Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Chapter Five,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 145:]

The first sign of Briggs's failing control of the Broadway Journal was Poe's insertion of a highly flattering review of the Southern Literary Messenger, a magazine he had edited successfully almost ten years earlier. Showing a surprising insensitivity to public opinion, or perhaps a supreme disregard, Poe wrote that few illustrious American names were not to be found on the Messenger's list of subscribers. He announced himself as its New York representative, clearly allying the Broadway Journal with the “elite of the South.”(1) Not until this brazen compromise of the Journal's carefully nurtured independence were the abolitionists outrightly offended. Briggs's freedom of party and faction had been his magazine's greatest advantage; it had been a distinct possibility that, if he were careful enough, all sides would permit him open expression of his strong editorial personality.

Furthermore, Poe monopolized a great deal of the Journal's space in his lengthy discussions of plagiarism. He indulged in a vendetta against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in whose work he documented instances of plagiarism from other poets, among them Poe himself. The [page 146:] little Longfellow War, as it was called then, began in the Journal on February 15, when Briggs replied to Poe's accusation that James Aldrich plagiarized from the British poet, Hood.(2) In the first issue of which he was named co-editor,(3) Poe reprinted all the notes and articles that had been written on the subject so far, in fact thrusting a challenge at his superior editor. Briggs hoped that the squabble would attract readers to the Journal. However, his decision to let Poe ride his “ticklish hobby” to death (“I think the better way is to let him run down as soon as possible by giving him no check.”),(4) was a serious miscalculation. Poe went on and on, multiplying his accusations against Longfellow, and later, Lowell; in the March 22 Journal he took nine columns. On March 29, eight more columns appeared, pushing out essays such as those on American prose writers, greatly increasing the hostility that the abolitionists, many of whom were Longfellow's neighboring Boston Brahmins, felt for Briggs's magazine.

Moreover, Poe did not attract contributors, with the exception, perhaps, of his female admirer Frances Osgood (Violet Vane). Reprints of his own work soon began to fill the magazine. Briggs only slowly began to [page 147:] comprehend the situation, as shown by his changing mentions of Poe in letters to Lowell. At first he thought that he retained “precisely the same authority that I did in the beginning, only I get the services of my assistants free instead of paying them, as I should otherwise be compelled to do.”(5) However, in April, he wrote a satire on American writers in which he portrayed Poe as the pale author whose stylus was an icicle. The narrator in that piece prophetically remarks that he would prefer being stung by a hornet to being stabbed by that “horrid icicle,” By June, Briggs was writing to Lowell, “I shall haul down Poe's name; he has lately got into his old habits, and I fear will injure himself irretrievably.”

Briggs had the ill-luck to be stung by the abolitionists’ hornet as well as stabbed by Poe's icicle. Before the Journal's first month was out, Lowell forced a confrontation concerning the magazine's stand on slavery. Throughout [page 148:] January, 1845, Briggs's letters to Lowell reiterate a request for contributions: “Send me something on Texas in verse.” Briggs felt that “People will take things kindly in rhyme which they will not in prose.”(7) At the end of January, however, Lowell submitted a prose letter in which Matthew Trueman, a “country cousin,” scolds a member of Congress who had voted for annexation. Briggs replied at once that the piece “sounds harshly to me and it will, of course, sound very harshly to those who do not feel for the writer as I do.” Explaining that he was as concerned for Lowell's reputation as for the effect of the article on his magazine's circulation, he remarked:

He promised to make a liberal selection from Matthew's letter, but confessed that he had relied upon Lowell's loving manner to subdue his own harshness: “but if you and I both indulge in a coarse vein, woe to my poor Journal.”

In this letter of January 22, Briggs said, “You know that I am unqualifiedly opposed to slavery in every shape, [page 149:] but for that reason I watch over myself to keep free from violent prejudices, that I may meet a slaveholder without making him feel that I am his personal enemy.” He repeated his advice: “Put all your abolitionism into rhyme.” Briggs advocated cultivating imaginative sympathy for the slaveholder as well as the slave (“Can any of us feel certain that we should not have been pro-slavery men if we had been born at the south of southern parents?”). Finally he revealed a basic cause of his anxiety:

Lowell, however, did not appreciate the argument of “doing good by stealth”; he was newly married to Maria White, an outspoken advocate of abolition who had a profound effect on him, and he was surrounded in Boston by Garrisonians who considered neutrality opposition. One of the major efforts of Garrison's Liberator was to present a picture of the South as irredeemably decadent.(9) Far from being able to imagine reaching Southern minds by gentleness and indirection, the abolitionists attacked frontally, playing up the brutalizing effects of slavery on Southern society. [page 150:]

Briggs tried to placate Lowell in succeeding letters, not only for the sake of his contributions, but for the preservation of a valued friendship. In their correspondence of February and March, he continued to request anti-annexation articles that were, at the same time, not “personal”; moreover, he confessed himself almost willing to accept annexation, in the hope that the addition of slave territories to the Union would destroy it. New England would then be free to establish a genuine republic: “ Think of the glory of such a Commonwealth as Massachusetts without the drag of Pennsylvania and South Carolina.”(10) By mid-March Briggs noticed that Lowell's contributions had fallen off; he almost regretted that he had not published Matthew Trueman's letter, “for I fear my not doing so has deprived me of many good things.”(11) Moreover, during this sensitive period, Poe's praise of the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared, slipping by despite Briggs's customary alertness. It must have seemed to Lowell that Briggs's tact was exercised in a curiously one-sided way. The editor himself noticed that “All my Boston acquaintances, I hardly dare call them friends, fight shy of me.”

In a long letter of March 19, Briggs, who had not received promised contributions from Lowell, defended [page 151:] his position in great detail. First, he repeated that the publication of Matthew Trueman's letter would have damaged Lowell's reputation as well as stopped the circulation of the Journal in the South. The scope of his magazine, he insisted, had to be national. “They need no new abolition papers in New England but they do need them at the South, where the Journal never could have gone after it had conveyed Matthew's letter to them.” Briggs prophetically chose a military metaphor to express his editorial position on the subject of slavery:

Finally, he was forced to admit that his editorial stance had a practical base. He had been obliged to gain the assistance of a publisher and a printer, both of whom had a financial interest in the paper and had to be placated. Once he had established the Journal in paying circulation, he could be freer about admitting anti-slavery material: “You know that publishers and printers judge of propriety by profit ... and my publisher and printer took alarm at the outset at my manifest leaning toward certain horrifying, because unprofitable doctrines.” [page 152:]

However, Briggs had deliberately chosen Bisco, and must have been aware of his lack of commitment to the anti-slavery, much less abolitionist, position. He might have been somewhat less restrained were it not for the publisher's influence, but more than the problem of financial backing was involved in Briggs's quarrel with Lowell. Just as he had always objected to isolated movements of reform, he expressed distaste for attacking slavery exclusively, as if it were an evil unconnected with other defects in the social system. It was on this subject, the same that divided them in the 1844 elections, that the debate between Briggs and Lowell became most acrimonious. Lowell wrote on August 8, 1845, “You are worse than those ‘philanthropic enuchs’ you talk about, if you consider the ‘unity of evil’ as a sufficient reason for putting one's hands in one's pockets and sitting down quietly upon the fence in the sun.” He accused Briggs of belonging to “that class of useful reformers whose sphere of action is that of reforming the reformers themselves.”

Indeed Briggs's position was melancholy; however eloquently he wrote to Lowell of the evil of imprisonment for debt, which had touched his own life, and which he considered at least as great as slavery, however cogently he argued that “we at the North” have a hand in slavery too, and that attacks must be made upon the economic causes of slavery, not on the slaveholders themselves, Lowell and the abolitionists were unpersuaded. Finally, Briggs revealed how deeply the Broadway Journal had become enmeshed in the confusion the slavery issue created:

In the Boston Liberator of March 28, 1845, the abolitionists officially withdrew their approval of Briggs's magazine.(15) His tone one of formal excommunication, Robert Carter made the following accusations: [page 154:] l) he dredged up Briggs's early remarks about Southern Quarterly Review,(16) distorting them to show that the editor approved of that magazine's moral stand; 2) he attributed Poe's readily explainable, if tactless, praise of the Southern Literary Messenger to Briggs, intimating that it was a purposeful bid for Southern readers; 3) he accused Briggs of disrespect for Abby Kelly and Lucretia Mott; 4) he claimed that Briggs refused many articles by abolitionists,(17) and 5) he completely failed to note that Poe, who was responsible for the only real offense committed by the Journal, was recommended to Briggs by Lowell, who had been as unaware as the editor of Poe's Southern bias.

