Text: Burton R. Pollin, “The Role of Byron and Mary Shelley in ‘The Masque’,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 75-90 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 75:]

5

THE ROLE OF BYRON AND MARY SHELLEY IN POE'S “MASQUE”

ALMOST EVERY MASTERPIECE of literature reflects a variety of sources, recent and remote, major and minor, all absorbed and held by the creative spirit in a state of dynamic but subliminal flux, until the moment of conception. It may be argued that the pinpointing of this moment and of the particular stimulus involved, can never be definitively verified either through analyzing the finished work or tracing the sequence of the author's major and trivial personal affairs. I emphasize the multiplicity of the origins because I consider Poe's acknowledged source in Hugo's play, treated in chapter i, to be only one of the many which flowered into “The Masque of the Red Death.” Two more writers remain to be discussed in the present chapter. These two were friends who shared a common background and who, together, had a singular influence in establishing and linguistically sharpening Poe's underlying theme. Through my discussion of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, I mean to place Poe's tale in the stream of one of mankind's major preoccupations — the question of man's ultimate fate on earth, both as individual and as a species. I put aside, for the moment, the fairly easily settled matter of Poe's knowledge of the writings of the two authors.

Byron's poem “Darkness” can be properly presented as a widely known statement of the romantic theme “The Last Man,” which engaged the interest of many leading writers.(1) The Knickerbocker Magazine of New York, in October, 1833, [page 76:] shows awareness of this in its observation that Mary Shelley's The Last Man is a detailed, prose copy of the “terrible painting” of Byron's “Darkness.”(2) The poem was only one of several of Byron's contributions to the subject that Poe admired. It was a product of Byron's sojourn at Geneva during the summer of 1816, when he constantly associated with Shelley, Mary, and Claire. Its weird and nightmarish concept of the death of all living creatures on earth, when the sun goes out, reminds us of the grim stories that were told nightly at Villa Diodati.(3) Mary's Frankenstein was another product of those sessions. Byron's eighty-two lines of blank verse in “Darkness” present a succession of horrors: howling men who build their own pyres, vipers consumed for food, sailorless ships rotting on the motionless seas, and famine-stricken multitudes. It concludes:

The poem shocked Jeffrey and Scott and probably most of those who read it upon publication in 1816 as part of The Prisoner of Chinon and Other Poems.(4)

Although Byron's manuscript notes defensively assert: “The thoughts I claim as my own,” they have been traced by Eugen Ktibling to a work of some popularity at a period when many in Europe under the heel of Napoleon thought that the day of Armageddon had indeed come; this was the two-volume novel of 1805 by Jean-Baptiste Francois Cousin de Grainville, Le Dernier Homme; ou, Omegare et Syderie.(5) Obviously the subtitle owes its origin to Revelation 22:13: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” Revelation is rich in scenes of final destruction. The rather full account of the novel in Michaud's Biographie Universelle points out that it was published after the suicide of the author early in 1805 and was then issued in 1806 in English, with no indication of the original authorship.(6) The book subsequently received so much attention through a long reference to it by Sir Henry Croft in his 1810 edition of the odes of Horace [page 77:] (Book II, Ode 1) that it was republished by Charles Nodier in Paris in 1811. Its continuing popularity may be indicated by a poetic adaptation as late as 1831.(7) Byron may have read any of these editions of the novel or even the detailed analysis given in L’Esprit des journaux of May, 1811. At any rate, de Grainville tells about the universal sterility of all mankind and the extinguishing of the heavenly bodies through a vast conflagration. The absence of warmth and of growth becomes Byron's major theme. It is not impossible that Poe derived in part the concept of the dotage and death of the earth from Byron. He used that idea in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” in December, 1839, and was to mention it at the end of “The Power of Words” in June, 1845. An intervening work, undoubtedly familiar to Poe, was a Blackwood's story of March, 1826, “The Last Man,” which was followed by a published controversy in the January, 1827 issue over the claim of Thomas Campbell as opposed to Byron to be the “originator” of the idea. Poe, of course, had studied Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine closely for his tale “How to Write a Blackwood Article.”(8)

Quite apart from the concept of the extinction of all life, which prevails in “The Masque of the Red Death” (since the plague is presented as universally inescapable), there is a similarity of phrasing in the two works of Poe and Byron. The Red Death, after being accosted by Prospero at the masquerade, afflicts and fells every one of the thousand courtiers. I shall have so many reasons to allude to this famous last paragraph that it should be cited in its entirety:

