Text: Anonymous, “[Prefatory Note],” Bookman (London, UK), January 1909, pp. 162-163

[page 162:]

For much assistance in producing this present number we are indebted to Mr. John H. Ingram. All the portraits of Poe and his relatives and friends, the facsimiles of his writing and the sketches and photographs of places associated with him, have been kindly supplied to us by Mr. Ingram from his unique and valuable collection of such portraits and pictures, and are his copyright property. Alexander Smith said that Poe was “ the most incorrigible blackguard of genius that has appeared in either hemisphere,” and the Edinburgh Review, praising his work, described him as “ a blackguard of mark.” That was in the late ‘fifties and the mid-‘sixties, and we owe it to the enthusiastic devotion and careful research of Mr. Ingram that nobody dreams of disseminating those slanders to-day. When he issued with Messrs. A. & C. Black, in 1874, his four- volume edition of Poe's Works, the ample Memoir with which he prefaced it shattered and scattered once for all the cloud of lying and scandalous stories with which the unspeakable Griswold and those unscrupulous sensation-mongers, his many disciples, had darkened the poet's name; as the Spectator said at the time, he rescued Poe “ from the reputation of something like infamy.” In 1880 Mr. Ingram published the exhaustive and admirable biography that remains, and must remain, the standard “Life of Poe”; it has gone through [column 2:] many editions, its accuracy has never been shaken, and every subsequent biographical sketch or article concerning the poet has, admittedly or not, been based upon it.

This were a good life-work for any man, but Mr. Ingram has much other and excellent work in literature to his credit. He edited the “Eminent Women” series of biographies; has edited several editions of Poe's works; and an edition of Darley's “Sylvia,” for which he wrote also a biographical sketch of the author; he has written biographies of Oliver Madox Brown and of Mrs. Browning, and, amongst other books, one on Christopher Marlowe that won the high commendation of Mr. Swinburne. He has just written a biographical introduction to a reprint of Poe's Poems for Messrs. Routledge's Muses’ Library, and is revising the famous four- volume “Standard” edition of his “Works of Poe,” which Messrs. Black will presently reissue. For some years past now Mr. Ingram has been engaged on a Life of Chatterton which is almost ready for publication. At a very early age his interest in Chatterton was aroused by the fact that his mother, when a child, lived amid certain personal friends of Chatterton, and that he frequently heard her talk of what they used to say about him. He has been as thorough and as painstaking in searching into Chatterton's story as, he was in [page 163:] unravelling Poe's; has discovered new facts of importance, and will include in his volume certain poems that were published by Chatterton, but have never since been reprinted.

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Apart from the numerous evidences of English and American interest in the Poe Centenary — in France, where Messrs. Calmann-Levy's translations of Poe by Baudelaire rank among the classics, M. Davry is issuing a monograph on Poe, and two lectures that M. Calvocoressi is delivering at the Sorbonne will appear in the Mercure de France on February 1. In Germany, essays on Poe's centennial position are announced by Herr Leopold Katscher; Tauchnitz has the Tales and Poems on sale with a new memoir by Mr. Ingram; and Herr Philip Reclam, junior, who includes Poe's works in his “Universal Bibliothek,” publishes a memorial article in Reclams Universum for January. From Budapest and Lisbon come translations of the Poems into Hungarian by Zoltan Ferencz, and into Portuguese by Colonel Greenfield de Mello.