Text: Michael Allen, “The Blackwood's Pattern and Poe's Journalism,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 19-38

[page 19:]

II

Most commentators(1) support De Quincey's opinion that Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817-) introduced “that great innovating principle” whereby the literary magazine “oscillated pretty equally between human life on the one hand and literature on the other.”(2) Certainly the seventh issue of Blackwood's (with its first attack on Leigh Hunt's “Cockney School” integrated into a total effect of ebullience and originality) differentiates itself sharply from the quiet and sedate miscellany like The Gentleman's Magazine on the one hand and the Reviews on the other. And Blackwood's initiated an age of great literary magazines. The London Magazine (1820-29) copied its general shape and many particular ideas and details of presentation.(3) The New Monthly Magazine revised its original form in 1821 to become specifically a literary magazine. Fraser's Magazine (1830-69) imitated Blackwood's so closely in its features and format as to be practically indistinguishable from it.(4) [page 20:]

 

I. THE “FEW” AND THE “MANY”

The great wave of journalism and “popular” literature in early nineteenth-century Britain gained its technological impulse from the original introduction of machinery into paper manufacture and printing between 1801 and 1814, and exploited a comparatively small upper-class audience which was nevertheless steadily growing as a result of the widening of economic opportunity in the early decades of the century. The usual descriptions of this new audience (for which the narrative poems of Scott and Byron and the Waverley Novels were written) as semi-educated and middle class are inadequate. For any one of these publishing ventures what the rapid social movement of the period provided was a potentially expanding circulation. The audience itself must obviously have been composed of two types. On the one hand there were the climbers in the social scale who wanted to acquire ‘the social prejudices characteristic of the class in which they found themselves, among which was a powerful desire to protect their substance and privileges against the encroachments of the class they had lately left.” On the other hand were those who had been longer established and “felt all the more strongly the need for defending their own position against the newly arrived.”(5) All the major publishing ventures of the early nineteenth century aimed at uniting the popularity which would attract readers of the first type (the “many”) with the prestige and “quality” which would retain the more influential readers of the second kind (the “few”). Margaret Dalziel in her book, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (London, 1957), shows that there were plenty of magazines and plenty of novels of low status catering to the “many” throughout the period. [page 21:]

The attempts at popularity, the significant concessions to the “many,” were made by prestige writers and publishers, who had already assumed a relationship with the “few” and were reluctant to forfeit it. The most immediate example is, of course, Scott's very tentative anonymous approach to his “experiment in the public taste,”(6) Waverley. But the old idea of the superiority of the “few” to the “many” could hardly flourish during the literary boom of Scott's prime. “In this country,” said the Edinburgh Review in 1812,

The considerable circulations which they achieved between 1814 and 1818(8) show that the great Reviews were the first periodicals to gain widespread success from this quality-popularity audience. There was little immediate competition for their authority and prestige in the ranks of the numerous miscellanies, since for material most of these relied on piracy and their correspondents,(9) and lacked the capital and the circulation to improve. But, according to H. A. Innis, the very authority and influence of the Reviews, by driving them into competition with the Times, were increasing the potentiality of the magazine field.(10) In fact, in 1817 the great Reviews were reaching their peak circulation,(11) and there was, as Amy Cruse says, a potential audience for an intelligent type of monthly magazine, less ponderous and more entertaining than the quarterly Reviews, which would nevertheless retain something of their [page 22:] intellectual standing, literary quality, and influence. And when William Blackwood brought capital, intelligence, and modern methods to bear on the miscellany form, a new stage in the development of the modern periodical was the result.(12)

The circulation of the magazine rose continuously from 3700 in 1817 to over 8000 in the 1830's, and this rise is significant in terms of both success and stability for the magazine.(13) Even when one remembers that several people would see each copy of the magazine,(14) and that many more copies would be bought in bound volumes, this may seem a very small circulation, compared with the mass-circulation figures of today, to have achieved such influence. But in pre-Reform Britain the educated classes were a small percentage of the population, and influence was directly proportionate to status in a steep social hierarchy. Both “few” and “many” in the terminology of the day were located in the upper half of the social pyramid.