The last sentence, it seems to me, has links with Byron's “Darkness had no need / Of aid from them — She was the universe.” Byron, in turn, may have borrowed it from a familiar source which has been assumed to be Poe's original — Pope's conclusion to the Dunciad:

Certainly Poe shows an awareness of Pope's celebrated poem, but of his eight allusions to the Dunciad only one is to specific lines, and these are drawn from Book I, “at random,” Poe tells us; the others refer merely to the title as a standard of satirical style.(11) It is Byron with whom Poe shows a thorough familiarity, both in his varied references and in the many echoes from diverse works.(12) Moreover, the context of the conclusion of the Dunciad is scarcely relevant to the theme of Poe's “Masque of the Red Death,” while Byron's “Darkness” has much in common with the tale.

A definite influence from Byron appears in Poe's final paragraph in the words, “and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.” The end of Byron's Lara gives us:

Poe would find significance himself in the coincidental use of posture and fall in Byron's poem for the “dying” man, both of which he applies to the stricken stage figures of Prospero's court.(14) Patrick Quinn rightly points out the theatrical effect of the story: “The reader ... understands that the drama is not being played out on any realistic stage:(15) Byron again is not totally lacking in responsibility for this, since he starts “Darkness,” [page 79:] originally entitled “A Dream,” with “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.” Poe, midway in his tale, while discussing the “phantasms” which the courtiers have become through their grotesque costumes, says: “There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. ... To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these — the dreams — writhed in and about. ... The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. ... And now again the music swells, and the dreams live” (4.254). It is the “factual dream” quality of both pieces, determined throughout by the strange settings and the specific details, which produces the horrified tension of our response.

In other well-known works Byron had also given the effect of utter desolation with the extinction of virtually all human life, and these too may have provided Poe with a general orientation toward the theme of “The Last Man,” if not with specific ideas. For example, Heaven and Earth: A Mystery, founded on Genesis, deals with the flood and the elimination of almost all life. One passage in the soliloquy of Japhet, when he contemplates the death of all mankind except for Noah's family, gives us the feeling of universal annihilation, especially with its rhetorical repetition of “no more”: “Oh, men — my fellow-beings! Who / Shall weep above your universal grave, / Save I. ... No more to have the morning sun break forth. ... No more to have / Day's broad orb drop behind its head at even. ... / No more to be the beacon of the world, / ... And can those words ‘no more’ / Be meant for thee, for all things, save for us ... ” (I, iii). This was possibly also a suggestion for Poe of several of his uses of “no more” or variations thereof in his poetry, as in the “Sonnet to Zante.”(16) Heaven and Earth derives from a later period in Byron's career, having been written at Ravenna in October, 1821. Mary Shelley saw it in the second number of Hunt's The Liberal, as she notes in her letters.(17) Since she and Shelley shared most of their reading, its presence on Shelley's list for December 14, 1821, also indicates her familiarity with it.(18) [page 80:]

After the death of Shelley on July 8, 1822, followed by that of Byron on April 19, 1824, Mary Shelley felt peculiarly alone, since she had been tied emotionally to both poets. Soon after hearing of the second loss she wrote in her journal: “The last man! yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feeling, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”(19) In 1826, her third novel, The Last Man, conceived after Shelley's death and given much impetus by Byron's death, rather closely represents her husband as Adrian and Byron as Raymond and incorporates Byron's adventures in Greece into the narrative. Her journal exclamation suggests that she derived elements from de Grainville's book and also from “Darkness,” which she knew well, having been present during its gestation.(20) With these she combined the idea of widespread death by plague, which came to her from a variety of sources, as she admits in her novel — chiefly the works of Boccaccio, Charles Brockden Brown, and Defoe.(21) She does not mention de Grainville's The Last Man, or Omegarius and Syderia either by main title or subtitle, but two facts make me think that it influenced her as well as Byron. Chapter viii of the second volume of her novel ends with this sentence: “There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes — life — life — the continuation of our animal mechanism — was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race” (p. 212). Ome-garius, the name of de Grainville's hero, is undoubtedly from the “Alpha and Omega” passage in Revelation, as I have indicated. Secondly, Mary Shelley was living with Godwin during much of the time that she was working on The Last Man and continued to see him frequently when she moved to another address in London. Godwin records in his journal for January, 1826, that he is reading the two volumes of Omegarius. it is likely that this was connected with the imminent publication of his daughter's nove1.(22) Perhaps Godwin wished to check on the new novel's closeness to this source, in expectation of the reviews that would soon be published. He was correct, for one [page 81:] article at least wondered why one Last Man was not sufficient.(23) Part of her motivation, of course, was the growing interest in the spread of plague from the Orient. Year by year Asiatic cholera had been moving westward from Bengal, having recently ravaged Asia Minor; hence, the inclusion of episodes at Istanbul and then at Athens. In point of fact, the plague reached England only in 1831 and the next year one of its victims was Mary's half-brother, William Godwin, Jr., a promising novelist and journalist. Poe saw its incursion into Baltimore in 1831.

