Text: William Henry Gravely, Jr., “Chapter 07,” The Early Political and Literary Career of Thomas Dunn English Story, dissertation, 1953 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 373:]

Before we move on to New York to recount the circumstances under which Poe and English resumed a relationship which, if not completely broken off, must have been badly strained before Poe left Philadelphia, let us devote a chapter to English's own chief literary accomplishments during the early 1840's and to his recollections of some of his literary contemporaries other than Poe. However important the Poe-English relationship may be insofar as literary history is concerned, we should remember that English is an exceedingly interesting minor literary figure in his own right. If we are to have a full view of the man, we must not neglect his own literary achievement, such as it is, and we must see him in relation to at least some of his contemporaries who did not become his implacable enemies.

English was no more than casually acquainted with Nathaniel Parker Willis prior to 1844, but it was this slight acquaintance that seems to have been responsible for his writing the one poem which brought him more fame during his lifetime than all the rest of his numerous and varied writings put together. At any rate, by September of 1843, Willis had become sufficiently acquainted with either English or his poetry to solicit from him a special poem for The New Mirror, a journal which he and [page 374:] George P. Morris were then editing in New York. English complied, and on September 2, 1843, the poem that is now known as “Ben Bolt” appeared in The New Mirror, without a title but with the following laudatory comment by Willis: “Read this, for a strong and true feeling in measure to suit.”(1) The poem, which gained worldwide recognition for itself if not for its author, and which will frequently find its way into this biographical study from now on, is given below just as English wished it to be remembered. It differs, however, in a few minor points of diction from the rather carelessly written version first printed by Willis:

Unfortunately, the poem as first printed by Willis contained several serious flaws, one of which was probably not English's fault. The omission of “which” before “crawls” in the seventh line of the second stanza was evidently the result of bad proofreading, for which Willis must be held responsible. But the presence of the line, “There is only you and I,” instead of “There are only you and I,” at the end of the fourth stanza, was almost certainly due to English himself, who, as we have seen, was especially prone to commit errors of this kind. Although the original version contained no other glaring grammatical error, the third stanza was spoiled by the same sort of illogical expression that Dow ridiculed in English's poem, “Tecumseh.” Instead of saying that the button-ball tree stood “nigh by the doorstep,” English originally said that it stood “over the housetop” — an awkward expression from [page 376:] the standpoint of visual imagery, to say the least. It may be mentioned, too, that Willis was responsible for another error, perhaps intentional, which was generally thought to have Improved the poem and which was therefore allowed to remain in subsequent authorized reprintings. “In the manuscript which Mr. Willis received from me,” said English about three years before his death, “the third line of the first stanza read ‘who blushed with delight when you gave her a smile,’ In printing the poem, the word ‘blushed1 was wrongly printed ‘wept,’ and so the song has always read.”(3)

The story of the composition of “Ben Bolt” and of its extraordinary vogue for many years has been told again and again., Some accounts of the origin of the poem are completely fictitious, and others are shot through with inaccuracies. Even the most trustworthy accounts are by no means free from errors. A combination of circumstances probably accounts for much of the confusion. Since the poem rapidly became popular and since only English's initials were appended to the original, naturally it was widely copied and recopied, and often inaccurately quoted from memory, by persons who had no idea who the author was. It was early set to music by composers who, either because they were ignorant of the original or because they felt no compunction about altering it to suit [page 377:] their purposes, became the media through which badly mutilated versions were disseminated. Moreover, when their compositions were published, they received full credit for composing the music and adapting the words to it, but the author of the poem received none.. One of the composers — Nelson Kneass — achieved phenomenal success, and, when “Ben Bolt” soon became far better known as a song than as a poem, quite naturally and almost inevitably it lived on in the mind of the public for many years as the creation of the man who had been chiefly responsible for its almost unprecedented popularity.

As a result of all this confusion, English was continually being drawn into controversies over the authorship of the poem, and he made many a futile effort to have the original words restored. Often after he first became a candidate for Congress in 1890 and even oftener after the publication of Du Maurier's Trilby in 1894, English was repeatedly questioned by writers for newspapers and magazines who wished to get from him, firsthand, the true story of the genesis and astounding success of the poem. Partly because of inaccurate reporting and partly because of English's own imperfect knowledge of the history of the poem, which became more imperfect as old age made his memory increasingly less trustworthy, these accounts vary considerably in reliability. There is not a single one purporting to deal with the topic in detail which does not contain a good many inaccurate [page 378:] statements, nor is any account that has been written since English's death altogether free of them. An anonymous account appeared in 1894, after the publication of Trilby, which is as accurate as any other that was written during English's lifetime.(4) Although written in the third person, it was undoubtedly either English's own or a paraphrase of an account of his own by his daughter or by some other authorized person. In wording, it closely follows an account which English wrote (or dictated) in the first person and which now forms a chapter of the unpublished ‘Memorabilia Fragments.” Although most of the story related in the “Memorabilia Fragmenta” has been frequently quoted or paraphrased and contains the usual inaccuracies, it will form the basis of all subsequent discussions of the poem as they fall chronologically in various chapters of this study. It is the story of “Ben Bolt” as English wished posterity to read it.

The following excerpt contains English's account of the actual genesis of the poem:

The rest of the story belongs to subsequent periods of English's life. Suffice it to say here that in “Ben Bolt” he achieved success in a type of poetry which he had often written without attracting more than casual attention. Much of English's early poetry, it will be remembered, was no exception to the drippingly sentimental verse that saturated the newspapers and magazines of the 1830's and 1840's. Such themes as the death of a young love, faithlessness in courtship or marriage, drunken brutality, the betrayal of innocence, loneliness in old [page 380:] age, and a hopeless yearning for the past were mawkishly handled in countless poems. Admittedly, many a first rate poem might embody any of these themes if it were conceived and written with sufficient restraint and artistic sensibility. But when English and many like him touched on such themes, their main object, apparently, was to subject their readers to as tearful an emotional experience as possible, regardless of whether the experience was legitimately motivated.

