Text: Michael Allen, “Poe's Popularity,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 157-181

[page 157:]

IX

By the middle of his career Poe had become an extremely efficient editor, procuring large increases of circulation for the journals he edited. He claimed to have raised the circulation of the Messenger from 700 to 5500,(1) and that of Graham's from 6000 to over 40,000.(2) (In the latter case he was exaggerating slightly; the figures given by Graham himself(3) were, 5000 to over 37,000.) And there can be no doubt that in 1845 and 1846 Poe seems to have found, in self-identification with the American mass-audience, a sense of public identity, however precariously achieved this may have been. But there is very little reason to suppose that the American mass-audience consistently gave him the kind of favourable attention he sometimes imagined for himself.

Apart from a few occasional pieces, he was not a popular writer in his lifetime. One reason for this was given by G. R. Graham, Poe's most sympathetic employer, when he said that [page 158:]

And this statement by Graham about Poe's comparative popularity has a great deal of authority. Graham, as William Charvat points out,(5) had a systematic method of estimating the popularity of American writers from the extent to which their work was reprinted from his own magazine into the Western and Southern journals which sent him exchange copies. He related his rate of pay to a writer's estimated popularity(6) on a sliding scale ranging from $2 to $12 a page;(7) and it is significant that, after Poe ceased to be editor, he was usually paid $4 a page for his contributions to Graham's(8) not very far from the bottom of the scale.

Of course, as Edmund Wilson says, Poe “succeeded in selling almost all he wrote to the insipid periodicals of his day,” and this, while not popularity, was certainly not failure. We have already seen something of the process of adaptation whereby Poe achieved this. But it was hardly the same kind of achievement as that of Mr. Wilson himself, faced with the twentieth-century glut of magazine material, and forced to slip “over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject. ...”(9) There were relatively so few competent American magazine writers in the 1830's that editors may often enough have had to choose between an over-intellectual article from Poe and a piece of sheer incompetent writing from someone else. And most of the magazines Poe wrote for paid so poorly(10) (or suspended [page 159:] payment (11) ) that the competition for space in them cannot have been intensive. The two well-paying journals to which Poe had access were Graham's and Godey's. Poe did achieve two of his isolated journalistic successes in these magazines, “Autography” in Graham's, ‘The Literati of New York” in Godey's: but his more characteristic pieces which appear in these journals are very different in tone from their surrounding material. Graham must have had some reason other than profit for printing in a magazine which was admittedly directed at the mass-audience, writing which he knew “was of such an order as not to be very widely in demand.” Perhaps he had some detrital sense of the responsibility of literary patronage, most likely also a desire to add “tone” to his journal with a more highbrow piece. And “patronage” is really too impersonal a word to do justice to a relationship that began with Poe acting as a (technically) very efficient editor for Graham, and in which, after losing the job, he seems to have retained Graham's sympathy and respect. Mrs. Sarah Hale, who according to Hervey Allen first knew of Poe in 1827 and wrote a letter to her son at West Point in 1830 inquiring about him, certainly had the urge to patronise: and her interest, no doubt, as Allen says, “partly explains Poe's frequent appearance in Godey's where Mrs. Hale held sway for years. ...”(12)

Graham's view that “the character of Poe's mind” prevented him from being popular seems to be substantially correct. I shall show in this chapter how the nature of Poe's fiction, the limitations of his idea of popular writing, and above all, the basic conservatism of his journalistic modes, all militated against him in this respect. But the most immediate revelation of “the character of Poe's mind” must have come to his readers through his style. He did, of course, [page 160:] make substantial efforts to simplify his style, together with other aspects of his writing, after the unpopularity of his early modes became apparent. But despite these effortsit retained the ineradicable marks not only of intelligence but of elitist superiority. This would be the quality that would most alienate all but a small “class of educated mind.” It was outside Poe's power to adapt his rather idiosyncratic style sufficiently for it to fit in completely with the popular mode of the time. The staple prose of Godey's in the ‘forties was limpid and equable, carrying diluted facts or straight narrative, simple, instinctive, and tending to enthusiasm. Poe, with his brilliant imitative flair, could write this way, but usually when he does his tone suggests a perfunctory contrivance and lies just behind the line of conscious parody. A few sentences from his Godey's review of the poems of Frances Sargent Osgood will serve as examples:

The lady readers of Godey's might agree with the sentiments expressed, might not consciously be aware of anything wrong: but they could hardly have warmed to the reviewer in the way they did to more sentimentally involved journalists. And the quality of artless simplicity which marks the prose of the favourite writers in Godey's, and [page 161:] against which Poe campaigned all his life, was one he never exhibited in any of his better writing. The short, rather jerky sentences of his later “Arabesques,” expressing the nervous excitability of more plain-spoken protagonists, have little of the instinctive quality of most popular art: and the idiosyncratic, brittle mental control, which one finds in their style is also apparent in the over-all structure of his more skilful later pieces. Some of Poe's hoaxes, the “Balloon Hoax” in particular, do seem to have been very successful as a result of their ingenious simulation of a popular style. But they, too, have this sharp mental quality, with part of the writer's attention given to the imaginary butt, the foolish reader who is to be deceived, and the rest to the intelligent reader who, like the writer himself, is enjoying the deception and the skill which goes into it. And one cannot really call the success of a hoax “popularity,” because the mode does not (once the truth is out) draw the reader to the author, as did the modes of typical nineteenth-century mass-journalism.

 

I. THE POPULARITY OF POE'S FICTION

We have seen from the advice given to Poe when he was trying to publish the “Tales of the Folio Club” that his early fictional modes were not in tune with the mass-audience's tastes. Despite his adaptations of mode and style, his later fiction does not seem to have much increased his popularity: Killis Campbell confirms(14) that he was not known as a fiction writer in his lifetime. The exact size of the “Small Edition” of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque printed in 1840 is in dispute.(15) But whether 750 or 1750 copies were printed (and not completely disposed of in [page 162:] three years after publication), his publisher's interpretation of the venture stands. “This,” wrote H. C. Lea,

And it is significant that the publishers of his 1845 volume of tales got E. A. Duyckinck, who undoubtedly was attuned to the mass-audience, to make the selection of tales for the volume (a selection, incidentally, with which Poe himself was by no means satisfied).(16) One must not underestimate the considerable modification of his style and subject matter between 1839 and 1845, whereby Poe set out to win recognition from the mass-audience. But the amount of adaptation possible from a man, the character of whose mind was, in Graham's words, “of such an order as not to be very widely in demand,” was limited. Poe's most characteristic styles and modes of writing were as idiosyncratic as his deepest feelings, and mental activity and intention could compensate for this idiosyncracy, rationalise and adapt it considerably, but not deeply and fundamentally transform it. To his more serious and characteristic fiction, there seems to have been much more response in Europe than in America. Poe was his own best publicist on such matters, listing his British press notices for J. M. Field to publish in his St. Louis Daily Reveille in 1846, and sending a clipping to his friend T. H. Chivers, saying “you will be pleased to see how they appreciate me in England.”(17) He mentioned his fairly favourable Blackwood's review quite nonchalantly in January 1845;(18) the attention being paid to him in France already equalled that in England.(19) No doubt this [page 163:] foreign praise was instrumental in drawing a favourable review from the new American Review,(20) if nothing from the older established American journals. Poe was ironic about a reviewer for the North American Review who, after deferentially acknowledging the justice done to Poe by the Revue Française and the Revue des Deux Mondes, had claimed that his own journal was restrained from doing the same only by Poe's “invincible spirit of antagonism.”(21) Some of his more characteristic writing had already reached the European readers who were to ensure its fame, but the representatives of the American audience were still circumspect about wholly approving it. There is no evidence that the Tales of 1845 were particularly popular: they apparently sold well enough to justify the publishers in putting out an edition of Poe's poems,(22) but he was not successful in his plan(23) for another edition of the Tales in his lifetime. His critical savagery and the rumours of his weakness for drink were the only things which had impressed the wider audience, preparing the ground for the biographic study in depravity which R. W. Griswold added to his edition of the Works. Griswold's “Memoir” caught the American moralistic imagination as Poe himself, by and large, could not: in its light the fiction, after Poe's death, began to receive some more widespread American attention. Two distinct factors seem to be involved in the failure of Poe's fiction to become popular in its own right: his theory of popularity, and his restricted view of fiction.