I suggest that the whole theme of her novel, the death by plague of all in the world save the narrator, could easily have directed Poe's mind to the subject. In addition, the work furnished Poe with specific details and even phrases, I think. In “The Masque of the Red Death” Prospero removes one thousand of his courtiers to a “castellated abbey” where they are shut inside to revel and forget the fearful epidemic. Finally after their half year of seclusion, the masquerade ball is given in the suite of seven differently colored rooms. The Red Death enters in a spectral or corpselike costume, his mask sprinkled with blood, like the face of a plague victim; Poe here is changing the characterizing buboes or sores of the bubonic plague (first called Black Death in English only in 1823) to a horrifying new symptom, bleeding at the pores.(24) The Red Death strikes the accosting Prince with the plague, and the rest of the company succumb almost at once. The details of the plot of The Last Man need not be given. The first part is a tangle of relationships involving the throne of England in the twenty-first century; it is being abdicated by Adrian, or Shelley, in his democratic fervor. The major episodes involving Lionel Verney, married to Idris, Adrian's sister, are set chiefly in the castle at Windsor and nearby Marlow, prominent in Shelley biography. The fifteen hundred English survivors of the plague, in 2096, decide to seek refuge in Switzerland, which, they discover, has also been losing its population, and finally the small remaining group travels to Italy. Both locales give Mary a [page 82:] chance to describe in vivid detail memorable scenes from her life with Shelley. At last, Adrian and his niece die by drowning (p. 321), just as Shelley had died, leaving Lionel Verney alone to tell his story.(25)

Certain resemblances are evident, even from this short summary: the annihilation of all within the purview of the story by plague, except for the narrator; the locale of Italy at the end of the story, and the use of a castle as an ineffective refuge. Other resemblances are the importance of a masquerade at one point in the story; the intrusion of a black-cloaked figure representing Death, and at least two striking verbal similarities, which I shall give later. The masquerade enters into chapter vi of the first volume, when the plague has attacked England. Near Windsor a “mock fair” is being held. “The park was speckled by tents, whose flaunting colours and gaudy flags, waving in the sunshine, added to the gaiety of the scene” (p. 173). As Verney continues reflecting, “The gay dance vanished, the green sward was strewn with corpses, the blue air above became fetid with deathly exhalations” (p. 174). It was this sort of charnel atmosphere interspersed throughout the book that disgusted the reviewers — if not the public, since The Last Man reached a second printing in 1826. The same masquerade episode yields several other details for comparison. Verney says: “The lightness of heart which had dressed them in masquerade habits, had decorated their tents and assembled them in fantastic groups, appeared a sin against, and a provocative to, the awful destiny that had laid its palsying hand upon hope and life” (p. 176). Change the “tents” to “rooms” and this might be a motto for Poe's tale. The sudden death brought by the plague in both Poe's and Mary Shelley's work is unique, for other authors, such as Defoe, give at least a few hours for the career of the disease from its symptoms to its termination.(26) This is made clear in the same episode in her book: the Lord Protector Ryland becomes terror stricken, for “One of his servants, while waiting on him, had suddenly fallen down dead. The physician declared that he died of the plague” (p. 176). [page 83:] Similarly, Mary emphasizes that throughout the world only Verney recovers from it, while Poe has Prospero and his thousand courtiers succumb almost instantaneously.(27)