That “Ben Bolt” does not escape this excessive sentimentality can hardly be denied. Although partly imaginary, the matter of the poem is surely autobiographical enough to require the author to keep within reasonable realistic bounds. The master “so cruel and grim” was suggested by Thomas Wilson, whose school in Philadelphia English attended from the age of six to the age of twelve. Alice and possibly Ben Bolt were two of his young playmates.(6) But is it not demanding too much of the reader to expect him to believe that when English was only in his twenty-fifth year such vast changes as he described in the poem could have taken place? That sweet Alice and the cruel master had died is probably true enough, but the mill was in ruins and so was the log cabin. The hickory tree was gone, and [page 381:] the entire forest had given way to cultivated grain fields. The running brook, once large enough to provide a swimming hole for the children, had entirely evaporated. Even if it be admitted that all of these changes might conceivably have taken place over a period of twelve or thirteen years in the environs of a populous city like Philadelphia, the realistic reader can hardly be induced to believe that after such a short time only English and Ben Bolt remained out of a schoolful of playmates.

But English should not be judged too severely for doing what much better poets than he did with far greater artistry. The onetime widespread popularity of poems like Tennyson's Locksley Hall and Enoch Arden, or of many of Longfellow's most sentimental poems, is sufficiently indicative that Victorian youth responded more generally and sincerely to heart-rending verse than many a person of the twentieth century might think possible. Although no competent critic, even in English's lifetime, ever regarded “Ben Bolt” as a work of distinction, its widespread and long-lasting popularity both as a poem and as a song attests to a certain kind of vitality and charm that cannot be gainsaid. Despite an excessive amount of trumped-up feeling, much of the sentiment rings true. Moreover, a sort of rural freshness and simplicity permeates the poem, and some of the images which were not watered down by musical composers are strikingly vivid. Perhaps Willis was nearer right than wrong in attributing to the poem [page 382:] “a strong and true feeling with measure to suit.”

In his temperance novel, The Doom of the Drinkers, which began to appear about a month after the publication of “Ben Bolt,” English introduced as his heroine the same Alice who is the subject of the first stanza of the poem. Although, as we have previously seen, English himself appears in the novel merely as a physician who takes only cold water at an after-dinner drinking party, he drew on his own childhood recollections for many of the details of the life of his main character, Walter Woolfe. Walter's experiences with his schoolmaster are identical with those which English had with Wilson. Moreover, both were precocious lads, and both were withdrawn at the age of twelve from the tutelage of a cruel teacher who had unjustly accused them. But in The Doom of the Drinkers a little nine-year-old, golden-haired girl named Alice Alberg comes to Walter's rescue and reveals the true culprit. This incident marks the beginning of a love which, if Walter had not developed a. fondness for drink, might have resulted in the happiest and most ideal of marriages. How drink led to precisely the opposite result is told with considerable narrative power and skillful manipulation of incident. The novel, however, is so absurdly melodramatic, so sentimental, and so full of unrestrained rhetorical flights that it becomes downright laughable at times. Take, for example, the following passage, in which the reformed drunkard, Walter, recalls the fatal first glass [page 383:] that led to his undoing:

Another example of how English waxed sentimentally eloquent in the novel is a passage in which the reformed drunkard recalls how he was impressed by the beauty of Alice when, on a certain occasion after he had planned to leave college, he found himself by chance in the same coach in which she and her father were traveling. Alice was nearly seventeen now and her hair, once golden, was a wavy mass of beautiful brown. The mere thought of her beauty and of how his drinking and consequent cruelty had resulted in her illness and early death inspired the following outburst:

A summary of the latter part of the narrative will suffice to indicate the melodramatic action of the entire novel. Many years after the death of his wife, Walter learned through a dying harlot that Frank Somers, who once pretended to be his closest friend, had insidiously plotted his ruin. For some time, when the two young men had been closely associated with each other, Somers had kept a young page in his employ. But now it developed that this page and the dying harlot were one and the same person! She was a French girl of aristocratic ancestry whose name was Julie De Bouffiers. Somers had met her in Paris.and had persuaded her to elope with him from a convent. Later, he had brought her to the United States and disguised her as a page to conceal her sex. After getting her with child he had turned her adrift, and her poverty and helplessness had compelled her to become a tramper of the streets. But before the wretched woman could tell Walter why Somers hated him, she died. Years afterward, when he returned to his native village, Walter learned the truth. A person of considerable means before drink had degraded him, Walter now found that all his former property [page 385:] was in Somers’ hands. When Somers recognized the aging and dissipated Walter, he gloated over what he had done to his former companion, but he said that one of them must be at the point of death before he would ever reveal the cause of his enmity. This moment was not long in coming, for Walter proceeded to bury a knife in Somers’ breast. The dying Somers then revealed that Walter's own father had once made a wager — under the influence of wine, of course — that he would ruin a young girl by the name of Miss De la Grange, who was the city belle. He accomplished his purpose, but the wronged woman relentlessly and vindictively pursued her seducer. After her seducer had married someone else and Walter had been born, the revengeful woman determined to strike at the father by bringing about the ruination of his son. To this end she planted the seeds of implacable hatred for Walter in the heart of her. illegitimate son, Frank Somers, who deceitfully won the devoted friendship of Walter, succeeded in making a degraded drunkard out of him by persuading him to engage in one drinking frolic after another, and successfully plotted to get possession of all his property. Somers had a double motive for revenge, for he had passionately desired Alice. At last the mystery had been solved. Walter had allowed his life to be ruined by the illegitimate son of his own father, and he was now about to become a fratricide, for he had mortally wounded his own brother. Just as Somers revealed the terrible truth, the [page 386:] blood rushed from his mouth and he died! Walter, however, escaped the penalty of death, for he was considered mad.