 

II. POE'S THEORY OF THE STOCK-RESPONSE

The deliberate creative formula set out by Poe in the Hawthorne reviews, whereby the writer decides upon an “effect to be wrought” and then coolly sets about achieving [page 164:] it, was very unlike the writing process, warm, spontaneous, focussing [[focusing]] on the heart and the affections, approved by all the popular writers of the nineteenth century. Lowell had apparently said of a writer, “who knows precisely how every effect has been produced by every great writer, and who is resolved to reproduce them,” that “the heart passes by his pitfalls and traps and carefully planned springs, to be taken captive by some simple fellow who expected the event as little as did his prisoner.” Poe, in 1845, claimed that Lowell's error here

But few of the really popular nineteenth-century writers would have disagreed fundamentally with Lowell.

It is clear how seriously such arrogance would limit his chances of popularity when Poe theorises about the process whereby popularity can be achieved. Poe's theory of the stock-response was extremely ingenious, but he saw the achievement of popularity too much as a coldly calculated procedure. In the 1847 review he repudiated complete novelty of thought and incident because it “tasks and startles the intellect” and therefore “cannot fail to prove unpopular with the masses,” and advocated instead an originality “true in respect of its purposes,” which, “in bringing out the half-formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind ... combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egoistic delight. By absolute originality, [page 165:] he claimed, the reader would be “excited, but embarrassed, disturbed, in some degree even pained at his own want of perception. ...” The “seeming novelty” on the other hand, he would enjoy

Poe's idea of the stock-response and its manipulation was conceived in the conspiratorial terms that he applied to journalism: cool contrivance, deception, and superior condescension are imagined as central to the business of achieving popularity. His earlier hostile accounts of the process had found the same elements: Samuel Warren, the Blackwood's writer, he saw as cynically exploiting the popular themes of money and health, Captain Marryat as exploiting in the same way the appeal of national sentiment. The theme of “life in the wilderness” like that of “life upon the ocean” is, he had said,

But, of course, popular writing is not as easy as that, particularly for someone as idiosyncratic as Poe. What is missing in Poe's conception of it is any recognition of the importance of an instinctive sympathy and identification with the audience in the popular writer,(27) a quality far more significant [page 166:] than the cynicism which he may, or may not, display. The elements in Poe's background which might have produced such an instinctive sympathy had been so complicated by his acquired attitudes, defensively erudite and superior, that they only partially liberated themselves in his journalism. And in the field of fiction, with its appeal to the relaxed mind, the unconscious sharing of feelings and attitudes is very important in making for popularity: in this respect even Poe's drab deliberate potboilers like “Thou Art the Man” and “Why the Little Frenchman has his Arm in a Sling” lack the simple appeal of dozens of stories in Godey's by far less skilful authors; they suffer from having been written down to the mass-audience, in obedience to a conspiratorial theory.

Poe's preoccupation with cool skilful performance seems to have concealed from him at times the degree of his distance from the spontaneous impulses of contemporary readers. The cold contrivance of his more characteristic tales, the sense that, in W. C. Brownell”s words, “his motive is, too plain and his means are too primitive,”(28) was probably a factor counting against them in the popularity poll. Another would be that the stock-responses which underlie these stories have little relation to the current modes of Godey's or Graham's in the ‘forties. The “shudders” of moral perversity, putrescent corpses, living burials, apocalypse, plague, and ruin with which he was still working were instinctive enough. They were attuned, however, not to the love-adventure-sentiment staple of the popular magazine fiction of the 1840's but to the morbid Byronic and Gothic stock-in-trade of the previous generation, which Poe had absorbed in his youth and still found congenial to his own temperament. [page 167:]