 

II. THE BLACKWOOD'S PATTERN

Probably, at the deepest level, the success of a magazine results from the creation of an ethos which represents something of the inner desires of an audience and their idea of themselves, an ethos which draws them together into an imagined intimacy with the writers of the magazine, assimilating writers and readers to a common image and setting them apart from the uninitiated. At this level Blackwood's “most intimate of magazines,”(15) as A. L. Strout calls it, was certainly a success, displaying continually the kind of assurance which depends on the known approbation of the readers. The Blackwood's formula remained an elitist one: [page 23:] it retained the air of exclusiveness and authority which had characterised the Reviews; it incorporated the curious and esoteric learning(16) which was a feature of the more respectable older miscellanies like the Gentleman's; but it fused these elements into a more relaxed, personal, and intimate ethos which permitted the inclusion of more blatant sensationalism, literary gossip, and fiction for the less erudite reader. For all its affected elitism, the magazine was careful to maintain its relationship with the popular audience. The Blackwood's editorial statements usually claimed the approbation of the highest circles; but they also involved dedications to the wider public and boasted about the size of the circulation.(17) The fusion was facilitated by a group of editorial personae headed by ‘Christopher North” (John Wilson), whose comments and attitudes permeated the magazine, and who also appeared in the semi-dramatic dialogue “Noctes Ambrosianae.” Undoubtedly the appealing figure of “North,” a kind of aged combination of Byron and Sir Walter Scott, was an important factor in the magazine's success. So was its gaiety and hoaxing spirit, the savagery of critical controversy in which, like the Reviews, Blackwood's indulged, and its characteristic morbid pseudo-scientific fiction.

By the 1830's the literary audience was changing to accommodate the newly enfranchised middle-class readers, and the literary norms and attitudes reflected in the great mid-century novels were emerging. Soon Dickens would so dominate the entire audience that a representative of the polite upper-class or “gentlemanly” criteria of the Reviews like Lord Jeffrey would be one of his greatest admirers,(18) and Blackwood's would uphold the idea of a broad popular audience against any kind of elite.(19) The social change [page 24:] validated in 1832 was reflected in the growth of mass-circulation periodicals like Chambers (1832-1953), the Penny Magazine (1832-45), and Bentley's (1837-67), which together with the one-shilling novel parts usurped the lower price ranges of the periodical market to a large extent until the advent of one-shilling literary magazines like Macmillan's and the Cornhill in 1859 and 1860. (The older journals like Blackwood's and the New Monthly were 2/6d or 3/6d.) Despite the changing climate of the age, however, the Blackwood's pattern was sufficiently vital for Fraser's, the great success of the early ‘thirties, to imitate it in every possible respect: all the elements, the mystery editor (“Oliver Yorke”), scurrilous “personalities” in criticism, High Toryism, conversational dialogues like the “Noctes,” and semi-learned fictional modes were transplanted by Maginn, one of the original Blackwood's writers, to the new journal, which attained a circulation as great as that of the parent magazine in its first year.(20) But part of this success should perhaps be attributed to the way Fraser's streamlined and intensified the popular features of Blackwood's, including its early scurrility, to suit the changing age.

The publishing history of the other two magazines which had interested Poe throws an interesting light on the importance of what could be called the “Blackwood's pattern” of journalism. The short life (1820-29) and comparatively small(21) circulation of the London Magazine can, for instance, almost certainly be related to an overbalance on the side of “quality” in its formula. The contributions of Lamb and Hazlitt have, of course, retained literary value for later generations as few of the essays in Blackwood's have, but they seem to have had far narrower appeal. Also, the intelligent Radicalism of the magazine was not likely to find such [page 25:] widespread support among the upper classes in the troubled years before 1832 as would Blackwood's Toryism. There was, on the whole, little attempt to vary the highbrow tone of the magazine by the introduction of fiction or by sensational jeux d’esprit, and the slow demise of the magazine was probably the result of an excess of “political economy” and a lack of the elements of popularity, during John Taylor's editorship (1821-24).(22) P.G. Patmore had suggested earlier that the London should imitate Blackwood's “power.”(23) A public letter to the editor early in 1822 repudiated such wide appeal, pointing out that the magazine was bound to have more of a minority appeal than Blackwood's and the others. Having “ ... no paper on an ancient Highland knee-buckle, no drunken songs, no paltry ch romances, and no scandal,” the London could expect no encouragement ... from the largest class of magazine readers.”(24) But, Lamb, one of the journal's most intelligent contributors, was aware of the dangers of its being “too serious” and wrote to Hessey, one of its publishers, “The London Magazine wants the personal note too much. Blackwood owes everything to it.”(25) And about the same time a letter from John Taylor to his family had a recognisably modern note of highbrow disillusion:

The early issues of the magazine certainly had some popular appeal, and their impact seems to have been particularly due to the journalistic flair of Scott, its first editor? [page 26:] while something of the impetus he gave it seems to have survived for a time after his death.(27) He, of course, admitted the extent to which Blackwood's influenced the London in matter, shape, and format;(28) and it is interesting that the two items which are most clearly regarded in the magazine as having created sensations, and which helped to establish its name in the early “twenties, do correspond to the Blackwood's formula: these were the “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” which De Quincey originally intended for Blackwood's,(29) and the London reply to the Blackwood's “Cockney” campaign, which from uncertain beginnings achieved a vigorous pungency of its own.

Taylor had lost no time in exploiting the sensation caused by the first part of the “Confessions,”(30) printing the second part as his first item,(31) and devoting an editorial to an encomium and a description of the paper's effect. And one indication that the literary conflict in the early years had had a healthy effect on the circulation of the London is that in the new series of the magazine a serious, if very tame, attempt was made to resurrect the controversy: the “Cockney” label was reversed and applied to a Blackwood's writer “Charles Edwards” in a series of heavy-handed attacks on the Edinburgh journal.(32) There are occasional hints in the later issues of more direct attempts to secure popularity in the Blackwood's way; one or two sensational tales(33) and two imitations of the “Noctes”(34) which may well have been attempts to revive the sadly declining circulation.

Colburn's New Monthly Magazine changed its format and became specifically a literary magazine in 1821 shortly after Blackwood's came on the periodical scene. But it did not change at any deep level, retaining throughout the [page 27:] ‘twenties the quiet, sedate tone established by the Gentleman's Magazine, with poems, papers like “Anecdotes of Russia” and “Specimens of German Genius,” Thomas Campbell's “Lectures on Poetry,” and chronicles of events. The disadvantages of such conservatism had been painted out by both Blackwood's and the London, the former commenting on the lack of “buoyancy” and the monotonous dullness of the issues, while the latter ridiculed its “tame unoffending, dove-coloured meekness.”(35) Colburn did int to keep up with the age, as his intensive advertising demonstrated,(36) and rather adventurously he replaced Campbell as editor with the brilliant young Bulwer. In many respects Bulwer was one of the first literary editors of the rather consciously intellectual kind with which we are familiar today, displaying on the whole a lofty Radical idealism and a personal honesty very different from the attitudes which animated the really successful literary journals of the age. He tended to idealise the process whereby popularity could be achieved, seeing the magazine as “ripening in the favour of the public by progressive efforts to merit their esteem.”(37) According to Sir Michael Sadleir,(38) most commentators have regarded Bulwer's editorship a failure. Malcolm Elwin(39) is probably representative in blaming the fall of the New Monthly's circulation from 5000 to 4000(40) during Bulwer's term of office directly on the high seriousness of the editor. The cynics of Fraser's certainly had a point when they contrasted Bulwer's claim that politics was not to dominate the magazine with the contents of his first issue.(41) And the note of relief with which Colburn, in the first issue after Bulwer's departure, announces a return from politics to the “quiet and pleasant paths of literature”(42) is unmistakable. [page 28:]

Nevertheless, there were other factors working against success, particularly Colburn's break with Bentley, his publishing partner, halfway through Bulwer's term of office;(43) and while Bulwer's talents were not ideally those of the magazinist, he was very aware of the need for the elements of popularity. When he became editor, he was already engaged in a heated controversy with Fraser's of precisely the kind which had attracted so much attention to Blackwood's, and he made a conscientious effort to continue the battle. He deliberately set out to imitate the “Noctes Ambrosianae,” the popular Blackwood's series, in his own “Asmodeus at Large” articles. He claimed in his introductory address that his political preoccupations would not detract from the more characteristic aims of the Blackwood's type of journal, original critical verve and power, and a wide-ranging concern with “topicalities.”(44) In his “Farewell” he spoke of his double duty of “representing your opinions” and “amusing your leisure.”(45) In fact, he certainly attempted to reproduce the Blackwood's “balance,” even if there is only one witness (an obscure one) who can be brought forward by his son to claim that he actually did combine with his undoubted “impartiality,” “variety, and power.”(46)

