buildings burned rather than fight the fires. Some days (or weeks), chaos reigned.

It was this very urban nightmare that infects Poe's greatest works. The chaos of the streets becomes the disorder in the minds of his madmen (and madwomen). Riotous gangs become the deadly misrule and panic that conspire to wrench the veil from life and reveal the loathsome, decaying mortality that lurks beneath the mask of our lives. The plague of death stalks us. We can do nothing. Barring the doors will not keep it at bay. We are at the mercy of the nightmare that daily burdens the people of the city.

Poe is part of a tradition that gothicized the urban landscape of Philadelphia. Charles Brockden Brown, at the turn of the 19th century, wrote gothic novels set in and around Philadelphia. In Arthur Mervyn, the title character is caught up in murderous conspiracies in the city while the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 rages through the population (killing between one-fifth and one-fourth of the residents). In Wieland, a man spontaneously combusts and, years later, his son hears voices from God telling him to murder his wife and children, a deed he promptly carries out with an ax.

Poe's friend Lippard transformed Philadelphia into a gothic horror show with deformed hunchbacks pursuing fainting women along the corridors of an old mansion. Both Poe and Lippard acknowledged their imaginative debts to Brown. Both writers adapt gothic conventions in ways similar to Brown. The past is a burden on the present. Madness can be a mere blink away. Axes are sharp and can do great damage when plunged into heads.

One story serves as the best example of the influence of the urban nightmare landscape on Poe's works, "The Man of the Crowd," written and published in 1840. In it, the narrator is sitting in a coffeehouse in London, watching through a bay window the crowd rushing through the streets, a "tumultuous sea of human heads." He identifies the professional men — attorneys, stock-jobbers, clerks — as well as the beggars, gamblers, laborers and pickpockets. His attention is suddenly arrested by a "decrepit old man," who inexplicably fascinates him: "There arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the 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." The narrator then begins an all-night pursuit of the stranger.

Although Poe sets this story in London, Philadelphia must have provided the template. The increasingly paranoid, phantasmagoric pursuit of the stranger through the labyrinthine streets of the city are a tour of Philadelphia at its chaotic worst, a gas-lit scene of squalor and decay:

It was the most noisome quarter of London, where 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, in directions so many and capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing grass. Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.

Poe would not have witnessed these scenes in his childhood visit to London. He could have read of scenes like this in the novels of Dickens. He could have seen scenes like this in Baltimore and New York, but why would he need to conjure images of those places when he lived in the midst of such an environment in Philadelphia? The dirty, cobblestone streets of Philadelphia would have been pre-eminent in his mind. "The Man of the Crowd" is a snapshot (or more appropriately, a daguerreotype) of the worst of Philadelphia.

After leaving Philadelphia, Poe achieved his greatest celebrity in New York City as the author of "The Raven," but wealth did not accompany his short-lived fame. His frail wife, Virginia, died and Poe became increasingly unhinged. The last year of his life seemed to bring some hope when he became engaged to marry a wealthy widow of Richmond, but shortly afterward, Poe would die in what may be the most bizarrely mysterious circumstances of any American writer. On his return trip north to either Philadelphia or New York, where Poe sought to secure financial backing for a new periodical he would edit, he stopped off in Baltimore. On Oct. 3, he was found in what appeared to be a drunken stupor in a saloon, dressed in ragged clothes that were not his own. A few days later, Poe died in a hospital, alone and raving.

No one knows why he was in Baltimore or what he did while he was there. Equally mysterious is his condition when he was found. Was he drunk or just deliriously ill? What happened to his clothes? Over the years, the cause of his death has been ascribed to abduction and forced drunkenness (in order to repeatedly cast illegal votes on election day), meningitis, robbery, epilepsy, rabies and a toxic blood disorder. What is certain is that Baltimoreans virtually ignored his death. Only three people turned up for his burial. He died a stranger's death in Baltimore.

Had Poe died in Philadelphia, there would have been a huge funeral. The penny press would have trumpeted the announcement for a solid week. Philadelphia has always had a way of celebrating its disasters, its ne'er-do-wells. Poe, found delirious, possibly drunk, in a tavern, taken to a hospital where he dies raving like a lunatic? The press would have eaten this up, but the public also would have embraced him like a prodigal son. The society matrons may have shaken their fingers at his supposed moral destitution, but the public at large would have lined the streets for a parade to accompany him to the cemetery.

