Text: Anonymous, “[Review of Ingram's Life of Poe,” Knutsford Division Guardian (Knutsford, UK), October 17, 1891, p. 6, col. 8

[page 6, column 8, continued:]

Edgar Allan Poe, his Life, Letters, and Opinions. By JOHN H. INGRAM. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co.

This is the new volume of the Minerva Library, the last portion of Mr. Ingram's work in vindication of Poe. We had had the idea that in his 1874 edition of Poe's works he had said, in his prefatory memoir, all he wished to say on the poet's life. Not so, however; for in 1880 the present careful and elaborate life of Poe first appeared. Like the four volumes of 1874, this life cost Mr. Ingram several years of research. This labour, however, has not been devoted to uncovering the obloquy that had so unfairly and ungenerously been thrown upon the poet's character by Griswald [[Griswold]], his early biographer; that had been completely accomplished in 1874. Mr. Ingram confesses that on undertaking this work he was embarrassed by the quantity and not by the lack of biographical material that was open to him. Much of this material was not untrustworthy merely, but cruelly unjust and untrue, and the labour was to sift the wheat from the chaff. And it was only by the labour of years that this work was accomplished. And in what he has written the biographer did not aim at a mere sketch of the poet's life, but strove at tracing the development of his heart and mind, of his nature as a poet and a man. In accomplishing this the biographer had little aid that he could accept from what had been previously published on the subject, but had to search long and laboriously for his materials amongst those who knew the poet, and were cognizant of his life and work, a list of whose names is given. Surely never was there a more loyal, laborious, and devoted attempt to vindicate a child of genius and place him in his true position than Mr. Ingram's life of Poe supplies.