The Doom of the Drinkers is fairly typical of the work of numerous writers of fiction during the 1840's whose aim was either to promote or to exploit the cause of temperance by painting the most revolting kind of picture of the sort of life to which intemperance leads and of the untold sorrows which it brings to the innocent. The general purpose of such fiction had a good deal in common with that of the evangelistic sermon designed primarily to play upon the emotions of the hearer rather than to appeal to his reason. Yet in spite of its sensationalism and the absurdity of its plot, The Doom of the Drinkers is a narrative of considerable vividness and force. Nathaniel P. Willis was quick to recognize these qualities when he called it a “powerfully descriptive novel.”(9)

English's interest in the reform movements that were flooding the country at this time was not confined to the temperance movement. Although he had little sympathy with communal schemes such as the Brook Farm experiment which followed in the wake of Fourierism, he took an active interest in the struggle to abolish the death penalty which deeply stirred the country during the 1840's. As early as 1835 the anti-gallows movement had become strong enough in Maine to command the attention of the State [page 387:] legislature, and thereafter it rapidly spread into other States. By 1842 partisans for and against the movement had succeeded in arousing the people of Philadelphia to a state of high emotional excitement over the issue. Sermons were preached defending both sides of the question, and the Bible was quoted again and again to support the views of opposing groups. The anti-gallows adherents contended that the principle of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” was contrary to the teachings of Christ, whereas their opponents argued that it was not. Even before the movement gained great headway, there had been widespread revulsion against the amusement of attending public executions, and such grisly spectacles had become a thing of the past in some States.(10)

During the early part of 1844, probably near the end of February, English published in the Philadelphia Irish Citizen a poem entitled “The Gallows-Goers,” which Horace Greeley reprinted in the New York Daily Tribune of March 2. with the exception of “Ben Bolt,” this poem did more than any other to bring English into public notice as a writer of verse. Although the sixteenth edition of The Poets and Poetry of America, included no entire poem of English's except “Ben Bolt,” Griswold evidently regarded “The Gallows-Goers” more highly. “The stirring lyric of ‘The [page 388:] Gallows-Goers” said Griswold in his brief biographical sketch of English, “is the best of his productions and there are few more effective examples of partisan verse.”(11) English himself at one time apparently thought more of the poem than he did during the later years of his life. It was included in an edition of his poems which was supposed to appear in 1855, but which English decided to suppress. It was omitted, however, from the Selected Poems of 1894. Yet in the brief memoranda for a sketch of his life which he wrote sometime during the 1860's, he singled this poem out for special mention. In these memoranda, after sketching his life chronologically through the period in which “Ben Bolt” appeared, he wrote: “Afterwards, a partisan lyric — called ‘The Gallows-Goers’ — a vigorous but coarse invective against hanging, attracted favor, and during the agitation of the death penalty question in the Northern states from 1845 to 1850, was much quoted and declaimed, as well as printed by hundreds of thousands of copies.”(12) Since “The Gallows-Goers” cannot be found in any published volume of English's poetry, it is given below in full:

It is small wonder, in view of English's early interest in the cause of temperance and in the anti-gallows movement, and in view also of the frequent fugitive poems which this interest inspired, that he should have been consigned by Griswold to “that large and busy class known as ‘reformers,’” because he seldom wrote “without some other purpose than the making of verses.”(14) True, English later denied that he was a reformer and maintained that he wrote because publishers liked his work and paid him well for it.(15) But if this assertion is accurate, how can we account for the speeches which he delivered before groups [page 391:] sponsoring both temperance and the abolition of capital punishment? The truth seems to be that as English grew older he became more conservative, and that as he did so he came to look upon his earlier partisan poems as youthful indiscretions. That he eliminated almost all of these poems from his final published collection is strong evidence of his altered evaluation of them and perhaps even of the reform movements which inspired them.

Although “The Gallows-Goers” is undeniably an extremely crude poem, one can easily understand why it must have been an excellent piece of anti-gallows propaganda. The satire is caustic and vigorous, as well as obvious enough not to be lost on the ordinary reader. More subtlety might have improved the poem, but it would have probably lessened its popularity with the masses of the people. Whatever intrinsic merit the poem has lies in its being precisely suited to the large audience it was designed to reach. English's scornful attack on the clergy for aiding and abetting those who were in favor of the gallows and his cynical allusion to the brutalizing effect of a public hanging on a child's impressionable mind probably shocked many a newspaper reader into a state of sober reflection upon the evils of the existing order. However crude “The Gallows-Goers” may be, it at least has the merit of avoiding the sentimentality that was so prevalent in much of English's early verse. [page 392:]

One of the most interesting and baffling phases of English's varied literary career began about 1843 when he decided to enter the field of dramatic composition. Intermittently for fifteen years or more, he was employed by managers of various theatres in Philadelphia and New York, as a writer and adaptor of plays. How many plays English had a hand in will probably never be known, but the estimates mentioned in brief sketches of his life vary anywhere from about twenty to forty or fifty. English himself stated that he wrote most of his plays anonymously and that only one, The Mormons, was ever published. Moreover, as he was always extremely careless about preserving his manuscripts, many unpublished plays which otherwise might have survived have probably disappeared forever. In his own memoranda for a sketch of his life he made a critical appraisal of his dramatic work as a whole. “These plays,” he wrote, “owe their success more to sprightliness of dialogue, diversity of character, and the author's knowledge of stage effect, than to novelty of subject or construction of plot.”(16) Although not one of the plays which English wrote during the decade of the l840's is extant, there are traces of his dramatic activity in the newspaper files of the period, as well as in some of the more specialized works dealing with the [page 393:] history of the theatre in Philadelphia and New York at that time. This fragmentary information, in addition to that which English himself furnishes in his reminiscences of some of the actors, playwrights, and managers with whom he was acquainted, enables us to get at least some insight into his early dramatic career. Needless to say, his work in the field of the drama greatly increased the circle of his acquaintances and enabled him eventually to add materially to his rich storehouse of personal recollections.

