Text: John C. Miller, “Preface,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. xvii-xviii (This material is protected by copyright)

[page xvii, unnumbered:]

Preface

When John Henry Ingram of London reached Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, Poe's former fiancée, in Providence, Rhode Island, with a written plea for her help in his efforts to write a truthful and redemptive biography of Edgar Allan Poe, her swift reply that she would gladly write out her memories of Poe for his use made him realize at once that he had found his “Providence.” Her responses proved that of all the correspondents he had reached in America and all the others he was to reach, she was the most reliable and intelligent source of firsthand biographical memories and materials about Edgar Poe that he was ever to find.

This volume offers students, teachers, scholars, and future biographers, as well as that large public which is always interested in new and reliable information about Poe, the voluminous and largely unknown and unpublished correspondence that passed between John Ingram and Sarah Helen Whitman from late 1873 through mid-1878. The texts of that correspondence are established and here presented in their entirety for the first time. They contain discussions of almost every poem and tale as well as many of the critical articles Poe wrote, and they offer new information about him that Ingram did not take full advantage of, even though he received it first; no subsequent biographer has ever fully explored and used this rich store. This correspondence dramatically presents the changing relationships between Ingram and Mrs. Whitman, it offers much unknown information about other British and American writers of the period, in addition to that about Poe, and finally and perhaps most importantly, it reveals the long and sometimes painful gestation of the first reliable biography of Edgar Allan Poe. John Ingram was an impassioned biographer. Mrs. Whitman was a superbly gifted person, a poet and an acute critic who had a deep and clear insight into Edgar Poe's human personality and habits as well as into his accomplishments as a writer. It took this particular combination of persons to build Poe's biography as we now have it.

This volume has no precedent in Poe literature, for here, together with searching questions and well-founded factual answers, are presented [page xviii:] for the first time since their publication more than one hundred years ago a number of important magazine and newspaper articles about Poe, several of which exist in a single copy only, while others are in collections not readily accessible. In these articles readers can see for themselves how quickly Ingram rushed into print with the new information about Poe that he was receiving almost daily from Mrs. Whitman, information that became and has remained permanent elements in Poe biography.

After Ingram's two-volume biography of Poe appeared in 1880, he thought he was through with his job, that he reigned alone as the sole arbiter of everything concerning Edgar Poe; in short, Ingram was convinced that his was the definitive biography. That he was mistaken is a matter of record, for the controversies he sparked by his publications and the interest he aroused, particularly in America, in Edgar Poe were forces that compelled him to go on with his researches until his death in 1916, as a concluding volume will show. In it I expect to reproduce documented evidence of his attempts to defend his untenable position as the only authority about things concerning the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

JOHN C. MILLER

Old Dominion University