Text: John H. Ingram, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Richmond Standard (Richmond, VA), October 16, 1878, p. ?, col. ?

[page ?, column ?, continued:]

SIR, — Your issue of the 2d instant contains the review of a book purporting to be a “Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” by W. F. Gill, and you claim the sympathetic aid of the English Press on behalf of this volume because the subject of it “is known by one biography alone,” and that Griswold's “incorrect and hostile” one. It scarcely becomes me to comment upon your reviewer's ignorance of the fact that my “Memoir of Poe” has been accepted as a complete refutation of Griswold's calumnies by the Press of England and America, but I ma without egotism be permitted to mention that the work has passed through many editions in England and America, has been translated by the leading publications of three Continents, and has even been mentioned in your own columns. But my purpose is with Mr. Gill, and the book he passes off as an original work, and for which, as such, your reviewer claims English sympathy. The publication last year in the United States of the volume of which this reprint pretends to be “a fourth edition,” and an anser to my complaint that “no trustworthy biography of Poe” had yet been written by his own countrymen, brought home to me vividly what the Boston memorialists, quoted by Dickens in the Athenaeum for July, 1842, meant when they urged upon the United States Congress “that if English authors were invested with any control over the republication of their own books, it would be no longer possible for American editors to alter and adapt these [as they do now] to the American taste.”

Mr. Gill, who is a Boston bookseller, to suit what he deems the American “taste,” has altered and adapted and translated into Yankee dialect the “Memoir of Poe” upon which I have spent so much time, labour, and money. His theft had already been so completely exposed on both Continents that I did not deem it probably another exposition of it would be necessary — at least in my own country — but you have shown that it is. Your reviewer need only compare my “Memoir of Poe,” first published in 1874, with the book under notice to discover that, subject in most cases to vulgarisms, my illustrations, fac similes, letters (the copyright of some of these being vested in me), my phraseology, even my errata, are reproduced. It would need several columns of your paper to adduce the whole of my evidence: therefore, my many friends — known and, personally, unknown — who will be startled by the appearance of your review must be contented to accept my statement that I have evidence sufficient, both in quantity and quality, to satisfy any legal tribunal that Mr. Gill's book is a great infringement upon my copyright.

To those readers who, meantime, may have procured this plagiarism of my labours it will not be important to offer these words from Professor Shepherd's 1875 address, as cited at p. 305: “An appreciative and generous Englishman has recently added to the treasures of our literature a superb edition of Poe's works, in which ample recognition is accorded to his rare and varied powers, and the slanders of his acrimonious biography are refuted by evidence that cannot be gainsaid or resisted.”

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

JOHN H. INGRAM.

October 15.