Text: Michael Allen, “Introduction: Poe's Reading of the British Magazines,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 16-18

[page 16:]

I

“Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,” wrote K. L. Daughrity in 1930, “more than any of the other foreign periodicals intensely interested”(1) Poe. He drew this conclusion from some of the scholarship (there has been more since) which has traced sources of Poe's writings in Blackwood's and other British journals of the earlier nineteenth century. The specific indebtednesses which have been traced extend back to the issues of Blackwood's for 1819, confirming Poe's hint in a review of 1842 that he had been particularly impressed by the “earlier numbers of Blackwood.” But much research on this subject tries to establish Poe's verbal indebtedness to British magazine articles,(2) the kind of verbal indebtedness with which we are concerned in the source-study of poetry. And no one reads magazines with the depth and particularity of attention that poets give to their favourite poetry. Certainly Poe didn't.

Poe first read the British journals as a boy in a room [page 17:] above his guardian's store, Ellis and Allan's, in Richmond.(3) This was presumably fairly relaxed and wanton reading. It may well have resulted in the absorption of the ethos of a magazine like Blackwood's with considerable pleasure if at no great depth. And it probably fixed in his mind a sense of the superiority of the “earlier numbers” which would recur when he was later to ponder for himself on the principles of good journalism. But his later reading of the magazines is of far more significance for our purposes: this would be in the course of the “porings over foreign files”(4) which he said was one of his professional duties as a journalist. And we are fortunate to have Poe's own description of his way of reading in later life presented with a naiveté that substantially guarantees the accuracy of the account. In “reading out,” he wrote in 1844, one can read very little, since “each individual word must be dwelt upon in some degree.” But “in reading to ourselves, at the ordinary rate of what is called ‘light reading,’ we scarcely touch one word in ten.” What is more, Poe says, “he who reads really much finds his capacity to read increase in geometrical ratio.” He can just glance at the page which detains the ordinary reader some minutes” and winnow “the matter” from “the chaff.”(5) De Quincey had seen this kind of “shorthand reading” as one of the worst evils resulting from “the plethoric form of cumulation and periodic writing” of his own generation of journalists. “It is more ... ” he said, “by the effort and tension of mind in holding on than by the mere loss of time that most readers are repelled from the habit of careful reading.”(6) If Poe acquired the habit of desultory reading as a young man, he clearly systematised and intensified it as a professional tool once he was a journalist. And it was in the course of such rapid professional reading that he analysed [page 18:] the basic principles of British literary journalism and arrived at a high opinion of its potentiality and value.

Now if Poe read in this way (and the source-scholars themselves confirm it(7) ), we must spread out the net rather more extensively than they did. We must interest ourselves in the impact not merely of particular articles but of whole “genres” of articles, of the ethos of each particular magazine, of the characteristic attitudes struck by well-known journalists, and of the basic ideas of journalism which are reflected and exemplified as well as proclaimed in their work. Of course, Poe read a great deal other than magazines and was widely acquainted with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. But when he wanted to find ways of transmitting what he read to a magazine audience, he found that the conventions of the British journalists had been largely designed for the purpose: they were vehicles for popularized eighteenth-century modes and modified Romanticism of precisely the kind he needed. Later in this study my attempt to understand Poe's attitude to the British journals in the American context will involve trying to explain the self-contradictory statements he put on record about both the journals and the American audience. I will go on to show how impossibly hopeful Poe's early choice of British journalistic precedents was to prove in the context of mid-century America, and how ineradicable an influence they had on him. But first, I hope, by tracing the various conventions from their British context into Poe's work, to establish how widespread and pervasive their influence on him actually was.