Carter had been inspired to write the review by Lowell, who privately lamented that the Broadway Journal had not become a “powerful weapon in the hands of Reform.”(18) Briggs's real offense, it seems, was not in the petty half-truths that Carter had enumerated, but in his stubborn unwillingness to turn the magazine into an instrument of the abolitionists. Unsuspecting that Carter's assault was in the works, Briggs was deeply shocked by it. Embittered, he wrote to his friend, William Page: [page 155:]

Briggs characterized Carter's attack as a gratuitous attempt to injure him in the estimation of the abolitionist community; he revealed the virulence of the aroused sentiment in his exclamation to Page: “I suppose it will be made a charge against me that my house faces south. Don’t stay in Boston until the atmosphere of the place infects you,” The air was too charged for an independent Broadway Journal to succeed; Briggs described the rising tide of emotion generated by the slavery issue when he wrote, “It strikes me that the Boston Association should put up an Auto da fe or rebuild the Charleston Armory and make an Inquisition of it.” He correctly identified the mood that destroyed the Journal: “This morbid feverishness about everything South is dreadful.” Briggs's desire to [page 156:] make an “honest clear toned literary journal” had to remain unsatisfied until, in 1853, George Putnam, the publisher, put him in charge of Putnam's Monthly.

The abolitionists’ harsh disapproval of the Broadway Journal is a clear example of the doctrinaire attitude that earned them the reputation of fanatics. Unable to, exert any power over the larger, more influential journals, they flexed their muscles over the bantling Broadway Journal. Like a small bully whose shadow-boxing has passed unnoticed by the older boys, they expressed their frustration by turning on one more defenseless. In terms of practical politics, they achieved nothing by their censure of the Journal; in stilling Briggs's voice they were able to provide no substitute for his intelligent comment and review. Indeed, if it were true that Briggs did not favor the anti-slavery position, why did he print the engraving of Satan? Why did he request anti-slavery material at all? Briggs was so vulnerable precisely because he hoped to communicate with both sides; in withdrawing approval from the Broadway Journal the abolitionists calculatedly chose to abandon the possibilities of discourse, as they and others would do at intervals during the next fifteen years.

Although Lowell, Carter and their friends were important to the Journal's success as subscribers and contributors, they were not indispensable. But however, few [page 157:] their numbers, their loss was a powerful blow to Briggs's morale. His anger and bitterness towards Carter and his depression at Lowell's displeasure alarmed the publisher, Bisco, who feared that Briggs would succumb to the abolitionists’ pressure. Meanwhile, Poe, noticing Briggs's coldness, surmised that the editor intended to drop him,(20) and played a Machiavellian role. Poe had absorbed Southern attitudes during his childhood in the Virginia home of John Allan; however, he was more committed to the expression of his unique genius than to any political cause. He saw the possibility of making the Broadway Journal the desperately needed outlet for his work. At this critical juncture, he persuaded Bisco, who had already agreed to sell his share in the magazine to Briggs, to continue publishing with Poe as the sole editor. Impressed by Poe's ability, his resistance to abolitionist pressure, and his persuasive charm,(21) Bisco defaulted on his promise to sell by raising the price for his share to an exorbitant figure. Briggs, dispirited by the loss of Lowell's good opinion, essential to his self-esteem, allowed Poe and Bisco to outmaneuver him,(22) and abandoned the Journal entirely. [page 158:]

It is appropriate to the abrupt end of Briggs's connection with the Journal that the last writing he did for the paper was an unfinished serial. Entitled “The Adventures of a Gentleman in Search of a Dinner,”(23) its theme of a man's frustration by circumstance and friends is peculiarly fitting to the editor's own case. The gentleman of the story's title, an Epicurean who increased the pleasure of his daily dining by abstaining from all but one meal a day, is invited to the home of a well-to-do friend for dinner. The cost of outfitting himself and the cabman's fare make a substantial dent in his financial Resources, but in his anticipation of the gourmet's table, he deems it worthwhile. The friend's party is abruptly called off, and the hungry gentleman hurriedly finds a restaurant. After ordering a dinner elaborately detailed, from the oysters and potage to the meringue, he is upset by the presence of an avowed enemy in the restaurant. Leaving the place, he passes from restaurant to restaurant, ordering a succession of magnificent dinners. At the point of dining, he is always interrupted by financial embarrassment or a related circumstance. In the final number of the Broadway Journal. Volume 1,(24) the by-now-starving gentleman is rescued by a friend named Skillet,(25) [page 159:] who is on the way home to his isolated cottage, carrying a basket of smoked salmon and radishes. However, the basket is lost on the drive to Skillet's house, where the tea-table, set by his “icicle” of a wife, bears only bread, a dry rusk, and red currants. By now in desperation for his meal, our gentleman leaves Skillet's home, and luckily meets two friends from Boston, S. and L., who are about to sup. Invited to join them, he insists on the delicacies Skillet had promised — smoked salmon, rather than the oysters which they are consuming with relish in front of him; his laughing friends ignore the strange request, and tease him by failing to offer a single oyster, leaving him to exclaim plaintively: “But my friends, ... you forget the salmon.”