Of the British magazines reprinted and circulated in America in the earlier nineteenth century, Blackwood's was of paramount influence and was only equalled by the great Reviews.(47) The Blackwood's image of the American littérateur who took

seems to have been widely representative.(49) The cheapness of the reprints, together with the efficiency of the publishers,(50) gave the magazine a considerable circulation in America. R. Shelton Mackenzie suggested, in his edition of the ‘”Noctes Ambrosianae,”(51) that for “one reader of Blackwood's Magazine in the old country, there cannot be less than fifty in the new.” According to F. L. Mott, two magazines, Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, had, in the thirties and forties, a measure of real originality, of native American growth. These apart, Mott agrees with a writer in an 1827 New York Mirror that the magazines of the United States were “generally modelled after those of the mother country ... ”(52) In general shape, in tone and style, in critical assumptions, the old-style American journals imitated the British Reviews and magazines. An article in the Democratic Review defined the characteristics of good literary journalism explicitly in terms of Blackwood's and its main writer:

And until about 1830 the old-style journals imitated, and e new ones pirated, one distinctive kind of Blackwood's fiction.(54)

 

III. FICTIONAL PRECEDENTS IN BLACKWOOD'S FOR POE

This was the kind of late Gothic tale of sensation and horror which Poe called the “Blackwood Article.” The appeal [page 30:] of this type of tale was sensational but it generally. elaborated its central feeling with philosophical or psychological or popularly German mannerisms and ideas. It was usually structured around a protagonist isolated in some strange, horrific, or morbid situation which is progressively exploited for effect. So between 1821 and 1837 Blackwood's contained “The Man in the Bell,” “The Buried Alive,” “The Night Walker,” “The Suicide,” “The Last Man,” “The Metempsychosis,” “Le Revenant,” “The Murderer's Last Night,” “The Iron Shroud,” and “The Involuntary Experimentalist,”(55) as well as episodes in serials like “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician” with similar qualities. But in a rather wild letter of 1835, Poe seems to indicate that not one but both of the major kinds of story he was writing were to be found in the British journals. In the course of an attempt to persuade T. W. White, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, that his own fiction would benefit the magazine, he defined the nature of the articles which had enabled magazines in the past to attain celebrity:

Killis Campbell(57) interprets this passage as setting out four distinct types of tale which Poe had reproduced in “Loss of Breath” (type one), ‘”Metzengerstein” (type two), “The Duc de Omelette” (type three), “Morella” (type four). But Poe's serious pieces could invariably be categorised as type two or type four, presenting horror, a sense of strangeness, [page 31:] and mystical (i.e. symbolically metaphysical) implications. Moreover, types one and three usually run into each other: “Loss of Breath” while certainly ludicrous is also a burlesque (of the “extravagancies of Blackwood,”(58) in fact). Poe seems to have accepted the usual twofold division of his tales into “grotesque” and “arabesque” long before he used the distinction in the title of his 1840 volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In 1836 he and J. P. Kennedy discussed his fiction in terms of a twofold division into bizarreries and grotesques.(59) So his distinction in this letter can probably best be taken as a loose rhetorical antithesis indicating different tones or shades of feeling within the two broad “kinds” of tale he wrote.

Now if we return to the early volumes of Blackwood's we find that three kinds of tale seem to recur with a regularity and frequency which suggest that they were popular. One, however, is peculiarly local in its application. Often set in idyllic rustic surroundings, it tells the story of the working-class man who refuses to be content with his lot, becomes a criminal (or a Jacobin), and is either executed for his “sin” or, by his repentance, strengthens the virtuous submission of others.(60) This fictional pattern would have a simple political appeal to the British conservative reader in the troubled years before 1832 but would have little interest for the American reader, and one can understand why Poe ignored it. The other two kinds of tale one finds in Blackwood's are those referred to by Poe, the burlesque(61) and the tale of sensation. And the burlesque does indeed recur as frequently as the “Blackwood Article.” One meets titles like “Fragment from a Literary Romance,” “Shakrak and the Magician,” “The Man with the Nose,” and “The Barber of Gottingen.” Like Poe's, the Blackwood's genre tends to burlesque [page 32:] some recent literary success or popular literary mode or fashionable philosophic idea. If the tale of sensation was a concession to the popular fiction-reading audience, the burlesque adopted a snobbish or superior attitude to the simpler reader modelled vaguely on that of Sterne or Fielding or “Seriblerus.” It relied upon the smarter reader's power to recognise allusions and see what was being attacked. And it built up the idea of an imaginary elite from which the uneducated reader could be excluded with scorn and ridicule. In all these respects Poe's burlesques are identical with those in Blackwood's.