Shortly after the “masque” scene just mentioned, Mary repeats this contrast, obviously derived from Boccaccio,(28) in describing the shallow merrymakers in London; they tried “to banish thought and opiate despair ... assemblies of mourners in the guise of revellers” (pp. 200-201).(29) Reminding us of the courtiers in their costume and the Red Death in his, she has a maniac warn them: “Apparel yourself in the court-dress of death. Pestilence will usher you to his presence” (p. 190). The inevitability of its coming to all, indicated ironically in Poe's choice of name for Prospero, the absolute monarch, is reflected also in Mary's more obvious homily: “The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist” (p. 212). Likewise, “To chambers of painted state farewell — To midnight revelry, and the panting emulation of beauty, to costly dress and birth-day shew, to titles and the gilded coronet, farewell” (p. 233)! (This last is very much, in phrasing and sentiment like Calderon, whom Mrs. Shelley cites twice, pp. 136 and 195.) “Death sat at the tables of the great ... seized the dastard who fled, quelled the brave man who resisted” (p. 198) and “Nature ... invited us to join the gay masque” (p. 198). The idea of investing death with spectral garb is also used, derived, I assume, from standard representations of the dance of death, dating from the Middle Ages.(30) On the road toward Geneva, the company is “haunted for several days by an apparition, to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre.” They see it only at evening when all believe it to be a “token of inevitable death.” Eventually the spectre turns out to be a lonely French nobleman, somewhat shyly following them until he dies of the plague at the moment of his unmasking (p. 299).

Two similarities of phrasing establish more circumstantially the probability of Poe's having read Mary Shelley's work. One phrase occurs in Mary Shelley's description of the dance: “The [page 84:] band played the wild eastern air of Weber introduced in Abon Hassan” (p. 173). Poe speaks repeatedly of the dance in the “Masque of the Red Death” as being the waltz. This same importation from the Continent produced Byron's “The Waltz, an Apostrophic Hymn” (1812), which condemns the “voluptuous” dance.(31) One must remember that in the costumes of Poe's courtiers there was “much of the wanton.” The orchestra plays “wild music” (4.254), and as “the music swells,” the “dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever.” Spurred on by this music “the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited.” Only the “spectral image” moves among the waltzers “with a slow and solemn movement” as if to remind them of his restraining purpose.

The “wild music” of the waltz also forms a curious and rather intricately wrought link with both Mary Shelley's Last Man and Poe's “last man” story of “The Fall of the House of Usher” of 1839. In this earlier tale the narrator is remembering his last days with the demented Roderick Usher. “I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber” (3.282-283). A little later we are told that he “confined himself upon the guitar,” for which he wrote both the words and the notes of “wild fantasias” or “rhapsodies,” as illustrated by “The Haunted Palace” (actually, added to the story after the first printing).(32) However strange the waltz would sound on a guitar, the adjective “wild” is interesting in comparison with Mary Shelley's “wild eastern air of Weber introduced in Abon Hassan” (p. 173), in a scene of revelry in the Windsor Castle park, just when news of the advent of the plague in London is to be announced. She does not specify that the dance was a waltz. Mary Shelley must have attended a performance of Abon Hassan in 1825; this was the name given in England to Weber's Abu Hassan, a two-act play with music, derived by his librettist, Franz Carl Hiemer, from a story in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The growing popularity of Weber's music and his widely heralded arrival in London for the first performance [page 85:] of Oberon may have led to two separate productions of Abon Hassan: a farce by William Dimond and a Drury Lane version by Thomas S. Cooke, both using Weber's score.(33) Since Weber tries to provide an exotic atmosphere in a few arias and in an overture marked presto, Mary's reference to a “wild eastern air” is not inappropriate at the time.

This reference in The Last Man or Poe's possibly direct knowledge of Abu (or Abon) Hassan may have been merged in Poe's retentive memory with the title of another work attributed to Weber. It was a popular piece, originally for the pianoforte, called “Weber's Last Waltz.” In Poe scholarship, Professor Mabbott appears to be the first to observe that it was not really Weber's at all; Kenneth Graham and others mention its being a composition by Karl Reissiger.(34) Reissiger, who had succeeded Von Weber as conductor of the Dresden opera, wrote many popular chamber music compositions. His Danses Brillantes pour le pianoforte, op. 26 (1824), includes the so-called “Last Waltz.”(35) As with so many of Poe's references, no simple explanation will suffice. The piece in reality was Reissiger's “Weber's Last Thought” (Gedanke), either mistranslated or misapplied. Percy Scholes supplies the interesting information that Weber had heard Reissiger play it in February, 1826, just before Weber left for London, bearing a donated copy of the piece. A few months later, after Weber's death, it was found among his effects and published or republished in England with the erroneous title of “Weber's Last Waltz” and was attributed to Weber himself. Years later, when Johann Peter Pixis sent Reissiger his own “Fantasia” on the theme ascribed to Weber, the composer discovered the error, now too widespread in English-speaking lands to be corrected.(36) Not only was the piece frequently played but many adaptations and variations on the theme were composed. I have found three in two major music libraries of New York City: a “Fantaisie” for piano and clarinet by Friedrich Berr, piano “Variations Bril-lantes” by Henri Herz, and a four-hand duet by Henry Karr; all are ascribed to “Weber's Last Waltz.” Roderick Usher's [page 86:] “perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber,” the “fervid facility” of his “impromptus” (3.283), and his “wild fantasias” induct him into the large company of musical enthusiasts who were varying Reissiger's air.