The analogy to the story of the Broadway Journal is clear. Briggs had staked his resources on the creation of a satisfyingly independent magazine; Poe, whose offer of assistance made its accomplishment at first seem nearer, eventually chilled his hopes as effectively as Mrs. Skillet's tea table did his hero's. There was no help forthcoming from Briggs's Bostonian friends either. Like L. and S., who thought that a desire for smoked salmon was a frivolous joke if they preferred oysters, Lowell and Carter were similarly lacking in understanding of Briggs's purpose. The second installment of Briggs's serial is marked “To be [page 160:] continued”; its real conclusion appeared in the same column of the Broadway Journal two weeks later. Announcing Volume II, Number 1, the publisher, Bisco, noted that there would be henceforth only a single editor of the Broadway Journal — Edgar Allan Poe. Briggs's hero never consumed the marvelous dinner that was a symbol of achievement and satisfaction to his creator.

The Journal survived for six months after Poe took over, and predictably, it took quite a different turn under his auspices. The possession of a magazine of his own was a cherished dream of Poe's.(26) He not only agreed with Briggs on the need for honest criticism, but he desperately needed a showplace for his own work. The Journal's second volume became a vehicle for Poe's best creative work, but it lost its character as a review and social commentary. In the Journal under Briggs, there was room for such tales as “Berenice,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Premature Burial”; Volume I also included “The Raven,” “Dream Land,” and “To One in Paradise.” If Briggs had been able to get more creative work of this quality from other writers, the addition to his editorial comment and satiric tales would have been beneficial. Poe was as unable as Briggs to draw this kind of contribution. Instead he filled up the magazine with [page 161:] his own new and old work, often writing and signing almost every piece in it. Among the stories that were reprinted in Volume II were “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “Masque of the Red Death,” “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “William Wilson,” “Ligeia,” “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” “The Devil in the Belfry”; among the poems were “Israfel,” “Lenore,” and “The Valley of Unrest.” If this makes the magazine an important source for students of Poe, it does diminish its value as critical review, social commentary and spokesman for the interests of American writers. For example, Volume I, Number Five (Feb. 1, 1845), under Briggs's undivided editorship, included reviews on books in widely differing fields; an essay in the “Prose Writers” Series on R. H. Dana (by William A. Jones); an essay on the theater (by Evert Duyckinck); several commentaries by the editor — on copyright, on architecture, on places worth visiting, on national nomenclature; poetry by Maria Lowell; drama and music reviews; correspondence. On the other hand, Volume II, Number Five, under Poe's editorship, contained a story and poem by Poe, a tale by “Fay Robinson,” a poem by Mary Hewitt, a long review by the editor on Hood's poetry, several brief reviews, and the musical department. There were no essays, and no significant contributors apart from the editor himself. Poe's Journal was unable to draw on the talents of the alienated Bostonians; the Southerners had magazines and editors of their own, and [page 162:] many of the lesser New York writers had affiliations with longer-established magazines, like the Knickerbocker or the Democratic Review; or, like Mathews and Duyckinck, were struggling to establish their own periodicals.

