The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe Book

The life, times, and work of a tormented genius

Shelley Costa Bloomfield

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781440538261
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The genius and orphan son of itinerant actors, Poe led a tragic life and suffered greatly—as much at his own hands as those of Fate. Yet tragedy never stopped him from writing: poems, short stories, literary journalism, and even creating a new genre, the detective story—a contribution so great that the most prestigious writing award for crime fiction, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, bears his name. The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe is a fascinating guide to the tormented genius, with critical insight into:

• His difficult childhood
• His 13-year-old bride
• The truth about his drug use
• The enduring mystery of his death

Poe led a life as epic as one of his poems. In The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, you'll learn all the deepest secrets that haunted this tortured writer, influenced his writing, and ultimately drove him to an early death.

Chapter 1
The Fall of the House of Poe

Edgar Poe was born into a new nation and a family of actors. National—and personal—identity were shifting things in 1809. Possibilities abounded. In time, Edgar would harness the drama that inspired his parents and the lore surrounding his ancestors to become one of the greats in American literature. But there was much for him to overcome. The early loss of both mother and father thrust Edgar into a foster family that irrevocably shaped the course of his life.

Nothing Short of Complete Justice

The Boston of 1809, when Edgar Poe was born, was a vibrant city with a population of 30,000 (including upwards of 1,000 slaves) and a history of European settlement dating back nearly two hundred years. Called the Cradle of Liberty for its central role in the Revolutionary War—site of the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and the first battles in neighboring Lexington and Concord—Boston was entering the nineteenth century as a wealthy international port. Fish, tobacco, salt, and rum were the chief exports in this bustling seaport, and the citizens were incensed at the Embargo Act—Congress’s attempt to maintain neutrality in the conflict between England and France by forbidding trade with foreign powers.

fact

Because it was just a two-minute walk to the theater district, what was called Carver Street when Poe was born housed many actors. It was a charming, narrow street with gaslights. Now it’s called Charles Street South, and it houses the Massachusetts Transportation Building.

Just two weeks after Poe’s birth, the Boston Gazette commented, “The spirit of New England is slow in rising; but when once inflamed by oppression, it will never be repressed by anything short of complete justice.” It is a quintessential New England point of view (although you can hear its echoes in Confederate rhetoric a generation later), and in it there is both a reminder of Boston’s recent Revolutionary War history and a portent of things to come. What would become the abolitionist movement, with its far-reaching national and humanitarian consequences half a century hence, was simmering but not yet boiling. With its unique infrastructure, coastal location, and population—descendants of people who always grappled with ideas—Boston was poised for its role in the new century.

Poe was born in Bay Village, a neighborhood no bigger than a quarter of a square mile, a place of trim, red brick row houses. If Beacon Hill was home to the Brahmins, the First Families of Boston, Bay Village was home to the bohemians. In housing artists, artisans, and shopkeepers, the development of this section of the city reflected Boston’s economic vitality—and the emergence of the middle class. The first house was built in Bay Village around the same time the Arnolds arrived from England.

“The United States’ motto, E pluribus unum, may possibly have a sly allusion to Pythagoras’ definition of beauty—the reduction of many into one.”—Poe, equally sly, in 1845

Life upon the Wicked Stage

Henry and Elizabeth Arnold were a London theater couple who performed at Covent Garden Theatre Royal and other theater towns in England. They were itinerant stage performers and had to scramble for a livelihood. Their only child, Elizabeth (“Eliza”) was born in 1787 and joined her parents on stage when she was very young. The stage was her work, her play, her education, her life—a single, powerful influence on the development of the child who would become the mother of Edgar Allan Poe. The theater, for all its hardships, was all she knew. When life suddenly became more difficult with the death of her father in 1793, she and her mother continued to support themselves as performers for three more years, until the widow decided the American stage might offer more opportunities for them.

So they set out for Boston, bringing along Charles Tubbs, another English actor who became Eliza’s stepfather, and arrived in January of 1796. Three months after she arrived, Eliza debuted at the Federal Street Theater, singing a favorite called “The Market Lass” in a clear, sweet voice.

The audience loved it, and the family thought their American career was launched. But life on the American stage looked a lot like life on the English stage, and the transatlantic move didn’t improve either the fortunes or talents of Eliza Arnold’s little family. At the end of the eighteenth century, American drama was little more than a plodding derivation of popular European stage fare. Theater as a seductive, established institution for players, playwrights, and audiences was still half a century away. So the Tubbs couple traveled with Eliza from town to town along the Eastern seaboard, wending their way south, until finally they found some stability when they joined the Charleston Comedians troupe in 1798. But in 1798, Elizabeth Arnold Tubbs died of yellow fever. Eliza soon left the care of her stepfather, who had become manager of the troupe, and set out on her own as an actress.

