Text: Anonymous, “[Comment on Ingram's Life of Poe],” London Daily Times (London, UK), December 28, 1886, p. ?, col. ?

[page ?, column ?, continued:]

While every one knows how the author of “The Raven” has suffered severely at the hands of early biographers, it is not every one, according to Mr. John H. Ingram, who understands how unjust all this censure has been. His “Life, Letters, and Opinions of Edgar Allan Poe” (W. H. Allen) is the outcome of much industrious examination of materials at hand and an unqualified attempt to remove the stigma attached to the poet's name. There has been no lack of help in this work, the quality rather than the quantity of the proffered data has been his chief hindrance, and a very severe censorship and a careful process of sifting has been inevitable for the well-intended but exaggerated evidence of friends and foes. Thus it is that “The amount of mischief that can be and is manufactured out of a dead man's relics is terrible. Woe betide the luckless mortal who leave a history! Vivisection is merciful compared with the pitilessness of the post-mortem examination held upon his real and putative remains.” Mr. Ingram's book, in fact, is just another of the cleaning biographies in which the last twenty years have been so prolific. An epidemic of charitable short-sightedness besets our personal historians, and they distribute their plenary indulgences so liberally that it really looks as though we shall have little to pass on to another decade but an emblazoned roll of saints and martyrs. The future will, we fear, inevitably think more of the kindliness of all these historians than of their acumen and judgement.