During the theatrical season of 1843-1844 at least four plays by English were produced at the National Theatre in Philadelphia. This theatre was then under the management of Francis C. Wemyss and John H. Oxley. It was situated at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Streets and should not be confused with the Chestnut Street Theatre, which was on Chestnut Street above Sixth. English, who always remembered Wemyss with “the kindliest feelings,”(17) has recorded the following impressions of the man:

The National Theatre, which had failed in 1842 under the management of William E. Burton, did not have a successful season under Wemyss and Oxley. In his memoirs, Wemyss primarily blames himself for the failure, although he does not relieve Oxley of all responsibility. It was Oxley who overestimated the drawing power of James Wallack. Wallack had been absent from the United States for about two years, but he was nevertheless unable to attract large audiences and thereby caused the management embarrassment at the very [page 395:] beginning of the season. “This disastrous commencement,” Wemyss recalled, “although it disarranged our plans, did not frighten me, knowing that E. Forrest, with whom we ought to have commenced our season, and who was engaged expressly to oppose Macready, at the Chestnut, was to follow. The plan was, not to act on the same night the same play, but to follow each performance; if Macready played ‘Hamlet’ tonight, we acted it the following night, &c. By these means, we succeeded in creating an excitement to witness the different styles of two actors, at the head of their profession, in the same parts. We had the best of the contest, until the petulance of Mr. Forrest's temper upon trifles, induced him to leave hastily for New York, and gave him the appearance of running away from a contest in which he was already the victor.”(19) In this show of irritation Forrest was merely giving the public a foretaste of an irascible temper which was shortly to have serious repercussions in both England and the United States. When Forrest was unfavorably received in London while on a visit there in 1845, he became convinced that Macready had been implicated in a scheme to belittle him as an actor. His pride deeply hurt, he attended a performance by Macready in Edinburgh on March 2, 1846, and publicly hissed his rival for introducing in Hamlet what he termed “a fairy dance.”(20) This incident was the beginning of a [page 396:] feud which aroused so much ill feeling in the United States that when Macready later visited this country a riot occurred in which seventeen persons lost their lives. But in spite of Wallack's lack of appeal and the defection of Forrest, a series of minor successes followed which enabled Wemyss and Oxley to recover lost ground before the end of 1843.(21)

Wemyss frankly admitted that if he had acquiesced in Oxley's plan to engage Junius Brutus Booth at the National Theatre, the season would have been successful. “Booth offered to play,” said Wemyss, “but I confess I was afraid of him; he had been playing his usual antics in Boston and New-York. I was decidedly opposed to making an attempt, which, if followed by a failure, would have again ruined all chance of the success which now seemed within our grasp; unfortunately Mr. Oxley yielded to my opinion. Had I permitted him on this occasion to exercise his own judgment, Booth's triumphant engagement at the Walnut Street, which turned the tide of popular favor back to that theatre, would have been ours. Never did Booth act better, behave more steadily, or draw more money than during this engagement in Philadelphia, (which I had thrown away.)” [sic](22)

Toward the end of 1843 Thomas Dunn English made a futile attempt to check the waning popularity of the National Theatre. He wrote a play which, though unsuccessful, [page 397:] was novel enough to add considerable color to any account of the history of this theatre during a rather disastrous season. It was a “singular piece,” according to Wemyss, “in which the actors were all frogs.”(23) Charles Durang relates that the heads of the dramatis personae were “encased in papier-mache, modeled like a frog's; the dress of painted canvas, and varnished precisely like their soft, glossy skins, legs and forearms all true to the color of their frogships. Thus they hopped about the stage from logs and stones in artificial running waters.”(24) The piece was entitled “Blud-da-Nowns” and was advertised as a “Satirical, Lyrical, Musical and Farcical Burletta.”(25) It ran for three nights beginning Saturday, December 16, 1843, and ending on Tuesday, December 19. King Blud-da-Nown was played by Henry Lewis, and Dewtell, by John Winans, Although James Rees said [page 398:] that the piece “was quite successful, and excited much attention, emanating as it did from so talented an individual,”(26) his impression of its reception is not confirmed by either Wemyss or Durang. Wemyss acknowledged that the piece possessed a great deal of merit, and Durang, who called it a “merry conceit,” agreed with him provided “we take it in a satirical manner, or as a plot of imaginary humor and downright fun.”(27) But neither Durang nor Wemyss had any illusion as to the ultimate success of the play. “Several scenes,” said Wemyss, “were much applauded; but it was too long, and became tiresome — the curtain fell, not to rounds of applause but to a shower of groans and hisses.”(28)

In his reminiscences of Wemyss, English tells the following story of the public reaction to his singular piece, which is too amusing to omit here:

More successful than “Blud-da-Nowns,” but still not successful enough to make money for the managers of the National Theatre, was English's second play, Handy Andy. It was, of course, merely a dramatization of Samuel Lover's famous novel of the same title. With Winans, Gann, and Myers playing respectively the rôles of Handy Andy, Squire Eagan, and Lary Hogan: and with Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Knight, and Miss Matthews in the feminine rôles of Ragged Nance, Budget, and Conah, this play opened on the night of January 1, 1844.(30) It ran steadily through January 10, and toward the end of the season had a few days’ run at the Chatham Theatre in New York, with George Mossop, the Irish actor in the chief rôle of Handy Andy.(31) Rees asserts that Handy Andy was played at the [page 401:] Chatham “with great success,”(32) but its early disappearance from the boards would seem to contradict this statement. Since English's talent as a playwright manifested itself mainly in burlesque and farces, the blundering and clowning of Lover's comically uninhibited hero must have provided him with just the sort of dramatic material that he desired.

