Edgar Allan Poe — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”

Reading copy:

• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — reading copy

Manuscripts and Authorized Printings:

• Text-01 — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1843 — (There are no known draft manuscripts or scratch notes reflecting the original effort of composition.)
• Text-02 — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1843-1844
  • Text-02a — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — about 1843 — “Thomas” manuscript, roll (Mabbott text A) (This faircopy manuscript was prepared for publication. The original manuscript is currently part of the collection of the Morgan Pierpont Library, in New York city, having been purchased in 1909. It was formerly in the private collection of George C. Thomas. Following the format that Poe seems to have adopted during his time as an editor at Graham's Magazine, the manuscript is a roll, formed by pasting together a number of individual sections of paper. The manuscript was presumably preserved by the Godey family, but sold at some point, directly or indirectly, to a collector of autographs. That collection was sold by Bangs & Co. of New York city on November 16, 1892. That auction included the manuscript, which was described in several newspaper accounts as consisting “of pages eight inches wide and sixteen inches long ... These sheets are pasted together into a long string ... fifteen feet long” (New York Press, November 20, 1892, p. 22, col. 4). After spirited bidding, the manuscript was sold to Dodd, Mead & Co. for $250 (a total of $295 including the buyer's premium). It was sold at a Libbie & Co. auction held in Boston on April 24-25, 1895 from the collection of George T. Maxwell (1868-1929) (a New York stockbroker of the firm Maxwell & Scoville) for $230. The buyer was again Dodd, Mead & Co., which mentions the manuscript as being in its retail stock as one of several “objects of special interest suitable for HOLIDAY GIFTS” (see New York Evening Post, December 16, 1895, p. 1, col. 6). In 1907, it was listed in the private catalog of the collection of George Clifford Thomas (1839-1909), a Philadelphia banker.)
  • Text-02b — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — April 1844 — Godey's Lady's Book — (Mabbott text B)
• Text-03 — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1844-1850
  • Text-03a — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1844-1845 — (Speculated revised copy of Godey's (Text-02b), perhaps in anticipation of reprinting elsewhere. These revisions are presumably recorded in Text-03b. The changes are slight enough that a new manuscript is highly unlikely, and they are almost so minor that they could reasonably have been made during typesetting or in correcting proofs for Text-03b.)
  • Text-03b — “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — November 29, 1845 — Broadway Journal — (Mabbott text C — This is Mabbott's copy-text) (For Griswold's 1850 reprinting of this text, see the entry below, under reprints.)

Reprints:

• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — March 23, 1844 — Baltimore Weekly Sun  (This reprint is noted in the evening edition of the Sun of the same date (p. 2, col. 2), but no copy of the Weekly Sun of this period appears to have survived. The UMI microfilm of this title omits all of 1844 entirely, with no apparent copies to use for sometime in 1842 - about 1848. The comment in the Evening Sun begins: “A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS, from the ever entertaining pen of Edgar A. Poe, Esq., occupies the first columns of the Weekly Sun, this morning, which by the way is an excellent number, in the value and interest of its contents. Besides the above capital tale, there is a mass of Domestic news . . . .”)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — March 23, 1844 — Semi-Weekly Courier and New-York Examiner (New York, NY), vol. XVI, whole no. 1634, p. 3, cols. 1-2  (acknowledged as “by Edgar A. Poe” and “From Godey's Lady's Book”) (Information for this entry was provided to the Poe Society by Ton Fafianie in an e-mail dated May 18, 2021)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1844 — Spirit of the Times
  • “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — Part I — March 27, 1844
  • “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — Part II — March 28, 1844
  • “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — Part III — March 29, 1844
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — March 30, 1844 — Baltimore Sun  (printed in the supplement, published “in order to make room for the great number of advertisements that crowd upon us,” p. 1, cols. 2-4) (acknowledged as from Godey's Lady's Book)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — April 27, 1844 — Columbia Spy  (Columbia, PA) (Vol. XV., no. 1, p. 1, cols. 2-6) (noted in the byline as “By Edgar A. Poe“ and at the end “— Lady's Book,” from which it was reprinted)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1846 — Brooklyn Daily Eagle and King's County Democrat [Mabbott notes the editor of this journal at the time as Walt Whitman (Mabbott, Tales, 1978, p. 939)]
  • “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — Part I  October 9, 1846
  • “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — Part II  October 10, 1846
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1850 — WORKS — Griswold reprints Text-03 (Mabbott text D)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1852 — Tales and Sketches: to which is added The Raven: A Poem, London, George Routledge & Co., pp. 198-207 (This tale is not included in Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Humour; and Poems, London: Henry Vizetelly, printed in England about the same time)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1867 — Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, second series (New York: W. J. Widdleton), pp. 15-25 (This collection is extracted from the 1850-1856 edition of Poe's Works. It was reprinted several times.)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1874 — Works of Edgar A. Poe, edited by J. H. Ingram (vol. II, pp. 222-233) (This collection was subsequently reprinted in various forms)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1894-1895 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: Tales, eds. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, Chicago: Stone and Kimball (1:283-296)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1902 — The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 5: Tales IV, ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell (5:163-176, and 5:322-323)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1976 — The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harold Beaver (New York: Penguin Books), pp. 99-109 and pp. 363-368 (reprinted 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1982)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1978 — The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3: Tales & Sketches II, ed. T. O. Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (3:935-953)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America), pp. 655-665

