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Notes:
There is no title page or table of
contents for the original book, at least none which have survived. What
is presented here is a reasonable reconstruction.
The full title of the collection given
here is adopted
from the two
titles mentioned by Poe himself. As the full collection was not printed
as Poe intended, and most of the manuscripts of this collection are
lost,
the versions of the tales used here are taken from the earliest
appearance
in print. The one exception to this rule is for "Epimanes," which has
been
taken from the manuscript of 1833. (Although an early manuscript exists
for "Morella" it seems to be a preliminary form and probably not the
version Poe would have included in the proposed book.)
This selection and sequence is based on
the analysis of
Alexander
Hammond,
"Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Folio Club: the Evolution of a Lost
Book,"
in Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, ed., Poe at Work: Seven Textual
Studies,
Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978, pp. 13-43. Hammond
speculates
that Poe may have exaggerated when he said that there were seventeen
tales,
but this does not seem reasonable as seventeen has no inherent virtue
over
sixteen unless Poe actually had that many tales in mind. Had the offer
been accepted, explaining the downward variance in the number of tales
would have been awkward and there seems no reason to presume that Poe
was
reckless enough to take such chances with a book that had already been
rejected by one publisher. Hammond's position seems to be based on
Poe's
statement that all seventeen tales had "appeared in the [Southern
Literary]
Messenger," while in fact only fourteen of the tales had been printed
there.
Thomas Ollive Mabbott's selection of the
eleven original
tales
replaces
"Raising the Wind" with "A Tale of Jerusalem." Of the material Poe
anticipated to use between the tales, Mabbott comments: "The burlesque
criticims never appeared -- and I suspect were never written" (TOM, T&S,
2:201).
The seventeenth tale, referred to in
Poe's letter of September 1836
has
not been reliably identified. "Mystification" is offered here as
perhaps
the most likely candiate, for reasons both of date and tone. This tale
was not published until June of 1837, but this late printing may have
been
caused by Poe's protracted, though ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to
have the whole collection appear as a book. (In T&S, 2:203,
Mabbott states that he does not think "Mystification" dates earlier
than 1837.) In place of
"Mystification," another
possible story is
"A Dream,"
printed
in the Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia) for August 31,
1831.
This story, however, has only been assigned to Poe conjecturally. At
any
rate, it predates the other tales and seems unlikely as an addition at
such a late date.
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[S:1 - TFC, 1832-1836]
- Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Editions - Tales of
the Folio Club (1832-1836)
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