True enough, while newspapers around the country were maligning Poe's name, Philadelphia's Quaker City Weekly was blasting a clarion to defend it: "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." Poe still had friends in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Poe's posthumous reputation has ignored his connection with Philadelphia. Biographers of Poe have dutifully recounted Poe's stay in Philadelphia as just that, a brief stay, as if one's residence in a tumultuous 19th-century urban environment would have no real impact on an author's works. The best book-length critical analysis of Poe, heroically titled Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe in imitation of Poe's poem "The Bells," was written by a Philadelphia poet, Daniel Hoffman, although the author fails to address how the city may have inspired him.

There are scores of novels and stories that feature a fictional Poe. But for the most part, they, too, ignore Philadelphia. Of the most recent, The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl is set in Baltimore; The Blackest Bird by Joel Rose is in New York; The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard is in West Point; and An Unpardonable Crime by Andrew Taylor is in Poe's childhood England. Harold Schechter features Poe as a crime-solving sleuth in four mystery novels, but he situates him in Baltimore or New York. Even when a novel or story is set during the years when Poe lived in Philadelphia, mysteriously, Poe tramps the streets of other cities. I know of two short stories about Poe, Bill Crider's "But I Feel the Bright Eyes ... " (a vampiric tale that also features Lippard and his infamous Monk Hall) and Manly Wade Wellman's "When It Was Moonlight" (another one featuring a pesky vampire), in which the action plays out in Philadelphia. It appears that hardly anyone thinks "Philadelphia" when they think of Poe.

Of course, if you are a law-abiding citizen, then my arguments for a Philadelphian Poe are unnecessary. Congress has already legislated that Poe belongs to the city. In 1978, the Poe House at Seventh and Spring Garden was added to the National Park Service as a National Historic Site. Congress had to pass a law granting the interpretation of Poe's life and legacy to the management of the NPS at the Philadelphia Poe site. Poe is a Philadelphian by law.

Still, there remains a challenge. As the bicentennial of Poe's birth approaches in 2009, we must reclaim our macabre, prodigal son. Other cities on the Poe tour of America, be warned: Acolytes of Poe will be flocking to Philadelphia to celebrate our Edgar. The Free Library of Philadelphia houses one of the greatest Poe collections in the world (including Grip, Charles Dickens' pet raven that inspired Poe's most famous poem). The Glass Prism, a psychedelic band who had a minor hit with "The Raven" from their 1969 concept album, "Poe Through the Glass Prism," will be reuniting for the Friends of Poe at the German Society (just across the street from the Poe House) later this month (Oct. 27). The International Poe Conference is scheduled to meet in Philadelphia in 2009 on the anniversary of Poe's death (Oct. 8-11).

While here, they will visit a unique experience at the Poe House. The National Park Service maintains it in true Poe style. Rather than clutter it up with period furniture, the NPS has left the rooms eerily empty. The rooms echo with visitors' footsteps. The usual museum hush is transformed into ghostly silence.Floorboards creak.The walls have been stripped back to their original surface, but what survives is a parti-colored mosaic of greens, blues, blacks and whites in streaking, nightmarish patterns. Cracks suffer through the plaster. The entire house seems to commune with the gothic of Poe's work.

The most fun is the basement, a clear inspiration for Poe's stories. One must duck under the dusty, cob-webbed ceiling. The floor is brick. Plaster crumbles from the walls.There is even a partially uncovered recess in the wall, once bricked over, that surely inspired the wife's entombment in "The Black Cat" (and later Fortunato's in "The Cask of Amontillado" ).And those cobwebs on the ceiling and on the walls and on the stairs? They're not some phony Halloween decorations. Real spiders patiently await their prey, hanging inches from visitors' faces. How many Government Park locations offer that kind of experience?

If there were a dead author draft and cities could compete for writers whose provenance was multigeographical, then Philadelphia would use its pick on Poe. If Poe were a boxer, the ring announcer would intone, "Fighting out of the red corner, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ED-GAR Allan POE! POE!" If Poe were quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles, he might still get booed, but at least he'd go into the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, as an Eagle. (In your face, Baltimore "Ravens.")

So, Philadelphians, let's hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery. I'll bring the shovel. We can re-inter it under the floorboards at Seventh and Spring Garden or brick it into the wall. 

Edgar Allan Poe is a Philadelphian. Richmond? Baltimore? New York City? Please.

Poe is ours ... evermore.

Edward Pettit wrote about Philadelphia writer George Lippard for the Spring 2007 CP Book Quarterly. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and blogs at bibliothecary.squarespace.com.

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