Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 177: Review of William F. Gill’s Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by John H. Ingram, Oct. 6, 1877,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 488-490 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 488, continued:]

177. Review of William F. Gill's Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by John H. Ingram, London Athenaeum, Oct. 6, 1877, p. 539

ILL-FATED IN his life, Edgar Poe has been still more ill-fated in his biographies, especially those of his native land. Beyond a short critique by Prof. Lowell, and Mrs. Whitman's eloquent little volume on “Poe and his Critics,” we know of no American publication affording the slightest evidence of its author's capability to appreciate the poet's genius. And yet, under the title of “Original Memoir of Poe,” réchauffé compilations, seasoned with a few additional scandals more or less pertinent to the poet's story, follow one another with the greatest regularity in the United States. A few months ago we noticed one of the most pretentious of these volumes; and now we have to allude to another, replete with most of its predecessor's faults, and only less vulgar because containing less of its editor's own phraseology. This “Life of Poe” is written, its author informs us, to correct Griswold's “numerous inconsistencies” and “glaring falsehoods”; but, after perusal of the book, we are forced to the conclusion that its compiler cannot have read his predecessor's work through, [page 489:] or he would not make the many erroneous statements about it that he does. Some of his misstatements, indeed, are so singular, that it seems strange that they can have been made unintentionally; whilst his blunders, whenever he attempts to give information derived from “original investigation,” are most ludicrous.

“Another raison d’ etre of this book is,” says Mr. Gill, the complaint of an English author that “no trustworthy biography of Poe has yet appeared in his own country.” If Mr. Gill intended this Life to remove the reproach, he has failed utterly. Unwilling or unable to thoroughly investigate personally the subject of his work, he has contented himself with taking Mr. Ingram's recent “Memoir of Poe” as the basis and main source of his compilation, added several pages from Mrs. Whitman's book, a few untrustworthy data from an old sketch by Mr. Stoddard, interlarded some irretrievably vulgar anecdotes, and, concluding with a republication of the threadbare “Memorial Ceremonies” of 1875, entitles the collection “the first complete life of Edgar Poe yet published.” Could he have seen our recent review of Mr. Didier's volume, he would, doubtless, have deferred publication of this book until he had corrected some of the many preposterous errors with which it abounds. His most glaring fault is want of knowledge of the subject he is writing upon; in reprinting quotations from the writers whose works he makes so free with, he almost invariably betrays the fact that, instead of referring to the original source, he is citing at second-hand. He continually indulges in long verbatim or slightly altered excerpts from his predecessors, without affording the least acknowledgment of his indebtedness; and, whenever he does confessedly quote, he nearly always fathers the quotation upon the wrong person, as when he ascribes to Hannay the twaddle quoted at page 113, whilst Griswold and some mythical “London editor” are made responsible for much that outside Mr. Gill's Life it will be difficult to discover. Mr. Ingram's Memoir is followed with blind reverence, although, of course, without acknowledgment, and the consequences are often quite laughable. For instance, catching at an allusion to an article on Poe in the Northern Monthly for 1868, Mr. Gill misreads it, and states that Poe was engaged upon that periodical, although it was not started until nearly twenty years after his decease.

Mr. Gill's errata and blunders would require several pages of the Athenaeum to set forth, but we can only allot a few words to the bare mention of some of the most self-evident. Poe did not plead guilty to all of the specifications of the West Point court-martial, nor were they “innumerable,” nor were some of them “thoroughly absurd.” It was long before, instead of after, his career at West Point that the poet met Miss Royster; nor was it previous to, but after, his departure for Richmond that he married. He was not a regular contributor to the New York Quarterly Review. He did try to start a magazine of his own whilst with Mr. [page 490:] Burton; and did do many other thing which Mr. Gill alleges that he did not, and did not do many things which he declares that he did do; whilst to assert that he had no “craving for stimulants” is to falsify his story, and is in direct contradiction to Poe's own written words (vide Mrs. Whitman, pp. 74, 75). Where Poe's “expressed dictum” that his earlier poems should not be published is to be found we should be glad to learn, as also Mr. Gill's authority for several other equally unsupported statements; and we only regret that, in return, we may not promise to say of this Life what he tells the newspaper correspondents said of his reading, viz. that it was “the finest rendition of ‘The Raven — to which they had ever listened, and that Mr. Gill's “resemblance to the recognized ideals of Mr. Poe himself made the personation of his horror and despair almost painful.”