Poe, of course, did not allow that the novel could become a major art form,(29) and this suggests the limited nature of his most characteristic attitude to fiction: the space and freedom for plot to expand and become complicated, while characters grow in depth and complexity, seem to have had little appeal for him. (His own two attempts at writing novels, Arthur Gordon Pym and “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” show little facility and no real awareness of the potentialities of the form.) Another illustration of this restrictedness was his failure to respond with adequate critical attitudes to the widening fictional horizons implied in the novels of Dickens. In his review of Pickwick Papers, for instance, he admired Dickens's “delineation of Cockney life,” but he reserved his highest praise for those “efforts of a far loftier and more difficult nature” in which Dickens “has greatly surpassed the best of the brief tragic pieces of Bulwer, or of Warren,” and gave his detailed attention to one of these, “A Madman's M.S.”(30) In the 1844 ‘”Marginalia” he recommends (with some attempt at juster proportion) another of these ‘brief tragic pieces’:

In both these instances Poe offers only token admiration for Dickens's abilities as a novelist, his real attention being given to two rather melodramatic short-stories, which are written in his own favoured genre of short psychological case-studies. This rather restricted view of fiction represents, [page 168:] no doubt, the same reluctance to release entirely certain eighteenth-century elitist and learned protective attitudes, which we have seen again and again. It illustrates once more that oblique glance in the direction of an imagined elite which to the end of his life he thought might appreciate his most characteristic work. And the very sharp mental focus, which this conservatism gives to his fiction and his theory of fiction, is one factor which has thrown it into such salutary contrast with the ready outpourings of the heart and the affections produced by his popular contemporaries: the sharp tone of his more self-conscious fiction has been felt to anticipate that of Mark Twain's antigenteel burlesques, and that of twentieth-century intellectual science-fantasy. And his characteristic horror stories are largely redeemed for us by their learned overtones, their appeal to a mental world, by what Charles Feidelson calls “the ambiguity of Poe's metaphysics”(32) beneath the horror. But the mass-taste as it was represented in Godey's and Graham's showed a fairly uniform abandonment to the sheer escape-world of various kinds of romantic fiction. Poe's psychological case-studies, his learned burlesques, his metaphysical prose-poems and detective stories, on the contrary, tend to assume a mental control and purpose, as do British writings of the magazine milieu in which he had been so interested.

 

III. THE POPULARITY OF POE'S CRITICAL PERSONALITIES

According to Killis Campbell, Poe was principally known in his lifetime as a “fearless and caustic and not always impartial critic.”(33) Thus he was called a “tomahawk man,”(34) “Bulldog the critick,”(35) “magnificently snobbish [page 169:] and dirty,”(36) and was accused of “regular cutting and slashing” and “blackguard warfare”(37) in various press reviews. The popular image of Poe was that in the caricature by F. O. C. Darley(38) of a savage Mohawk brandishing his tomahawk. Of course, even in the early days, Poe's “‘personalities” representd [[represented]] a small proportion of his criticism, as he himself pointed out in a letter to the Richmond Compiler,(39) and this remained true of the later “personalities.” But this popular image so coloured discussion of Poe that an intelligent critic, John E. Cooke, could claim that “invective is the author's favourite style,”(40) and even his friends had to admit that he was “provokingly hyper-critical at times,”(41) and that he “mistook his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.”(42) But it seems that this quality in Poe's criticism “gained subscribers,”(43) as John R. Thompson put it, for the journals Poe edited. There is no reason to doubt Poe's claim that the personal controversy over his Boston poetry reading resulted in “the doubling, in five weeks, the circulation of the Broadway Journal.”(44) And the soundest confirmation for the idea that Poe's reputation for savagery was the basis of his reputation is the way that Godey, in 1846, publicised the fairly innocuous and gossipy “Literati” series for his magazine: he informed his readers that Poe's papers would “raise some commotion in the literary emporium,” claimed that friends and anonymous correspondents had asked him to restrain Poe, and referred to the “complaints” of writers who had been “noticed” by Poe.(45) Poe's reputation and Godey's editorial skill together made an immense success of the series, and Poe (calculating on four readers to a copy) was able to “congratulate myself on such an audience as has not often been known in any similar case — a monthly audience of at least 200,000. ...”(46) It should be [page 170:] stressed, however, that the “Literati” papers which Godey published were in fact remarkably mild in their handling of Poe's literary enemies, and that this, as much as the rumours of their savagery, must have contributed to their huge success.