The moribund Journal, unfortunately, left a legacy of bitterness to both of its editors. Briggs reported to Lowell in July, 1845, that the non-appearance of the magazine(27) was caused by Bisco's extortionate terms of sale. The new publisher, Homans,(28) whom Briggs had interested in the venture, was therefore unable to buy it:

Ten days later, in a letter to Page, Briggs further described the deterioration of his relationship with Poe, from initial great liking to the discovery that “he was the merest shell of a man.” Evidently, Briggs had finally [page 163:] realized that Poe's interest in him was confined to what services Briggs could render, as the often desperate poet sought to increase his literary reputation. 1845 was a difficult year for Poe: the Bostonians attacked him for the Lyceum fiasco, when he contracted to read his audience a new poem, but gave them the old “Al Aaraaf”, “the Osgood-Ellet affair, involving letters from Poe to two female admirers, erupted into common gossip; the Broadway Journal failed; and Poe's hopes for beginning the Stylus came to naught.(30) In attempting to earn some money, as well as to start what he projected as a literary history of the United States, he began the “Literati of New York” papers, in Godey's Lady's Book, for May, 1846. In the first series, Briggs is scornfully dismissed as ungrammatical, imitative, “Flemish” in taste, personally unprepossessing and annoying! Of all Briggs's writing, Poe singled out one story that had appeared in the Broadway Journal for faint praise, which the usually precise critic made even more damning by misquoting the title and distorting the hero's name.(31)

A reply to Poe's “Literati” papers appeared in the Mirror on May 26, 1846.(32) Planned by Hiram Fuller, the Mirror's editor, the article was probably written by Briggs. In his first public statement on his former [page 164:] co-editor, Briggs criticized Poe's biographical sketches for their slightness and the fact that many of their subjects ought not to be included among “literati.” He accused Poe of deficiencies in integrity, benevolence and power of characterization. Referring to the portrait of himself, Briggs remarked:

Whatever modern biographers have revealed about pressures on Poe that provoked him to such acts, it is undeniable that this is the way he appeared to many of his well-disposed contemporaries. Briggs, who had nothing but admiration for him at first, was increasingly chilled by Poe's open scorn for him; in the Mirror column, this bitterness erupted into a paragraph in which he called Poe a “thersitical magazinist.” Briggs concluded the column by mocking the end of Poe's sketch of him: “Mr. Poe goes much into society, but what society we cannot positively say.”(34) [page 165:]

It is true that Poe was willing to abuse Briggs in order to maintain harmony with those who could be useful to him. Typical of this behavior is a scandal he created concerning the Broadway Journal's review of Fitz-Greene Halleck's Alnwick Castle. The unfavorable review had been written by Lowell; on March 31, 1845, Briggs wrote to the poet specifically asking him if he would please put his initials to it. However, the Journal ordinarily carried only unsigned reviews, and Lowell's piece appeared without his signature. In August, 1845, Poe was laboring to reinstate himself in the good graces of Laughton Osborn, an intimate of Halleck's Whom he had earlier offended, but from whom he now needed money or encouragement. Freely admitting that he “had no hesitation is overstepping the boundary line of what is usually called editorial decorum,” Poe accused Briggs of “malicious instigation” in purposely requesting that Lowell's review of Alnwick Castle be unsigned in order that the “odium” fall on Poe.(35) The Briggs-Lowell letter of March 31 indicates that this accusation was patently untrue. In fact, at this point in their collaboration, Briggs was busy defending Poe to the Bostonians in the matter of the Longfellow War. Poe also tried his best to destroy the Briggs-Lowell friendship; he informed Robert Carter that Briggs abused Lowell behind his back.(36) Poe had easily grasped the fact that Lowell's [page 166:] friendship was a vital prop to Briggs's self-esteem; correctly sizing up Carter as a hysterical Judas, he attempted to use him against Briggs.

Following the May 26 reply to the “Literati” papers, Briggs made a few minor mentions of Poe,(37) until on February 27, 1847, he caricatured him as Austin Wicks in the New York Mirror serialization of The Trippings of Tom Pepper.(38) When Poe died, late in 1849, Briggs noticed the event in the editorial column of Holden's Magazine; from a modern point of view, some of his remarks were extremely fair.

He characterized Poe's poetry as “machine work,” however, and was guilty of believing that great poetry is “spontaneous outgushing,” rather than what he excellently described Poe's as: “a carefully designed mosaic, painfully elaborated, and designedly put together, with every little word in its right place, and every shade of thought toned down to its exact position.” Yet Briggs did find occasional merit in Poe's poetry: “ever and anon, in this strange [page 167:] jingling and clanging of words, there struck upon the ear sounds of real sadness, which touched the heart and produced the feeling caused by the strain of the true poet.” This was a relatively generous admission, in view of Emerson's dismissal of Poe as the “jingle man.” Moreover, Briggs did not hesitate to admit that his view of Poe was blurred by nearness.

