Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 180: John H. Ingram to Sarah Helen Whitman, Feb. 2, 1878,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 493-495 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 493, continued:]

180. John H. Ingram to Sarah Helen Whitman

My dear Friend,

For such I again venture to address you now — as I hope our clouds have disappeared.

Your great sorrow I heard of through our dear “mutual friend” of Paris but not, of course until I had sent off my enclosures.(1)

Since last we exchanged penned thoughts across the ocean so much of sad & glad things have happened. You have parted for awhile with almost the other half of your life — I — I have had my trials. A dear little nephew, whom I looked to as the future representative of our ill-omened & hapless family, has been placed in the bosom of Mother Earth. “Other friends have flown before.” But the world spins on & the winds, the tides, all nature performs her duties as of heretofore, & we must do the same.

The last few months have been a period of immense literary activity with me. I cannot mention a tithe of my published papers — too many for goodness, indeed. I wrote two papers on De Quincey, the longer & better for America (in the International Review) as a critique on a new life of the Opium Eater by Japp, the man who wrote the review of Poe for the B[ritish] Q[uarterly] R[eview].(2) Then recently I have had articles on “Fernán Caballero,” the Spanish female novelist who died recently, in the Dublin University Maga[zine] & on (for the same publication) “J. C. Mangan” — but this latter — I fancy — was sent you.(3) Then papers in English & French (in U. States & France) on a young English poet, O’Shaughnessy — (Irish, rather). I met him yesterday at [page 494:] another poet's to hear Villon read. Then I have had papers weekly in the Mirror, which has revived. This week's I send you with a medley therein, about authors including Poe.(4)

I have just written a paper for New York, London, Paris, & Leipzig! on the “Unknown Correspondence of Edgar Poe.” It will startle the literary world, I fancy. It only refers, as a rule, to the three last years of his life, but will give the chief portions of 15 or more unknown letters about new, unknown incidents in his life.(5)

This is only a sample of the immense amount of material I have accumulated about our hero. I hope to visit America this year for, without such a visit, I fancy, I cannot do this subject justice. What an amount I shall have to tell you.

I have written for next week or so a short hurried paper on Oliver Madox Brown's literary remains.(6) Have you heard of the poor boy? Not 20 when he died & yet already a genius! Son of F[ord] Madox Brown, the artist & brother-in-law to W. Rossetti & Dr. F. Hueffer.

Have you heard of poor Mrs. Houghton's death?(7) She was true to the last & thought of me & my objects with almost her last thoughts — or rather words. I quite loved her.

Your have not, of course, hear [sic] of how Mrs. Richmond's MSS. of “The Bells” & “A Dream within a Dream” were stolen — at the photographers?(8)

Last Oct. in Paris I had many chats with Mallarmé over Poe matters — but more of this hereafter.

You will — or have — heard of your dear Rose, and of how she so kindly consented to immortalize my weary face on canvas. I cannot express the joy it was to me to meet her & her graceful sister Kate in the dreary wastes of Paris life.

In a day or so, my friend H. B. Forman, the Shelley editor, of whom you wot, will publish the love letters of Keats from the original MSS.(9) Quite a treat. They will appear in New York at same time — and now, pray write again & forgive this hurried scrawl from he who has never really swerved in his allegiance to you — from

 

1. Mrs. Whitman's sister, Susan Anna Power, had died on Dec. 8, 1877.

2. H. A. Page [A. H. Japp], Thomas DeQuincey; his life and writings, with unpublished correspondence (London: J. Hogg & Co., 1877).

3. These articles were later printed in book form, as part of the Illustrated Library of Fairy Tales: The Bird of Truth (translated from the Spanish) of Fernán Caballero. By John H. Ingram. (London: Sonneschein & Allan, 1881). An announcement in the London Athenaeum, Nov. 17, 1877, stated that “a critical and biographical article by Mr. John H. Ingram, on James Clarence Mangan, the Irish poet, will appear in the December number of the Dublin University Magazine.”

4. The most important of these papers in the newly revived London Mirror of Literature [page 495:] appeared Nov. 3, 1877, displaying another triumph of Ingram's: “ ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman,’ a Newly-Discovered Work by the Late Edgar A. Poe.”

A paper Ingram did not mention in this letter as having recently published was his long, blistering review in the London Athenaeum of Gill's Life of Poe, which was reprinted in the Boston Herald, Oct. 28, 1877, forwarded, without doubt, by Ingram. A copy of Gill's reply is pasted in one of Mrs. Whitman's scrapbooks, now in the Brown University Library.

5. Ingram's calling Mrs. Whitman's attention to this forthcoming publication was surely malicious in intent, as was his subsequent sending her copies of the article (Apr. 9, 1878). See page 497, n.1.

6. As he usually did, Ingram expanded this paper and others on the same subject into a book, Oliver Madox-Brown: A Biographical Sketch (London: Elliot Stock, 1883).

7. Mrs. Marie Louise Shew Houghton had died on Sept. 3, 1877.

8. While “stolen” is inaccurate, the story of the manuscripts being lost and found by the photographer is detailed in Mrs. Richmond's letters to Ingram, Jan. 8 and Feb. 5, 1878, in Building Poe Biography, pp. 182-84. Items 328 and 330 in the Ingram Poe Collection.

9. Harry Buxton Forman, Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawn written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts and notes, Printed for private circulation (London: Reeves & Turner, 1878), 128 pp.