As we have already seen in his novel, The Doom of the Drinkers, English undoubtedly had a flair for the sensational and melodramatic in fiction. Several months after this novel appeared in The Cold Water Magazine English dramatized it for Wemyss and Oxley under the title of The Doom of the Drinker, thereby centering attention on the main character. Rees remarks that English's play was “a melodrama of startling interest, founded upon a thrilling story written by himself.”(33) It ran for only three nights, however, beginning April 22, 1844, and did nothing to revive the waning fortunes of the National Theatre. According to a newspaper advertisement, Messrs. Rogers, Matthews, and Phillips played respectively the rôles of Walter Woolfe, Frank Somers, and Colonel Alberg. Alberg's daughter, whose name English changed from Alice to Eulalie when he dramatized the novel1, was played by Mrs. H. Lewis, and Julie de Bouffleur (De Bouffiers in the novel) was played by Mrs. A. Knight.(34) The third performance of the play was advertised [page 402:] as being for the benefit of the author, but because of the rapidly approaching close of an unsuccessful season, it is doubtful whether the benefit performance put much money into English's pockets.

Those who came to English's benefit performance on April 24 saw two of his productions. The evening's entertainment of three plays began with the farewell performance of The Doom of the Drinker and ended with the first of three performances of a farce by English entitled Gammon and Galvanism.(35) The concluding presentation of English's farce was given on the night of April 26one day before the doors of the National were formally closed. “Our hard and dearly gained battle, was snatched from our grasp in the very hour of victory and triumph, by one false move,” says Wemyss, referring to his fatal mistake of not engaging Booth at the opportune moment.(36) Wemyss planned to reopen the theatre on May 11, after the withdrawal of Oxley from the partnership, but misfortune pursued him to the end. Riots occurring in May, 1844, compelled the authorities to establish martial law in Philadelphia, and [page 403:] on the same day that Wemyss planned to open the doors of the theatre again it was announced officially that all theatres in the city would have to close for a period of thirteen days.(37) Convinced at last that he was fighting a losing battle, Wemyss decided to surrender the management as Oxley had done only a short while before.

One of the most highly regarded playwrights with whom English was personally acquainted at this time was Robert T. Conrad, a fellow townsman whose fame, like that of so many of his gifted contemporaries, is now almost totally eclipsed. Yet James Rees, in an article written shortly after the death of Conrad ranked him first among the native dramatists of Philadelphia.(38) His reputation as a playwright, however, was due almost entirely to the great success of Jack Cade, a play inspired by Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 and written in l84l specifically to suit the histrionic talents of Edwin Forrest. In 1835 Conrad had written an unsuccessful version of this play, which he entitled Aylmere. When he rewrote it for Forrest he called it Aylmere, or The Kentish Rebellion, but this title soon gave way to that of Jack Cade, by which it has subsequently been known.(39) Doubtless, the widespread sentiment for Irish Repeal in Philadelphia and New York during the l840's, [page 404:] as well, as Forrest's popularity with the masses’, had much to do with the success of the play. Although a Kentish rebel, Jack Cade was reputedly an Irishman by birth.

Notwithstanding the talents of both English and Conrad for dramatic writing, the two men were not originally drawn together by this common interest. Like English, Conrad was an exceedingly versatile man who, although he may have fallen somewhat short of the former in variety of interests, could probably do more things well. Nine years older than English, Conrad had already established himself as a prominent lawyer and public speaker when his fellow townsman was admitted to the Philadelphia bar. It was over a legal matter involving their respective clients that the two men were first brought face to face, as English entertainingly relates in the following reminiscences more than twenty-five years later:

Among his contemporaries in Philadelphia whose literary talents English estimated highly was Henry S. Patterson. Along with Robert T. Conrad and W. L. Lane, Patterson served on the committee which selected Poe's tale, “The Gold-Bug,” as the prizewinning story in a contest sponsored by the publishers of The Dollar Newspaper during the year 1843. Their decision, however, almost resulted in a lawsuit, for a caustic Philadelphia critic by the name of Francis H. Duffee not only pronounced Poe's tale to be a “signal abortion” and ‘unmitigated trash,” but went so far as to insinuate that the publishers of the paper, the committee, and Poe himself had all participated in a fraudulent scheme to deceive the public; and furthermore that the publishers had not paid, and never intended to pay, any more than ten or fifteen dollars for the prize-winning story. An apology from the impulsive Duffee, however, apparently induced Poe not to sue for libel.(41)

When English published The Aristidean in New York two years later, Patterson was one of the collaborators who contributed to the magazine. Although he died early and therefore had little chance to make a lasting name for himself, English considered his death to be “a serious loss to American literature.”(42) Why English thought so is revealed in the following passage: [page 407:]

In a series of two papers entitled “Between the Ebb and Flow” and written just a few years before his death, English recorded some brief impressions of a group of minor writers who rose to prominence during the decade from 1834 to 1844. At that time, English observed, “there was an interval in our literary history of ten years whose characteristics were unlike any decade that preceded or followed it. It seemed as though the ebb in the flow of American authorship had been reached, and that the period of which I write formed the slackwater, to be followed by the flow which has since continued. During this time the authors who had made their mark before had ceased to produce a sensation. Irving had already become one of the classical writers, and Cooper, whose splendid works — ‘The Spy,’ ‘The Pioneers,’ and ‘The Pilot’ — had placed him as first of American novelists, was already beginning to show symptoms of that partial decay of his powers which came afterward. Charles Brockden Brown, whose novels produced some excitement in their day, had passed out of public favor. The popular taste ran almost entirely to foreign authors. In prose Scott, and in poetry Byron, held a firm grip. Then there sprang up a number of minor authors, some good, many bad but the greater number indifferent, who filled the void.”(44) Among these writers, whom English knew either personally or through their works, were James Kirk Paulding, Charles Jared and Joseph Ingersoll, William Ware, Samuel Woodworth, [page 409:] Albert Green, Brantz Myer, George Lippard, Philip Pendleton Cooke, John Motley, Cornelius Mathews, J. Ross Browne, Rufus Griswold, Robert Montgomery Bird, Charles F. Briggs, Charles Wilkins Webber, and Bayard Taylor. Writers in this group with whom English was personally unacquainted, or whom he mentions only casually, will receive no treatment in this study. A few of them, however, are linked with one or more striking episodes of English's life, and will appear either in this chapter or in a subsequent one.