So there is strong reason to believe that Poe found the general precedent for his own two predominant fictional moods in that journal. Killis Campbell is reluctant to accept this, preferring to see Poe as imitating the whole general trend of magazine fiction in his own time. “There were many stories of these types in the magazines of the day,” he writes, “and not only in Blackwood's and other British periodicals but also in the American periodicals, as Godey's Lady's Book, the Mirror, the Casket and the Saturday Evening Post.”(62) ‘Tales of sensation” of the Blackwood's kind were pirated and imitated in the American journals, but there are few even of these in Godey's after 1832. When Poe was starting to write such fiction, the vogue seemed to be dying out in America. There are certainly no burlesques in Godey's in Poe's time apart from his own “Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherezade.”(63) But in any case Poe's letter is quite specific. He is speaking of magazines that had become “celebrated,” and he never felt that any American journal had achieved this status. Also he gives as examples of the articles he is referring to “the ‘M.S. found in a Madhouse’ and the ‘Monos and Daimonos’ of the London New Monthly — the ‘Confessions of [page 33:] and an Opium Eater’ and the ‘Man in the Bell’ of Blackwood.”(64) “The Man in the Bell” is the earliest of the distinctive Blackwood's tales of sensation. “Monos and Daimonos” represents a type of article which Edward Lytton Bulwer was to perfect in the New Monthly and to call the “philosophical prose poem,” and which Poe certainly imitated. But the other two articles mentioned demonstrate the looseness of Poe's hold on the precise details of the British sources. No “M.S. found in a Madhouse” appears in the New Monthly. And De Quincey's “Confessions” (although it was written for Blackwood's) actually appeared in the London Magazine. But the impression that the “English Opium Eater” was a member of the Blackwood's coterie of writers was given not only by the appearance of his other articles in the journal but also by his own presence as a character in its central dialogue, the “Noctes Ambrosianae.” It is probably this persona, and perhaps the kind of erudite and allusive discourse that went with it, that Poe is here recollecting. It is interesting to see how naturally Poe's attention switches in the letter from the articles to the fame of their possible authors:

 

IV. “PERSONALITIES” AND “LEARNING”

Margaret Alterton, in her Origins of Poe's Critical Theory,”(66) examines Poe's attitude to Blackwood's in broader terms. She recognises, for instance, that an important element [page 34:] in the magazine's interest for Poe was the personality of its principal writer John Wilson, or “Christopher North.” (Had she read further in the British magazines she would have realised that the projection of a deliberately created magazine persona was one of the dominant journalistic conventions of the age.) And she relates Poe's theory and practice of fiction writing to a whole trend visible in the pages of Blackwood's. Writers in that magazine had contended that “the horrible is quite as legitimate a field of poetry and romance as either the pathetic or the ludicrous,” and that German tales of this type come closer to the English reader than the “fairy tales’ which “please ... but do not touch the soul.”(67) She finds all this relevant to Poe's most famous brand of fiction and to his well-known claim in the introduction to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque that his horror was “not of Germany, but of the soul.” She points out that Poe must have first picked up the gist of Schlegel's theory of effect in the pages of Blackwood's: there is a great similarity between Poe's theory of composition and that of a Blackwood's writer who advocates for the artist “a cool, cautious, artificial mood of mind akin to that of the mathematician or algebraist.”(68) She shows that the journal recommended the writing of horror tales based on the “analysis of sensation” and simulating the case-histories of medical jurisprudence, as well as publishing the whole genre of tale which followed this prescription and was imitated by Poe. The correlation she describes, in fact, reflects another major feature of the magazines of the period, the pervasive use of “learning” as a journalistic convention. What I mean by “learning” is not simply scholarship or even an infusion of esoteric knowledge. It is a combination of these with an appeal by the writer to intellectual [page 35:] snobbishness in his audience, an appeal which may be comparatively sober or may approach charlatanry. And in the light of the broad functioning principles I have described, it is clear that what Miss Alterton is describing is less a piece of intellectual consistency within the magazine than the operation of the principle of quality-popularity. The “learned” contributions dignify the fiction; the fiction popularises their heavier implications. Thus the range of appeal to “many” and “‘few” is maintained.