This was because the growing moralism of the age, in both England and America, would not stand unmitigated scurrility. “ ... Where is the benefit, what the advantage, of attacking a man's person, not his book — his character, not his composition?”(47) Bulwer had asked in 1833. “We cannot conceive,” wrote Wilson's daughter about 1860, “why a poet should be stigmatised as a base and detestable character merely because he was a Cockney and a Radical. ...”(48) In America such moral sentiments were even more intense: a writer in the Democratic Review for 1845 pointed out “what a much dreaded word egotism is in society and among critics, and how instinctively alarm is taken by a class of very sensitive persons at the slightest approach to personality. ...”(49) And Godey was a shrewd man and very alert to the mood of the time. When a controversy arose from the series, culminating in Poe's splenetic “Reply to Mr. English and Others,” it became clear that Godey was more eager for an apparent scandal than a real one. He decided not to publish the “Reply” in his own magazine, and to Poe's annoyance he had it published in a Philadelphia newspaper(50) instead. When Poe, soon after, apparently reproached Godey with lack of interest in his work, W. Gilmore Simms asked him, “But how can you expect a magazine proprietor to encourage contributions which embroil him with all his neighbours?” Poe's forte could be as much of a liability as an asset to a magazine proprietor, and there was probably wisdom in Simms's advice to “change [page 171:] your tactics and begin a new series of papers. ... ”(51) The one feature of his journalism that did make him widely known by no means provided Poe with unmitigated popularity or success.

 

IV. PERSONALITIES AND AUTHORITATIVE CRITICISM

With the growth of Romantic criticism, moreover, the claims of the old Reviews to critical “authority” in judging literature had tended to be repudiated along with their personal savagery. An article in the London Magazine, critical of the “attempts of modern criticism to blight and wither the maturity of genius” in such cases as those of Chatterton and Keats, soon widened into an attack on “judicial” criticism as such:

And this same confusion of the judicial with the personal marked a number of the contemporary objections to Poe's savagery. A cogent but representative example of the contemporary attitude is J. E. Cooke's powerful account of Poe's literary criticism.(53) Cooke, like most of his contemporaries, passed over the great bulk of Poe's criticism to see him as the author “of some of the fiercest, most savage, and most unfair literary criticism ever published in America,” and claimed of the largely mild and innocuous “Literati” series (read admittedly in the more virulent later version) that “invective is the author's favourite style.”(54) This judgement seems to be partly the result of that popular [page 172:] image of Poe as the “tomahawk man” on which I commented earlier, and which was unscrupulously propagated by R. W. Griswold in his edition of the Works.(55) (It was in Griswold's edition that Cooke found the later versions of the “Literati” essays.) It soon becomes clear, however, that Cooke was not only objecting morally to personal attack; he was at the same time objecting to the authoritative role for the critic as such. He disapproved entirely of “this apparent sitting in judgement,” “the severity of a judge reciting the crimes of a prisoner before pronouncing sentence,” and ap- pealed instead to “the just maxim that true criticism is appreciation.” His description of Poe's criticism com- pounded the personal method of some reviews with the “judicial severity” of others:

A hostility that spread from personalities to authoritative criticism as such (with its implied elite standards of judgement) probably explains the disproportion which Poe himself pointed out,(57) between public indignation and the small quantity of his criticism which was actually even predominantly unfavourable to the writer under review.

