Text: Burton R. Pollin, “New York City in the Tales of Poe,” Bronx County Historical Society Journal (Bronx, NY), vol. II, no. 1, January 1965, pp. 16-22

[page 16:]

NEW YORK CITY IN THE TALES OF POE

Burton R. Pollin

Edgar Allan Poe lived in several cities for varying periods during his short life: Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, and New York; perhaps none exercised a greater influence upon him than New York, which was also his last earthly residence. He had visited the city first during the unfortunate West Point episode in his life (1830-1831), during which time he had been expelled from the Academy and had published his second book of poems. Again, in 1837, he spent about a half year in the city before settling in Philadelphia. Finally, on April 7, 1844, he arrived in New York with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm to dwell until his death in October of 1849. This thriving, changing, picturesque metropolis of 300,000 might have been expected to enter into the twenty-one tales emanating from this last period of his creativity. Such a milieu always provides a sensitive artist, alert to his environment, with a standard of values in art and in social relations which must serve in some way to shape the structure and content of his productions. Poe's cottage residence in rustic Fordham, then in West Chester County, thirteen miles from down town New York, from July, 1846, perhaps symbolized his distaste for the metropolis after he had lived for two years in the heart of it. Significantly, the name of New York comes increasingly into his tales in 1844, beginning with the “Balloon Hoax” of April, 1844. It then appears in six others, and helps to give atmosphere to one or two more. Yet so strong was the escapist romanticism of Poe that we shall find the city associated chiefly with crime, disease, and the juggernaut of progress.

Poe rather considerately furnished his admirers with a direct expression of his views of the city when first he came to New York. In May [page 17:] and June, 1844, he contributed a series of editorial letters to the Pottsville, Pennsylvania Columbia Spy. His intention is announced in the first of the seven letters: to keep the public “‘au fait’ to a certain portion of the doings of Gotham.”(1) Since certain basic attitudes toward the city are clearly established in this series, a few items should be mentioned for their role in subsequent tales. In the first letter he roams over “Mannahatta” with its few “dreary” trees and depressing squatter shanties, lamenting the doom of old suburban mansions on the Sound side of the island, awaiting the demolition crews. In thirty years the “island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick” (p. 26). In letter two he speaks of the dirty streets thronged with strangers, badly lighted through the negligence of corrupt politicians, and refers to the gullibility of those who had believed in his own balloon-hoax, involving a three day flight from England to America (p. 36). In the third, he notes the liveliness of the city, with its commitment to pleasures, money-making, and polticial [[political]] excitement. Rather surprisingly he opposes Sunday curbs on business as going counter to the traditional separation of church and state. He praises the prospect from the hill at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street, down to the rivers, and also from the “white, light house looking shot tower at Fifty-Fifth Street and the East River” (p. 40). Again he laments the displacement in a few decades of the lovely cliffs and trees as seen from Blackwell's Island, in favor of shipping and wharves. The endowment of Trinity Church strikes the impecunious writer as most impressive. The fourth speaks of a foot race and also the vast store of treasures in Tiffany's “raree-show.” He rejoices that a Mr. Harper has failed to stop the Harlem railroad from running on Sunday and offers support of Reynolds over Wilkes in regard to the recent government expeditions, a subject that he treated elsewhere at greater length.(2) Letter five praises the air and general situation of Brooklyn, but decries the architecture of the “villas” and the street noises. Letter six again speaks of the beauty [page 18:] of New York Harbor, “disfigured” by displays of architectural and landscaping bad taste, and also of the murder trials of Polly Bodine and Mary Rogers. The last letter, of June 25, has nothing to our purpose, which is to indicate that Poe increasingly shudders at the ugly, crass appearance and activity of the city and longs for a more rustic environment into which to project himself as lover of a frail, etherealized reality. More practically, he wishes a more salubrious environment for his wife Virgina [[Virginia]], who was to die of tuberculosis on January 30, 1847, at Fordham. His various city homes had first given him enough opportunity to see, explore, and know well the island of Manhattan, for he had lived at 113 1/2 Carmine Street (in 1837), and at 195 East Broadway, 130 Greenwich Street, and, the Brennan farm near Broadway and 84 Street, at the Miller Farm in Turtle Bay, and at 85 Amity Street.(3) Since the only building occupied solely by Poe's family was the Fordham cottage, we associate him almost entirely with it, as his New York residence. He called it “Landor’ s cottage” in a romantic tale that was his last published work, June 9, 1849, using details of the property that make the identification clear. In contrast, the others that allude more specifically to the city present themes of murder, human dissolution or disease, trickery in business or in gambling, and similarly the beguiling of the public through hoaxes. To be sure, these are no special oases, for the themes from the ground work of many of Poe's most celebrated tales. Yet there is a special relevance, especially for readers of New York, in Poe's use chiefly of those aspects of the city that confirm or implement his tendencies as a thinker and writer.

In 1840 he published the highly effective account of the mysterious figure who is utterly alone and utterly desperate, “The Man of the Crowd.” While ostensibly set in London, the story could not conceivably reflect the scenes of that city as remembered [page 19:] by Poe from his childhood years spent in England. The ebb and flow of the throng in New York may be inferred from the vivid passages of this poignant sketch. In 1840 he also published his purportedly satirical “The Business Man,” who methodically cheats and steals throughout a wide range of important and trivial activities. At the end he is “bargaining for a country-seat on the Hudson,” thereby demonstrating his New York City origin. A much more significant tale was the “Colloquy of Monos and Una” of 1841 which simply tells how two lovers faced death in the “earth's dotage” and met again as spirits: “Meantime huge smoking cities arose innumerable. ... The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. ... Wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made. ...” Can we doubt that one of these cities was New York, in view of the opinions he later presented in the Columbian? The spirit of wild perversion of man's impulses is carried also into his tale of 1842: “The Mystery of Mary Roget,” which Poe footnoted as being based on the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in “the vicinity of New York,” a death which “occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement.” It became a sequel to the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and therefore Poe had to shift its locale to Paris, for the sake of its hero M. Dupin, but New York crime was its source. In his 1843 story, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” Poe took up again the theme of the “Business Man,” setting this series of painfully ingenious and incredible pieces of knavery in a city which, we are told, is not one of the “verdant localities of the Union” and which has wharves for ocean going steamboats — in short, probably New York City.