Although James Kirk Paulding was the best known of these writers during the actual period about which English wrote, the one who had reached the highest peak of literary fame at the time of his death was Bayard Taylor. But at the end of the decade from 1834 to 1844 Taylor was just beginning to make his presence felt in the world of letters. On the advice of Rufus Griswold, he published in February, 1844, a volume of poems entitled Ximena; or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and other Poems.(45) Only nineteen years old at that time, he at once began a rapid climb to a position of prominence in letters which the quality of his work as a whole now seems hardly to have merited. Never was his fame greater than it was when, after a life of ceaseless travel and prodigious industry, he died, worn out, before he could write what he had hoped would be his crowning achievement — a life of Goethe. Today, his diminishing [page 410:] fame probably rests more on his much-anthologized Bedouin Song and his translation of Faust than on any of his other works.

In his biography of Taylor, Albert H. Smyth relates an amusing incident involving both English and Taylor while the latter was still a boy.(46) The original narrator of the incident was Dr. William Dell Hartman, a classmate of English's at the University of Pennsylvania, who, according to Smyth, wrote an account of it for a local newspaper in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Smyth, however, apparently got the story from English, for the source of his quotation is a letter from English dated December 14, 1894. Equally authoritative, however, is the following account related by English in the second installment of his article “Between the Ebb and Flow”:

Of all the writers whom English discussed in his two papers entitled “Between the Ebb and Flow,” the one whose path most often crossed his own in the l840's was Rufus Griswold. Their relations were by no means always cordial, as we have already seen, but the two men were undoubtedly brought more closely together than they would have been under different circumstances by their common dislike of Poe. Men like English and Charles F. Briggs persistently [page 412:] defended Griswold against the charges of Poe's admirers that he had maligned the dead poet. Bitter as English and Briggs were toward Poe, their stout and unswerving defense of Griswold was almost certainly motivated to a considerable degree by a determination to protect their own reputations. Conscious of the relentless antagonism which these men felt toward Poe, Thomas C. Latto was convinced even as late as 1871 that a vindication of Poe would be difficult to achieve. “So long as C. F. Briggs & Thos. Dunn English are ‘to the fore,’” he wrote Mrs. Whitman, “any thing I could say here would be overborne by their vituperation, for I understand they are perfectly rabid on the subject of Poe's enormities & they are both connected with the New York press. My own idea is that the vindication should be published in an English or Scottish periodical, and it would have more weight in this country.”(48) In view of their adamant insistence that Griswold had been generous toward Poe and that he hah suppressed much to Poe's discredit that he might have publicized, it would be interesting to know how Briggs and English would have explained the forgeries perpetrated by Griswold against Poe if they had lived long enough to see them established beyond any possible doubt.

English admitted that he and Griswold quarreled occasionally because of their impulsiveness and irritability, [page 413:] but he maintained that their differences were invariably short-lived. The earliest indication of friction between them is contained in a letter from Horace Greeley to Griswold, dated December 21, l840, when English was still only twenty-one years old. At that time Griswold had not incurred the enmity of numerous poets who felt ignored or slighted by him. The first edition of The Poets and Poetry of America had not yet appeared, and Greeley was offering his friend advice on what course to pursue. Griswold knew that he would have to draw the line somewhere and had apparently already told Greeley that he intended to omit from the body of his book all those who had not published at least one volume of verse. Greeley, however, seems to have disapproved of his friend's plan. Although he acknowledged that Griswold should follow his own conscientious judgment, Greeley felt that some unknown poets should be given a fair chance and that certain others should not be ignored solely because they had not produced a volume of verse. He also strongly advised that a few of the more prominent poets should receive brief biographical notices. At the very end of the letter Greeley said: “I met Grund Saturday in Mr. Clay's room at the Astor. We spoke but a few minutes. I bragged on you and he heartily concurred; but won’t you catch it (somebody tells me that thinks he knows) for serving up Dr. Thomas Dunn English the way yop have? Ah, Gris! Gris! shave your [page 414:] horrid claws!”(49)

Since English was one of many minor poets who hoped to be represented in Griswold's book and was generally quick to resent what he considered a slight, it may be that Greeley, well aware that English would be excluded, was enjoying the prospect of the latter's discomfiture and of the stormy scene that was likely to follow. Of course Greeley's malicious delight in seeing English “served up” may have been due to something entirely different, such as a clever piece of political maneuvering, for all three men were actively interested in politics at that time. At any rate, English vividly recalled in both “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Between the Ebb and Flow how Griswold antagonized many a disappointed poet; and although he denied that he himself had been disappointed, there is an undercurrent of hurt dignity in both articles which belies his assertion. The following account is from “‘Down Among the Dead Men”:

In the second installment of “Between the Ebb and Flow” English enlarged somewhat on how he reacted to Griswold's explanation of why he had been excluded from the volume. According to this account, when Griswold explained the matter to him, English smiled and answered: “Doctor, your faults in the book are not those of omission but commission. You have not omitted a man who deserved to be there; but there are some in it whose presence I cannot account for, unless you were bound to make a large book and there was a scarcity of, raw material.”(51)

