[page 322:]

Notes [[for November 1836]]

[column 1:]

November 1836 - 1 Title: [John Forbes and John Conolly, eds.]. The British and Foreign Medical Review. [Jan.-Apr.-July 1836.] New York: W. Jackson, 1836. Baltimore: William Neal, 1836. SLM text: pp. 784-86. This review is notable only for the pride which Poe expresses in the accomplishments of American medicine.

a “clouted shoon”] Milton, Comus, l. 634.

November 1836 - 2 Title: Z. Collins Lee. Address Delivered before the Baltimore Lyceum. Baltimore, 1836. SLM text: pp. 786-87. Zaccheus Collins Lee had been a classmate of Poe's at the University of Virginia. He studied law with William Wirt and was at this time an attorney in Baltimore. He may have sent this address directly to Poe for review.

November 1836 - 3 Title: [Charles Dickens]. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836. SLM text: pp. 787-88. This notice is too perfunctory to add much to Poe's expression of his growing admiration for Dickens. In his comments on Beverley Tucker in the chapter of “Autography” in the November 1841 Graham's, he took credit for his own early recognition of Dickens in the SLM.

a imaginative conception] Such “conception” and “comic power” combined for an unusual decapitation in the second chapter of the Papers led to the chief idea in “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (see Mabbott 2: 620). [column 2:]

b “Peter Snook”] Reviewed in October 1836 - 10 . Warren is probably Samuel Warren, whose “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician” appeared first in Blackwood's. Poe had already referred to this work several times.

c I don't remember] Mabbott points out the “close parallelism” between the situations and details described in this tale and those in the 1838 “Ligeia” (2: 306). Deceased in 1968, he could not refer in his edition (of 1978) to the full tracing of this parallel in Benjamin Franklin Fisher's Poe Studies article of 1973, 6: 14-16, nor to the parallel between Dickens's tale and “The Tell-Tale Heart” traced very validly by Edward Strickland in Poe Studies, 1976, 9: 22-23. No one has mentioned a very likely parallel between the mad protagonist's self-betrayal and destruction of his sense of security, his being pursued by the populace, overtaken, losing his consciousness, and then speaking in chains from a madman's cell in both the tale by Dickens and Poe's “Imp of the Perverse” (Graham's, July 1845).

* gay / gray The error is not entirely Poe's, but rather the typesetters of the “pirate” publishers, in their speed to issue the book. Even in the 1838 Colyer (New York) edition, probably using plates rented or sold by the Harpers or Carey, Lea and Blanchard, the text reads “gay.”