Since 1844 vias the beginning of Poe's real residence in the city, more importance may be attached to the tales dating from that time. On April 13, 1844, one week after reaching the city he published “The Balloon-Hoax” in the New York Sun. This fabrication concerning the three day crossing of the Atlantic, Poe said, created “intense excitement.”(4) [page 20:] Previously he had tried the hoax approach in the stories of “Hans Pfaall” and “Arthur Gordon Pym” and New York with its pressing swarms of potentially gullible readers may have been responsible for two more attempts which we shall soon notice. There is a little of the obviously playful hoax about “Some Words with a Mummy concerning the resuscitation of the ancient Egyptian mummy, Count Allamistakeo. While there is no statement in the tale to link New York with the “City Museum,” the scene of the long conversation between the savants and the nobleman, there is Poe's underlying attitude as reflected in “the most odious and insupportable despotism. . . the usurping tyrant. . . the Mob.” The impressive size of the “Bowling-Green Fountain in New York” is adduced for the admiration of the count, who promptly counters with the proportions of the Temple of Carnac. Clearly, the American cult of bigness does not include Poe.

A more convincing hoax, which was promptly reprinted and praised for its verisimilitude in England, was published in December, 1845, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The subject is a solitary New Yorker “who has resided principally at Harlem, New York, since the year of 1839.” There is no need to give details of this nightmarish tale of the hypnotic trance into which Valdemar is thrown for seven months after his physical death. When he is “awakened” he crumbles into a mass of “detestable putrescence,” not having been initially preserved as was the ancient Egyptian, Count Allamistakeo. In July, 1845, Poe had published “The Imp of the Perverse” which continued the theme of Marie Roget, a murder which is somehow a product of the city's influence. The victim of the perverse narrator, for example, lives in a narrow and ill-ventilated apartment which contributes to his death by a poisoned wax candle, but at last the murderer “bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares” and shouted out his guilt. New York City is not given a name, but [page 21:] Poe could have had no other place in mind. In January, 1846, his strange tale, “The Sphinx,” linked several of these themes together, for the hero escapes “the dread reign of cholera in New fork” to retire with a relative to a cottage up the Hudson. Through the narrator's error in perspective he mistakes an insect of the genus Sphinx, with a death's head emblem on its breast, for a gigantic monster; analogically this is asserted to be similar to the error of overestimating the influence of a diffused “democracy.” Similarly, in his February, 1849, loosely strung together series of forced jokes called “Mellonta Tauta” — purporting to be a letter from a balloon of the year 2848 — he speaks of the despotism induced by “Mob, a foreigner by the by,” and of Republicanism a very admirable form of government — for dogs.” The Knickerbocker tribe of savages formerly inhabited the island of Manhattan, which they had packed with houses up to twenty stories high and with churches and pagodas for the worship of “Wealth and Fashion.” A violent earthquake has rendered it into a pleasure garden. Poe also disparages the New York habit of memorializing historical events and figures in his reference to a corner stone celebration of 1847 conducted by the New York “Washington Monument Association.”

Only one more tale used aspects of New York: “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” of April, 1849; Poe hoped it would have the effect of a hoax in reference to the Gold Rush, since it pretends that Von Kempelen has developed a process of making gold from lead. Two eminent New York papers, the Literary World and the Home Journal, are said to give an erroneous account of the thaumaturgist's origins, and a delicate piece of sarcasm is launched at Professor Draper, eminent expert in chemistry of New York University. The hoax, published in the Boston Flag of Our Union, failed of its intention, but it perhaps symbolizes for us Poe's desperate need [page 22:] to turn the stuff of his brain into the gold which he and his mother-in-law and aunt, Mrs. Clem, continued to need so desperately after Virginia's death. Is it not significant that the man who came to New York City to take up his residence in 1844 and seek his fortune left, as his last published poem, “El Dorado,” about a knight who “had journeyed long, / Singing a song, / In search of El Dorado”? But “he grew old” and “he found / No spot of ground/ That looked like El Dorado.” It might be said that his references to New York show clearly throughout his tales as well that Gotham had steadily lost its lure for the dejected and disappointed poet and story teller.

NOTES

1  These have been collected by Jacob E. Spannuth and edited by Thomas O. Mabbott under the title, Doings of Gotham (Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 1929), published in an edition of only 749 copies. For excerpts see A.H. Quinn, Poe (New York, 1941), pp. 411-413. The page references in my text will be to Spannuth's compilation.

2  See R.F. Almy, “J.N. Reynolds,” Colophon, II, N.S. (Winter, 1937), 237-245; and Aubrey Starke, “Poe's Friend Reynolds,” American Literature, XI (May, 1939), 152-J-59.

3  For descriptions of several of his homes see Quinn, op. cit., pp. 407-408, 475-476, and 506-507; also works cited or used by Quinn.

4  See Doings of Gotham, p. 33, in the letter of May 21, 1844; Professor Mabbott cautions, however, that contemporary papers give him “the impression that fewer people were fooled than Poe could have wished” (p. 36).