In an 1858 edition of The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, there appeared an unsigned “memoir” attributed by Poe's biographers to Briggs.(40) Almost ten years after Poe's death, Briggs remarked that the poet's biographers had been gentler in dealing with his personal defects than the truth warranted. Describing the tremendous difference in Poe before and after his periods of debauchery, he admitted that some who knew the poet “long and intimately” could never believe the stories about his other self: “Like his own Raven, he is to his readers, ‘bird or fiend,’ they know not which.”

Briggs's final remarks on Poe appeared in an article called “The Personality of Poe,” in December, 1877,(41) six months after the editor's own death, and twenty-eight years after his first notice of Poe's death. Briggs's opinion remained the same; he recognized Poe's ability as a writer, while he hesitated to forget his curious character. [page 168:] Giving Poe generous credit (“All concede that as a literary artist, he is entitled-to rank among the greatest of American writers, if not of contemporary writers in the English language.”), he regretted that Rufus Griswold did not present a fuller biography of his subject. Briggs was evidently unaware that the poet's literary executor had distorted Poe's intentions by maliciously altering correspondence. Quoting Cromwell's desire to be painted “warts and all,” Briggs wrote of Griswold's biography: “The warts have been omitted, and the world has lost one of the most remarkable portraits that it was ever likely to possess.” He repeated his earlier contention that Poe's dissipation was not his repulsive trait:

Briggs completely failed to comprehend Poe's unique relationship with his family, and had little awareness of the burden of the poet's illness.

Briggs felt that Poe's regard for literary reputation at the expense of openness and loyalty was less than admirable. Poe's intriguing certainly had extenuating motives; driven to desperation by poverty and illness, he was forced to act as his own publicist and literary agent. [page 169:] First abandoned, then orphaned, he had discovered early that he had to exert himself on his own behalf. It is true that Poe appears to have been more concerned about leaving as flattering and fully documented a record of his achievement as possible, than about treating his contemporaries kindly or justly; however, the actions of his literary executor more than justified his suspicions of the motives of his colleagues.(42) Briggs's portraits of Poe are fairer than the “literati” sketch Poe devoted to him; that they are not pure slander, as some supporters of Poe have said, can be proven from the correspondence of both men.

Briggs's essays on Poe have been described as “attacks,” one student even writing that he manifested a “willingness to exploit what has continued to be his principal claim to fame, a brief acquaintance with a man whose writing and career have commanded a wider interest than his own.”(43) It is clear, on the other hand, that Briggs did not hesitate to acknowledge Poe's genius; his pieces were not intended to damage Poe's reputation, but rather to describe all facets of the poet's personality. Only the three brief public mentions of Poe by Briggs in 1846 and 1847 demonstrate a desire to detract. If Briggs [page 170:] relied on his friendships for posterity's remembrance, he preferred to be linked with Lowell and Page, rather than with Poe.

Such a portrait of himself as Briggs would have wished was produced by Lowell in the Fable for Critics. The Fable presents accurate and witty sketches of Briggs and Poe, two men Lowell had initially brought together with such high hopes of fruitful collaboration. About “Harry Franco,” Lowell emphasized that his harsh exterior concealed a tender, loving nature:

In the succeeding lines, about Poe, the contrast to Briggs's portrait is clear; the poet “has written some things quite the best of their kind,/ But the heart seems all squeezed out by the mind.” Lowell felt, and with reason, that such a man as Poe (“Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge), who valued only “newspaper reputation and posthumous fame,”(44) was ill-equipped to appreciate either Briggs or Lowell himself.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 145:]

1. “Southern Literary Messenger,” Broadway Journal, I (March 22, 1845), 185.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 147:]

2. In the seventh number of the Journal, Briggs wrote, “There Is no such thing as originality of sentiment; expression is all that any poet can claim as his own.”