There were, of course, those who distinguished the personal from the judicial. Lowell deplored Poe's tendency in his more abusive moments to don “the cast garments of some pigmy Gifford or other foreign notoriety,” but he did not disapprove of authoritative criticism as such, “Had Mr. Poe,” he wrote, [page 173:]

And Poe, when on his best behaviour, also maintained the distinction, as when in the “Penn Magazine Prospectus’ he disowned his undue causticities, while claiming the right to calm yet stern judicial severity.(59) Elsewhere, however, Poe could contribute to the same confusion. With an extraordinary rhetorical sleight-of-hand he defended his “severity,” which an opponent had claimed was not popular, by conflating the popularity of pungent “personalities” and the intellectual appeal of impartial criticism: even the injustice of Gifford, he claimed, was exceedingly popular, and “there is no literary element of popularity more absolutely and more universally effective than the pungent impartiality of a Wilson or a Macaulay.” As a result of either impartiality or “mangling” similar to theirs (he mentions both as characteristic of the “just critic’) he had been able, he claimed, to raise phenomenally the circulations of the Messenger and Graham's. He goes on to defend himself only against the implications of the words “wholesale (or indiscriminate)(60) as applied to his hostile criticism. The extraordinary thing here is Poe's combination of exaggerated journalistic opportunism with the desire for literary respect, and it was perhaps the intensity of his desire to believe his criticism could be both good and popular that drove him to participate in the confusion of his readers. [page 174:]

 

V. THE APPEAL OF POE'S LITERARY PERSONALITY AND HIS LEARNING

His superior attitudinising in controversy was not the only feature of Poe's literary personality that was out of tune with the new age. Most of its other features also came too late. The enthusiasm for Byron's moroseness and despair had largely passed out of fashion. It was later possible for Griswold in the “Memoir,” with which he prefaced his collection of Poe's works, to capture the American imagination with the heavily moralised satanic version of Poe's Byronism that he presented there. But Poe himself projected his own Byronic attitudes in too intelligently amoral a way to achieve this kind of appeal. And as far as his fictional projection of his own idiosyncratic personality was concerned, Godey's fiction had already fallen well into the modern way of finding a sentimental hero or heroine as vacuous and anonymous as possible, with whom the reader could readily identify. Finally, Poe could certainly not, in his role of the learned expert, count on great favour in a magazine milieu where facts were diluted to the average taste, and opinionated elitism was suspect.

Why did Poe retain this learned tendency in his later work? He could hardly have hoped to dazzle the mass-audience with his erudition: shrewd writers and editors had already advised him to jettison learning if he wanted to succeed with readers who had repudiated it. The best explanation seems to be that he could not expurgate this element from his writing, and therefore continued in certain moods to hope for an elite that would respond to it. He had inherited a rhetorical pose which he enjoyed, without the audience that went with it, and rather than give it up, he continued [page 175:] to believe that the kind of audience he wanted might be available.

The distance of his final learned role from the mass-audience's taste might be measured by comparing Eureka with “Nature's Divine Revelations”(61) by the popular Andrew Jackson Davis. This work of the “Poughkeepsie Seer (whom Poe mocked in the first printing of ‘Mellonta Tauta”)(62) uses cosmological material in a combination or popular sermon and space fiction, very different from Poe's rational and allusive if idiosyncratic vein of argument. Indeed, far from arguing, Davis claimed to be verbally inspired by unseen spirits.(63) The fact that cosmological ideas were “in the air” in such a form may explain why, according to Poe, the papers which reviewed Eureka “all praised it — as far as I have yet seen — and all absurdly misrepresented it.”(64) One must admit, of course, that for all the differences in their modes of rational presentation, for all the sense of a European tradition that modifies and complicates Poe's erudition, there is a common quality to the two American works. This is their magnificent megalomania, related perhaps to that abhorrence of intellectual authority which had come, Leon Howard says,(65) by the beginning of the nineteenth century to characterise the mind of the American “common man.” I pointed out earlier the similarity between Eureka and De Quincey's article “System of the Heavens. But although Poe's erudite affectations and his superior elitist feelings are so like those of such British learned journalism, his writing carries individualistic vibrations — more individualistic than those one meets either in the British magazines or in the writings of the more sober, better educated, and economically secure habitual writers in the American reviews. And we are reminded that Poe played the [page 176:] expert in cranky fields like cryptography and autography, where his interests were more in tune with those of the mass- audience. This does not, however, affect the main issue. The audience-appeal of Eureka is far more like that of “System of the Heavens” than like that of “Nature's Divine Revelations.” There may be a naiveté at the core of Poe's journalism which reverberates beneath all his acquired European attitudes. But Poe's learned conventions alienated him in many of his most characteristic expressions from the mass. audience which could respond readily enough to the “Poughkeepsie Seer.”