“The fact is, the drama is not now supported for the sole reason that it does not deserve support. We must burn or bury the old models — We need Art … that is to say, in place of absurd conventionalities, we demand principles of dramatic composition founded in Nature, and in common sense.
—Poe on theater in America

It was a knockabout life for a teenager, especially one whose striking dark looks were as much a matter of comment as her work on the stage. At the age of fifteen, Eliza Arnold married another young actor, C.D. Hopkins, and they played the Virginia theater circuit. In three years he, too, died of yellow fever. Eliza Arnold Hopkins was an eighteen-year-old widow with no children and no family—but a sizeable repertoire—when she met a Richmond law student named David Poe, Jr.

Promoting “General” Poe

The law student named David Poe, Jr. was the oldest son in a large Baltimore family of seven children. By the time he was born in 1784, the Poes were third generation Americans who had established themselves in the New World as merchants, patriots, and landowners.

Poe’s great-grandparents, John Poe and his wife Jane McBride Poe, emigrated from Ireland to America (with their son, David) and were living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by 1750. David, who was Edgar’s grandfather, was the oldest of ten children, and only one of three to have children of his own. By 1755, John and Jane Poe had moved their family to Baltimore.

Edgar’s paternal grandfather, David Poe, Sr. was a patriot, in fact, a zealot in the cause of the colonies’ independence from England. It was a passion the Baltimore wheelwright and dry goods merchant backed with the dizzying amount of $40,000—a fortune in those days.

question

How much was David Poe’s gift in today’s dollars?

To give you a sense of just how extravagantly David Poe, Sr. put his money where his mouth was, in today’s dollars, his gift of $40,000 to the cause of American independence is roughly equivalent to $475,000.

David Poe, Sr. was instrumental in pushing the Tories—British sympathizers—out of Baltimore. His chief function in the nascent American army was that of quartermaster, providing patriot soldiers with military supplies. Even his wife, Elizabeth, mother of ten children, contributed to the cause by sewing uniforms. It was life lived in service to a glorious cause. For his work as quartermaster, Poe Sr. received the honorary title of “General.” And “General” he would remain to his ambitious young grandson, Edgar, whose vast romantic imagination discovered an interest in the military.

The Short, Scrappy Life of David Poe, Jr.

David Poe, Jr. took his life in a different direction than the one his family had charted for him. While studying law in Baltimore, David Jr. joined an all-male amateur theatrical group called the Thespian Club, and what began as a hobby soon became the reason he abandoned his law studies. He saw a performance by a young actress named Eliza Arnold Hopkins and fell in love, both with her and the delectable possibility of life as an actor. In a nation newly committed to the pursuit of happiness, David Poe, Jr. began promoting himself as an actor and singer.

The rest of the Poe family was not pleased.

fact

A rumor started floating among the West Point cadets that Poe’s other grandfather—not the one Edgar later referred to as the “intimate” friend of Lafayette—was Benedict Arnold. It was Eliza Poe’s maiden name, Arnold, that led to the rumor, and Edgar, who liked the cachet of military hero grandsires—apparently even traitorous ones—didn’t set the record straight.

No pictures of David Poe, Jr. survive, but a review of his professional debut pronounced his appearance “much in his favor.” One reviewer sniped that Poe was well suited to any role requiring a backwoodsman—which, of course is not what you want to hear if you’re picturing yourself as Hamlet—although his performance was timid. David Poe pursued acting with a kind of deluded passion but received nothing but enthusiastic disdain for his efforts, wounding his pride. By the time David and Eliza married in 1806, she had a decade head start in the theater over her vain young husband, and it was she who received all the praise. The couple had two sons—William Henry Leonard Poe was born at the end of January 1807, followed by Edgar (named for the legitimate son in King Lear, in which Eliza and David were appearing at the time) two years later, on January 19.

Was David Poe jealous of his wife’s success? Was he a reluctant father? Was he broken by the financial hardship the Poes could never quite outrun? In three years, David fathered two sons, garnered many bad reviews, developed a severe drinking problem, and earned a reputation for scrappiness. The marriage became stormy, and sometime during Edgar’s infancy his father disappeared. The father of Edgar’s sister, Rosalie, who was born more than a year after David Poe deserted his family, remains a mystery.