English maintained that Griswold rendered valuable service to American literature in that he gave his fellow Americans the best history of it and enabled both American and Europeans to form some idea of what the United States had accomplished in the realm of letters. He also maintained that Griswold's literary judgments were usually fair and honest, notwithstanding his tendency to be unduly prejudiced in favor of New England writers. Certainly Griswold was not biased in favor of Philadelphians, for Albert H. Smyth has pointed out that no more than “twelve of the one hundred and sixty poets recorded in ‘Griswold's cemetery,’ as Dr. Holmes called ‘The Poets and Poetry of [page 417:] America,’ are Pennsylvanians.”(52) The small number of Philadelphia poets included makes it possible to identify a certain one of them whom English did not mention by name, but about whom he related a story which may throw some light on the strained feelings that apparently existed between this poet and Griswold both before and after the events of the story occurred. After defending Griswold against the charge of partiality, English wrote:

Now if English told this story accurately, the offending poet could have been none other than Henry B. Hirst. Hirst was the only contemporary of Griswold in Philadelphia whom the editor of The Poets and Poetry of America decided to introduce in the body of the book during the period intervening between the publications of his second and third volumes of poetry, and whom the editor also [page 418:] allotted exactly three pages.(54) English related essentially the same story in “Down Among the Dead Men,”(55) but presumably because Hirst was then still alive, he did not say that the offending poet was a Philadelphian, and he did not mention how many volumes of verse the poet had published. Although Hirst's attempt to buy additional space in Griswold's book, if accurately reported, was outrageous, it is not unlikely that Griswold's righteous indignation at Hirst's brazen proposal was due partly to a lingering feeling of resentment stemming from the violent attack on him about six years before in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum. That Griswold was strongly prejudiced against Hirst is indicated by the tone of his biographical sketch which was based partly on information furnished him by Hirst in 1849.(56) In this sketch Griswold went out of his way to make certain derogatory comments on Hirst's poetry of a sort which he did not ordinarily make about the work of contemporary figures whom he chose to represent in his book. Speaking of Hirst's first volume, The Coming of the Mammoth, The Funeral of Time, and other Poems (1845), Griswold said that it had [page 419:] “certainly received all the praise to which it was entitled.” He also made the following comment: “It was not without graceful fancies, but its most striking characteristics were a clumsy extravagance of invention, and a vein of sentiment neither healthful nor poetical.” Commenting on Hirst's second volume, Endymion (1848), Griswold admitted that the work was “a fine piece of poetical rhetoric.” But he was evidently damning it with faint praise, for he immediately added: “There is not much thought in the poem, and where there is any that arrests attention, it whispers of familiar readings.” Even more derogatory is the following observation: “The fault of the book is the want of a poetical delicacy of feeling; it is not classical; it is not beautiful; it is merely sensual; there is none of the diviner odour of poetry about it. Mr. HIRST'S ‘chaste Diana’ is a strumpet.” If Hirst was already incensed because he thought he had not been given space enough in Griswold's book, it can be well imagined how he would have resented critical comments like these.

One of the most interesting literary figures of the early l840's whom English wrote about in both “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Between the Ebb and Flow” is George Lippard. In the latter series of papers, English recalled that Lippard “was eccentric in his dress, manner, and mode of conversation”;(57) but there is no indication that the [page 420:] two men were ever intimate, and it is quite probable that during the early l84o's, at least, there was ill feeling between them. Near the end of 1841 Lippard became a member of the editorial staff of the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times — a rather sensational paper published by John S. Du Solle, whom English later called a “virulent personal enemy” of his.(58) Early in the spring of 1842 Lippard contributed to this journal a series of articles known as “The Bread Crust Papers,” in which he satirized Henry B. Hirst as Henry Bread Crust, or the Sanguine Poetaster, and Thomas Dunn English, as Thomas’ Done Brown, or the Bilious Rhymester. These satirical papers contain an amusing account of a quarrel between the two poets which caused Henry Bread Crust to challenge Thomas Done Brown to a duel.(59) Although clearly fictional, the story almost certainly has some foundation in fact. When Poe replied to English's libelous attack upon him more than four years afterward, he also called English Thomas Done Brown and told of a quarrel which caused Hirst to challenge English to a duel. Poe's reply bears [page 421:] the same date as that of a letter which he wrote to Hirst, asking for “a fair account” of the duel.(60) It is not known, however, whether Hirst answered Poe's letter, and English later asserted that Hirst “offered to write a contradiction” of the account which Poe published.(61) Although the tone of Poe's reply suggests that much of it is highly colored and factually unreliable, including the brief account of the quarrel between English and Hirst, Poe's letter indicates that a quarrel did take place and that it resulted in arrangements for a duel. Whether Lippard was the first to call English Thomas Done Brown, or whether he merely employed a pseudonym which had already gained currency in Philadelphia, is uncertain.

Writing under the pseudonym of Eric Iterbil, Lippard places special stress throughout his narrative on Thomas Done Brown's love of a practical joke. At the hour of one on a rainy night Done Brown is seen trudging the streets of Philadelphia in search of Mrs. Hubbs’ boarding house, where his friend, Henry Bread Crust, lives. Although well toddied, he finally arrives at his destination and rings the doorbell. He offers the Negro servant who comes to the door a quarter to conduct him to Crust's room and then withdraws the offer with a promise to give him half a dollar the next day. On being taken up four flights of stairs to Crust's room, Done Brown rewards the [page 422:] Negro by blowing out his light.

