Text: W. F. Waller, “Poe's ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Notes and Queries (London, UK), 8th series, vol. 5, May 12, 1894, p. 366, col. 1

[page 366, column 1, continued:]

POE'S ‘MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.’ — The employment of an ourang-outang in the committal of these murders has always seemed to me one of the most original ideas in fiction with which I am acquainted, until now, when I light upon an extract from the Shrewsbury Chronicle, tucked away in the “Chronicle” columns of the ‘Annual Register.’ Poe's story was published in Graham's Magazine for April, 1841. What took place at Shewsbury occurred in July or August, 1834. At that time certain showmen visited the town with a “ribbed-faced baboon,” which, it was afterwards shrewdly suspected, had been taught to burgle, or, as the Chronicle puts it, and I underline, to “commit robberies by night by climbing up places inaccessible to men, and thereby gaining an entrance through the bedroom windows” — precisely the method of procedure adopted by Poe's anthropoid. In her bedroom one night a Shrewsbury lady found the creature. She raised an alarm, and the baboon “instantly attacked her, and with so much fury, that the lady's husband, who had come to the rescue, was glad to let it escape by the window.” The ourang-outang of the Rue Morgue makes a similar, though more fatal, attack when it is discovered in a lady's bedroom there, and effects its escape by the same means. It is, of course, possible that Poe may never have come across this episode; but it seems something more than probable that he did. Anyhow, the coincidence is singular. W. F. WALLER