Run, Eliza, Run

One of the most damaging events in the life of Edgar Allan Poe was the death of his mother a month before his third birthday. In the fifteen years since she arrived in Boston with her actress mother, Eliza Hopkins Poe had mastered seventy roles, played three hundred performances, toured the eastern seaboard, been widowed once, abandoned once, and given birth to three children. She was a remarkably dedicated actress who had no support system either to ease her financial hardship or participate in the upbringing of her little family.

Everything fell to Eliza.

Eliza’s Exit

At twenty-four, Eliza wound up back in Richmond, broke and ailing, with three children all under the age of five. An ad in the Richmond Enquirer of November 29, 1811, brought Eliza’s plight to the attention of the Richmond community.

question

What did the ad say?

“To the Humane Heart,” ran the headline, “On this night, Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance; and asks it perhaps for the last time. The generosity of a Richmond Audience can need no other appeal.”

Some civic-minded women affected by the ad visited the penniless Eliza Poe, sheltered at the home of a Scotch milliner. One was Frances Allan, the wife of a Richmond tobacco merchant. Eliza’s distress, though, went beyond anyone’s ability to help, and by early December 1811, she was dying, either of pneumonia or tuberculosis. At her bedside, in a home not their own, were her son, Edgar, and her daughter, Rosalie. (Henry, the oldest, was already staying with his paternal grandparents in Baltimore.)

The Allan Family Enters

Eliza Hopkins Arnold Poe was buried at Old St. John’s Church. Due to the vocal displeasure of some of the church members at having anyone so scandalous as an actress buried in their sacred ground, her grave was in a spot as far from the actual church as possible. It remained unmarked until 1927.

Eliza’s children were scattered to various foster homes. Poe went to live with Frances Allan and her husband, John. All the destitute Eliza left Poe was a treasured watercolor of Boston Harbor, which she hoped would remind him of his birthplace.

To Add to the Drama

Although there are discrepancies in the record, the vanished David Poe, Jr. died—elsewhere—within days of his abandoned wife, probably of yellow fever. And not even three weeks after Eliza’s death, the Richmond Theater, where she had performed, burned to the ground. Scenery caught fire during a crowded performance and because there weren’t enough exits, sixty-eight people died in the fire (some, trampled to death), including the governor of Virginia. It was as if the daily theater life in Poe’s family background was cut off, signaling changes a child so young couldn’t possibly understand.

But even though the stage as a Poe family way of survival disappeared from Poe’s life, the love for dramatizing human stories that drew his parents to the theater in the first place was part of the boy’s deepest nature, and it found a different form of expression as he grew. Is it any wonder that a bright and sensitive little boy who watches his beautiful, talented mother die—and watches her burial—returns to the theme of the premature burial of a beautiful woman in his own creative work, over and over again? Or that the tone is always one of horror?

Chapter 2
The Old Foster Folks at Home

The well-to-do Allan family of Richmond, Virginia, provided the orphaned Poe with the love of a foster mother and the indifference of a foster father, who funded unique educational opportunities for the boy in both Britain and America. But with Poe’s adolescence came his first forays into the realm of romance, a growing definition of his artistic ambitions, a recognition of his Poe ancestors—and an inevitable struggle with John Allan.

Richmond in 1811

The Richmond where Edgar Allan Poe was raised by his foster parents was emerging as a small city to be reckoned with. After all, it earned its stripes during the Revolutionary period, and it was positioned better than Charlottesville, seat of the landed aristocracy. Richmond seemed to be the Virginian town best able to take advantage of mercantile opportunities the new United States was interested in undertaking.

“It is a thousand p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Top Ten on the Poe Parade
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Fall of the House of Poe
• Chapter 2: The Old Foster Folks at Home
• Chapter 3: Squaring Off
• Chapter 4: Setting Out
• Chapter 5: Finding Family
• Chapter 6: On the Runway of Fashionable Ideas
• Chapter 7: The Work Begins
• Chapter 8: Filling the Pen with Prussic Acid
• Chapter 9: The Pen Refilled
• Chapter 10: Salons and Busybodies
• Chapter 11: The Tell-Tale Heartthrob
• Chapter 12: The Final Mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe
• Chapter 13: Horrors!
• Chapter 14: Tiger by the Tale
• Chapter 15: One-Shot Deals and “Rejects”
• Chapter 16: Reaching for Beauty—The Great Poems
• Chapter 17: Crime After Crime
• Chapter 18: Out of Place in the Literary Schoolyard
• Chapter 19: Overthrowing the Conqueror Worm
• Chapter 20: In Search of Eldorado
• A: Serving Up the Shivers
• B: Timeline of Edgar Allan Poe’s Life
• C: Bibliography
• Index