3. March 8, 1845.

4. Briggs to Lowell, March 8, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 147:]

5. Briggs to Lowell, March 19, 1845, Page Papers.

6. Briggs to Lowell, June 21, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 148:]

7. Briggs to Lowell, January 11, 1845, Page Papers.

8. Briggs to Lowell, January 22, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 149:]

9. As a glance at the Liberator or the National Anti-Slavery Standard will show, an ever-present column included a list of unrelated atrocities committed in the South; it was Implied that nothing less could be expected of a society supported by slave labor.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 150:]

10. Briggs to Lowell, March 8, 1845, Page Papers.

11. Although he at first decided merely to expurgate Matthew Trueman's letter, Briggs soon changed his mind, and gently rejected the whole piece.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 151:]

12. Briggs to Lowell, March 19, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 153:]

13. Lowell to Briggs, August 21, 1845, Houghton Library.

14. Briggs to Lowell, March 19, 1845 Page Papers.

15. “The Broadway Journal,” Boston Liberator, March 28, 1845. Robert Carter (1819-1879) was an editor and author. As Secretary to the Free Soil Committee in 1854, he suggested the name “Republican” for the newly-formed political party (Dictionary of American Biography).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 154:]

16. See p. 119 above. It is ironic that William Gilmore Simms, a prominent pro-slavery apologist, criticized as unfairly harsh the same review of Southern Quarterly that Carter thought too gentle.

17. Briggs claimed that he had refused only one article, Matthew Trueman's letter, and had solicited many others

18. James Russell Lowell to Robert Carter, March 16, 1845, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 155:]

19. Briggs to Page, April 10, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 157:]

20. On July 16, Briggs described the situation to Lowell. See page 162 below.

21. Briggs later noted in a memoir of Poe that no one who had not seen him during a period of debauchery could ever believe that he was anything but sober, industrious, and able.

22. The loss of Lowell's approbation made Briggs feel as if he “labored in vain” (March 19, Page Papers). The letters he wrote to Lowell following his abandonment of the Journal are designed to save face; Briggs, hurt by Lowell's part in the affair, wanted to minimize the extent of the damage to him. Thus he claimed that his parting with Poe was not unpleasant.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 158:]

25. Broadway Journal, I (June 21, 1845), 385.

24. Volume I, Number 26, for June 28, 1845, was the last number on which Briggs's name appeared as editor.

25. Appropriately, the name Skillet also belonged to a character in a sketch called “New Year's Calls,” that appeared in the very first issue of the Journal, I (Jan. 4. 1845), 1.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 160:]

26. All of Poe's biographers note this ambition; Briggs, if he did write the Memoir to the 1858 edition of Poe's works, expressed the poet's hopes for the Stylus this way: “it was the chimera which he nursed, the castle in the air which he longed for, the rainbow of his cloudy hopes.” The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1858), p. xvii ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 162:]

27. One week of publication was missed as negotiations between Briggs, Bisco and Homans stalled.

28. J. Smith Homans, later a partner in Homans and Ellis, who, in 1846, published a new edition of Working a Passage.

29. Briggs to Lowell, July 16, 1845, Page Papers.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 163:]

30. Mrs. Ellet concocted a scandal about the contents of letters exchanged by Mrs. Osgood and Poe; Poe was visited by a delegation of moral ladies, including Margaret Fuller, and challenged to a duel. See Sidney Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (New York, 1965).

31. Poe called the tale “Dobbs and His Cantaloupe,” instead of “The Grateful Clerk.” The name of its hero is Hubs,

32. James Reece, author of an unpublished dissertation, Poe and the New York Literati (Duke, 1954) assigns the reply to Briggs.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 164:]

33. “Mr. Poe and the New York Literati,” New York Mirror, May 26, 1846.

34. Poe had written of Briggs, as well as of others, “He goes little into general society ....”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 165:]

35. Poe to Laughton Osborn, dated August 15, 1845, in John Ward Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1966).

36. Lowell to Briggs, February 18, 1846, Houghton Library.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 166:]

37. “City Article II,” in the Knickerbocker, and a Pinto letter.

38. See Chapter Seven below, p. 252.

39. “Topics of the Month,” Holden's Dollar Magazine, IV (Dec. 1849) 765-6.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 167:]

40. See note 26 above,

41. “The Personality of Poe,” Independent, XXIX (Dec. 15, 1877), 1.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 169:]

42. The evidence of Griswold's rearranging can be seen in the Literati portrait of Briggs, which he made even nastier.

43. Reece, p. 263.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 170:]

44. Lowell to Briggs, August 21, 1845, Houghton Library. The full quote is, Poe “probably cannot conceive of anybody writing for anything but a newspaper reputation or posthumous fame .... Now, how can I expect to be understood, much more to have my poetry understood, by such-a man as Poe?”