 

V. POE AND THE BLACKWOOD'S PATTERN

There is no doubt that Poe recognised and understood these broad functioning principles. He thought of magazine journalism in terms that were considerably influenced by the European models I have been discussing. As late as 1841 he wrote in a letter sent with small verbal changes to Irving Kennedy, Longfellow, and Halleck:

Poe makes clear here that the kind of journal he admires as not yet been possible in America. He defines it in terms [page 36:] of the tendency of the age (which he sees as centred in Europe) to reject the Review form for what I have called the “Blackwood's pattern.” Poe disapproved of the Reviews for their substitution of articles or précis for legitimate reviews, for their habit of anonymous reviewing, their verbosity, and their assumption of authority.(70) He sees the form that is superseding them as a magazine directed at an audience neither exclusively mass (“merely uneducated”) nor exclusively elite, attempting to comprehend the “many” and the “few.” He imagines, in fact, a magazine remarkably like the British models I have been describing.

From the underlying concept of the double audience, the “many” and the “few,” emerged the characteristic quality of this type of journalism, variety of material and tone. The audience was basically united by social rather than by intellectual bonds. A wide range of intelligence and taste was to be catered to within the covers of the one journal. Consequently the keynote of its journalism must be variety. It was a lack of adequate range and variety that ultimately brought down the London and led to Bulwer's failure with the New Monthly, although in both cases it was consciously aimed for. But Blackwood's, particularly before 1832, was eminently successful in this respect. Its fiction content illustrates the nature of the basic formula very neatly. The horror tale would appeal to the “many,” the more sensational-minded readers. The burlesque, with its eighteenth-century roots would appeal to the “few,” the more traditional-minded with some literary education. And the social fable appealed quite simply to the class bond which these two groups (and those continually passing from one group to the other) had in common. The fiction content was, in fact, fairly small. But a similar polarity underlies the material of the journal as a whole. One pole of its range is scholarly, [page 37:] often affectedly so. The other pole is personal, humanising its intellectual materials by hostile or sympathetic inflation of the personalities involved. And these poles are connected by a pervasive elitism which elevates all the readers to membership in a distinctive and intimate circle. Even within a single mode, considerable variety of tone and appeal was possible. The “Noctes Ambrosianae” allowed serious discussions between its characters of literary and philosophical ideas. Its comedy was often quite “highbrow,” involving academic allusiveness on the part of its main figure:

But each article in the series manages to incorporate an element of music-hall horseplay for the many:

And this range was frequently commented on. De Quincey wonders if “the direct philosophy of Kant” is a suitable subject for an article in “a popular miscellany,” and decides that it may be in the case of Blackwood's because

Poe, as we shall see, thought considerably in terms of the “many” and the “few.” He hoped to the end of his life to consolidate a magazine appealing to both, with the backing of a “high caste” upper-class audience like that of Blackwood's. And this hope must, to some extent, have dictated the form of his own work. Indeed he himself at times claimed that it was his central motive. During one of his many attempts to found this “high caste” journal he wrote to Charles Anthon:

This assured purposiveness is difficult to swallow in its entirety. But it is easy to see how, once his work began to take its distinctive form, it must have continually reinvigorated the hope of a magazine which would earn Poe a living at the same time as it displayed his immensely variegated work. We have already seen how his fiction imitated the polarity of that of Blackwood's. We will go on to see how in its learning at one extreme, its presentation of personality at the other, the same is true of the whole range of his work. R. G. Cox has written of the Blackwood's capacity to “combine sheer horse-play with highbrow critical essays,”(74) and Poe's similar capacity never ceases to surprise [page 39:] (or appal) us. (“Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Arm in a Sling” might represent one extreme; his 1836 review of the poetry of Drake and Halleck, the other.) There is no doubt, when one surveys Poe's production, that he was correct in telling P. P. Cooke in 1846 that “one of my chief aims has been the widest diversity of subject, thought and especially tone and manner of handling.”(75) And this is the very idea of journalism which he had drawn from his reading of the British journals: it was, he had written in 1845, “in the extent of subject, and not less in the extent or variety of tone, that the French and English [magazinists] surpass us, to so good a purpose.”(76) And there is no evidence that he actually gave to French magazines a fraction of the attention he gave to the British ones.