Instream Comparative and Study Texts:

• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — study text (“Godey” manuscript) (This study text shows the changes Poe made on the manuscript)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — comparative text (Godey's and Broadway Journal)
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — comparative text (Broadway Journal and WORKS)

Miscellaneous Texts and Related Items:

• “[A Tale of the Ragged Mountains]” — 1855 — Fortaellinger [Tales] (Copenhagen)  (Danish translation, noted by Anderson, p. 14)
• ”Une aventure dans les montagnes rugueuses” — (French translation by Charles Baudelaire)
  • ”Une aventure dans les montagnes rocheuses” — December 11, 1852 — L‘Illustration
  • ”Une aventure dans les montagnes rugueuses” — July 26, 1854 — Le Pays
  • ”Souvenirs de M. Auguste Bedloe” — 1856 — Histoires extraordinaires, Paris: Michel Lévy frères
• “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” — 2017 — Audio book (unabridged), read by Chris Aruffo

• Anderson, Carl L., Poe in Northlight: The Scandanavian Response to His Life and Work, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973.
• Austin, Henry, “Poe as a Plagiarist and his Debt to Macaulay,” Literature (New York, NY), vol. II, no. 30, August 4, 1899, pp. 82-84
• Carter, Boyd, “Poe's Debt to Charles Brockden Brown,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 1953, 27:190-196
• Cobb, Palmer, “The Influence of E. A. T. Hoffman on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe,” Studies in Philology, 1908, 3:1-104
• Cobb, Palmer, “Poe and Hoffman,” South Atlantic Quarterly, January 1909, 8:68-81
• Falk, Doris V. “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (May 1969), 84:526-546.
• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943.
• Isani, Mukhtar Ali, “Some Sources for Poe's ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’,” Poe Newsletter, December 1972, 5:38-40
• Lind, Sidney, “Poe and Mesmerism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association (Dec. 1947), 62:1077-1094.
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
• Philippon, Daniel J., “Poe in the Ragged Mountains: Environmental History and Romantic Aesthetics,” Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism, ed. James M. Hutchisson, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011, pp. 89-102.
• Pittman, Diana, “ ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’,” Southern Literary Messenger, September 1941, 3:422-431 (this is the new version of the original journal)
• Thompson, G. Richard, “Is Poe's ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ a Hoax?,” Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1969, 6:454-460
• Weissuch, Ted N., “Edgar Allan Poe: Hoaxer in the American Tradition,” New York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin, July 1961, 45:291-309
• Wyllie, John Cooke, “A List of the Texts of Poe's Tales,” Humanistic Studies in Honor of John Calvin Metcalf, Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1941, pp. 322-338.