 

VI. THE POPULARITY OF POE'S HOAXES

Poe's hoaxes are usually taken to exemplify his attunement to the American mass-audience (although the practice of Godey and Graham does not suggest that the hoax really had much appeal for the anxiously respectable middle-class reader as against their sentimental and self-consolidating staple). Certainly several of Poe's exercises in this mode seem to have been popular. Both in England and in America the “fact or fiction” issue in itself could still become a source of publicity, as the success of Melville's Typee in 1847 (on the strength of the widespread discussion about whether it was true) demonstrates.(66) And it was on this simplest of levels that Poe achieved his popular successes with the “Balloon Hoax” in 1844 and “M. Valdemar” in 1845. In these his play on the gullibility of the mass- audience and his self-conscious simplification of manner are noteworthy. “The Balloon Hoax,” according to Poe himself, made an “intense sensation,”(67) the square around the offices of the New York Sun being besieged by those who [page 177:] wanted copies. The “Autography” series in Graham's (lighter in tone and less sardonic than the earlier series in the Messenger) was very popular,(68) again according to Poe. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” while it was noticed in America, seems to have had much more impact in Europe. Mesmeric enthusiasts in Scotland(69) as well as in Boston(70) wrote to Poe, and Elizabeth Barrett(71) told him of the sensation the piece had caused in London. But his claim in 1847 that “the writer who aims at impressing the people is always wrong when he fails in forcing that people to receive the impression,” suggests that his superiority was merely given another form in his hoaxes. And this is confirmed when one looks at the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precedents for such writing, and sees how all of Poe's hoaxes conform to a semi-elitist pattern. The eighteenth-century kind of gentlemanly elitism is forcefully present in Poe's first hoax, “Hans Pfaall,” and in his last, “Von Kempelen and his Discovery,” both of which have little appeal for the mass-audience and are hostile to it. His other hoaxes correspond to a journalistic pattern of “‘quality-popularity,” akin to that found in Blackwood's. They seem to be the only examples of a convention found in a British journal that Poe used with complete success on the American audience.

The eighteenth-century history of such writing might be said to have had two stages, represented by the writing of Defoe and Swift. In the first the hoodwinking of the reader is a simple, unselfconscious, and necessary technique. In the second it is a sly contrivance, primarily designed to delight the “few,” at the expense of an uninitiated “many” who are, or who are imagined to be, duped. In the latter form it is generally conjoined with satiric assaults on pedantry. The [page 178:] early Blackwood's, aiming to please both “few” and “many,” followed the latter tradition in its “mystification” and burlesque, while its simpler fiction was sold to the “many” in Defoe's way, but with rather more self-consciousness in its editorial presentation. Thus the magazine combined the two central eighteenth-century approaches to fact/fiction hoaxes with its particular “quality-popularity” audience in mind. Around the more popular fictional series in Blackwood's like Galt's Ayrshire Legatees and Warren's Diary of a Late Physician, developed a kind of humorous irony whereby the editors insisted that their fiction was of course fact, while printing correspondence which disputed this:(72) thus they protected their sales to the naive disapprovers of fiction, provided entertainment and a palliative for the more intelligent reader, and ensured a talking point and a source of publicity. Similarly, the postscript to a novel, The Omen,(73) by a Blackwood's writer, James Galt, tries to maintain the illusion that the novel was an account of some letters addressed to “the late Sir George. Shelbrooke R.C.B.”; but an oblique joke for those “in the know” is inserted. Mr. Blackwood, we are told, had agreed to publish the letters as they stood, in his magazine,