After Done Brown is admitted into Crust's apartment, it develops that he has played another practical joke — this time, on his friend. Having previously informed Crust that he was coming to confer with him on an urgent matter, he now declares it all to be a hoax and prepares to read aloud a poem which he has recently composed, entitled “Ocean-Shore.” Although exceedingly angry at first, Crust finally agrees to listen to Done Brown's poem. “It was a good poem,” Iterbil sarcastically observes. “Such a mingling of invocations to this or that muse, with such descriptions of sunsets, on this or that sea shore, such great big words, dragged neck-and-heels into the service, of poor, weak, sickly, consumptive ideas. . .”(62) After reading the first canto, Done Brown suddenly goes to a closet and appropriates Crust's only clean dickey and collar. He overcomes his friend's objections by pretending to need it for a funeral the following day. Actually, he has borrowed it because he has asked a girl with whom Crust is infatuated to go with him early the next morning to Fairmount to see the sunrise. It is not until Done Brown has left the apartment, carrying the dickey and collar with him that Crust realizes that his friend has done him brown. He discovers in his room a note to Done Brown from the faithless girl, Miss Smithers, agreeing to the early-morning meeting at Fairmount. [page 423:] Enraged, Crust vows that he will also be there.

The rendezvous takes place as arranged, but Done Brown is chagrined to learn that Miss Smithers is more interested in the prospect of having her breakfast than in listening to his florid and rhapsodic descriptions of the glorious natural prospects spread out before them. Just as he yields to Miss Smithers’ persistent pleas for breakfast — even though he has only a quarter of a dollar in his pocket — Crust appears and demands satisfaction before any breakfast may be had. A quarrel ensues, whereupon Crust thumbs his nose at Done Brown and receives in turn a blow from the latter's fist which floors him. Miss Smithers leaves on Done Brown's arm.

As a result of this quarrel, Crust sends his brother Clarendon to deliver a challenge to Done Brown and is surprised when he learns that it has been accepted without equivocation. Indeed, Done Brown is insistent upon having all the details of the affair carefully planned. The duel is to be fought at Camden, in a grove in the Woodlands, at five o’clock the following morning. The weapons are to be a “pair of Colt's patent pistols.”(63)

As the time of the duel approaches, Henry (or Harry) Bread Crust becomes more and more nervous. After writing final notes to members of his immediate family and to the faithless Miss Smithers, he dresses and then goes to meet [page 424:] his brother at a stipulated place. The drenching rain adds to his nervousness, as well as to his discomfort. Finally the two brothers reach the spot where the duel is to take place, but Done Brown and his second have not yet arrived. The delay gives Harry an opportunity to tell a story on Done Brown which is related by Eric Iterbil as follows:

Just as Harry's anecdote ends, two figures approach whom the brothers take to be Done Brown and his second. But they are mistaken. Finally, after waiting for a whole hour, they conclude that Done Brown is a coward and leave [page 425:] the appointed spot, drenched and splattered with mud. Shortly after eight o’clock that morning Harry Bread Crust arrives at his apartment. What he finds on opening the door, Iterbil describes as follows:

Obviously, it would be unfair to English to draw any conclusions about the nature of his feud with Hirst on the basis of a fictionized account by Lippard. Yet one may be quite sure that English would have resented the sort of ridicule that Lippard employed in relating the episode of the Camden Duel. It will therefore be interesting to examine English's recollections of Lippard, published twenty-eight years afterward, in order to see whether any light is thrown on them by Lippard's spirited lampoon:

Although nowhere in any of his numerous reminiscences does English reveal that he himself was ever ridiculed as Thomas Done Brown in a lampoon by Lippard, it may be that the final paragraph just quoted indirectly refers to this very fact, and that the rebuke which English hands Lippard is an expression of his indignation over the treatment accorded him in this very lampoon.

One of the most significant points which English makes in his recollections of Lippard is the assertion that Lippard's life was embittered by the belief that literary men had conspired “to decry his abilities, and prevent his success.” Whether this belief indicates that Lippard suffered from a persecution complex or not, the feelings which gave rise to it may have accounted in large measure for the bond of sympathy which evidently existed between Lippard and Poe. Even before leaving Philadelphia, Poe apparently felt that he himself was beset by personal enemies, and during the last three years of his life he evidently felt with increasing frequency that he was being [page 428:] deliberately persecuted by them. At any rate, not long before he left Philadelphia, Poe wrote to Lippard advising him not to allow his personal enemies to cause him any concern. Although he pointed out certain stylistic weaknesses in Lippard's “The Ladye Annabel,” Poe remarked that “the work, as a whole, will be admitted, by all but your personal enemies, to be richly inventive and imaginative — indicative of genius in its author.”(67) When Lippard published his serial novel, Herbert Tracy, in book form, he reproduced the entire letter at the end of it, with Poe's consent, and italicized the following words of advice as a rebuke to his personal enemies:

These words of advice to Lippard very probably explain why Poe was willing to resume outwardly cordial relations with English after the two men had moved to New York. It can scarcely be doubted that when Poe gave [page 429:] Lippard advice on how to endure the animosities of small literary men, he was thinking of his own enemies as well as those of his friend. Scarcely can it be doubted, either, that English was one of the enemies whom Poe specifically had in mind. Twice within a few months of the date of his letter to Lippard, Poe's character and literary integrity had already been assailed by English. Moreover, Poe's letter to Thomas of September 8, 1844, written five months after his removal to New York, clearly reveals his true feelings about English at that time.(69) In Poe's eyes English was not only “a bullet-headed and malicious villain” but a small-minded person. Why, then, did Poe seek English out to renew the relationship?

The answer may well be that Poe decided to do exactly what he advised Lippard to do — that is, to ignore the malice of a man for whose literary attainments he had little respect and whose animosities he determined to regard as tokens of his ascent, or as stepping stones to his ambition. After the final break with English, Poe employed the same epithets in referring to him that he had used in his letter to Lippard to refer to small-minded literary men who harbored animosities against writers more gifted than themselves — epithets like “ass,” “blackguard,” and “literary animalcule,” Clearly, the revived friendship of Poe and English was a patched-up affair — a friendship of convenience, which had little to hold it together other than the immediate purpose that it served.

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