The linking of the imaginary letters to the imaginary editor adds the elitist touch of entertainment for the inner group at the expense of the outer without betraying the “many” to positive scorn. [page 179:]

Poe's earliest hoax, “Hans Pfaall,” stands very clearly in the pseudo-scientific parody tradition of “Martin Scriblerus”; his later adaptations of the form combine the two traditions as Blackwood's does and show his growing interest in the mass-audience, although they never lose the hope that superior readers will enjoy the joke and admire the skill of the hoaxer. The act of deception in Arthur Gordon Pym and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is subordinate to the natural interest of the material, as it is in Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe. But a part of Poe's purpose is clearly that the intelligent reader should see the joke. He points out significantly in a letter to Duyckinck that the design in Robinson Crusoe was “far more to please, or excite, than to deceive by verisimilitude ...” whereas “in the story of Mrs. Veal, we are permitted, now and then, to perceive a tone of banter.”(74) A tone of banter is not allowed into the text of “M. Valdemar” or of “Pym,” but it is apparent from time to time in their editorial appendages, as it was in those of the Blackwood's fiction. An editorial note in the Broadway Journal regarding “the truth or falsity of the statements made in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,’ “ asserts:

While the publicity of a talking point is here the principle aim, there is an ambiguous appeal to the intelligent reader to share the joke, which one feels again in the “Preface to Arthur Gordon Pym. “Pym” writes that since the incidents [page 180:] of his tale were so marvellous, it seemed to him “that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction,” but that “Mr. Poe” had advised him

If the joke here is appreciated, it is clearly going to draw attention to the skill with which Poe counterfeits the crude forthright style of the son of a Nantucket sea-stores trader. “Mr. Poe's” praise of the “shrewdness and common sense” of the public is meant to refer the sophisticated reader to the real Poe's success in gulling the uneducated mass-audience. This appeal in Poe's hoaxes was to readers who would enjoy a demonstration of his view that “the nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”(77) If one is to judge by Robert Carter's report that the brother of O. W. Holmes could not be persuaded that Pym was fictitious,(78) or by Poe's need to assure his educated friend Eveleth that “M. Valdemar” was “a hoax, of course,”(79) what seemed to be lacking in America were the cynical readers who could thus appreciate a joke at the expense of their simpler brethren.

In a letter to Duyckinck designed to interest him in his final hoax, “Von Kempelen and his Discovery” (1849), Poe stressed its deliberateness as opposed to the accidental (and instinctive) convincingness of “M. Valdemar.” It was, he [page 181:] said, “a kind of ‘exercise,’ or experiment, in the plausible or verisimilar style,” which he believed to be “the first deliberate literary attempt of the kind on record.” The hoax is constructed out of haphazard allusions to imaginary newspaper reports of Kempelen's sensational success in making gold, and to the source for his method in Sir Humphry Davy's diary, and the whole thing is too cleverly oblique to have created the massive “stir,” the ‘temporary check to the gold-fever,” that Poe said he hoped for. Its appeal, far more assiduously than in the previous hoaxes, is really to those who appreciate the way “the whole strength is laid out in verisimilitude”(80) (as Poe put it in his letter to Duyckinck). And these subtle-minded readers are given the clue in the author's doubts about a reported earlier discovery of the alchemic process:

This implied compliment to Poe's indirect and convincing presentation of the improbable (together with mention of Locke's moon-hoax, which Poe imitated in “Hans Pfaall,” and of Maelzel's chess player,(81) on which Poe had written an article) is meant to draw the sophisticated reader's attention once more to the technical skill of “Edgar A. Poe.” Duyckinck, a shrewd judge of the taste of the time, apparently refused the tale(82) for his Literary World, and it appeared in the little-known Flag of Our Union.