For the twentieth-century listener, however, there is one drawback to the designation of “wild” — the nature of the music itself, which is happily available in a well-known collection called Masterpieces of Piano Music.(37) It is difficult to imagine anything more utterly pedestrian, more tame, more standard in its sequence of notes than this salon theme, devised by a composer of the early nineteenth century who completely reflected his period. It may be that Poe, impressed by the fame of the piece in its original form or in one of the sets of variations, used the title for a prestigious effect without listening to it for validation of his adjective “wild.” Perhaps Mary Shelley's reference to the “wild eastern air of Weber” contributed a theme to Roderick Usher's wild playing on the guitar.

Whatever the case, I feel that Mary Shelley's The Last Man may have entered into the earlier tale and into “The Masque of the Red Death.” It is noteworthy that immediately after the dance sequence in The Last Man, Ryland, formerly an ambassador to the United States, declares that “all the world has the plague!” Adrian responds, “Then to avoid it, we must quit the world” (p. 175). A bit further in the chapter Ryland reproves him: “It is well, shut up in your castle, out of danger, to boast yourself out of fear.” Their conversation is “weighed with intolerable heaviness from the knowledge that the earth's desolator had at last, even as an arch-fiend, lightly over-leaped the boundaries our precautions raised, and at once enthroned himself in the full and beating heart of our country” (p. 177). These details connected with the music at the opening of the chapter are good indications of a link between the novel and the tale.

There is another phrase used by Poe which is strongly reminiscent of a passage in Mary Shelley's book. In describing the reaction of different types of men to the pestilence, she says: [page 87:] “Death, which had in our younger days walked the earth like ‘a thief that comes in the night,’ now, rising from his subterranean vault, girt with power, with dark banner floating, came a conquerer. ... They endeavoured to exchange terror for heedlessness, and plunged into licentiousness, to avoid the agonizing throes of worst apprehension” (pp. 196-197). The unidentified phrase, placed in quotation marks by her, is derived from Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: “How comes He then like a Theefe in the night, when He gives an item of His coming?” (Pt. I, sec. 46). This is found soon after Browne's discussion of the ending of the world. “I believe the World grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor shall ever perish upon the ruines of its own Principles. As the work of Creation was above nature, so is its adversary, annihilation; without which the World hath not its end, but its mutation. But no one knows the secret of the date.”(38) Sir Thomas is taking his phrase from 1 Thessalonians 5:2: “The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” and possibly also from Revelation 16:15: “Behold, I come as a thief.” Mary had cited Sir Thomas Browne by name only a few pages earlier: “It is too late to be ambitious. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some others have done in their persons: one face of Janus holds no proportion to the other” (p. 189). This is from his Hydriotaphia (chap. v, para. 4), another storehouse of Browne's macabre ideas. We know that Shelley had read the Religio Medici aloud to her on March 14, 1815, according to an entry in her journal.(39) Shelley's admiration for Sir Thomas Browne, expressed in his letters, must have affected her deeply.(40)

It is true but unlikely that Poe may have picked up the phrase from his own reading of the Bible or of Sir Thomas and may have made the same adaptation by supplying “death” as the subject. He refers to Sir Thomas at least twice, but neither context is from the Religio Medici. In August, 1841, he cited the familiar reference to the Sirens from Hydriotaphia.(41) Even more generalized is his “Marginalia” note of November, 1844 (Harrison, 16.2) describing how he will “talk” in [page 88:] the “Marginalia” — “freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonne-ment — without conceit — much after the fashion of Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne.” As for his biblical references, Killis Campbell disbelieves the figure of sixty passages from that source attributed to him by William M. Forrest and doubts any intimate knowledge on the part of Poe. Most of the passages, Campbell reasonably asserts, are stereotyped expressions; therefore, the transformation of one Bible passage in the same way as Mary Shelley's seems unlikely.(42) Except for “dark banner floating” every detail in her context corresponds to those in Poe's.

At this point one may ask whether it is probable that Poe had read and to some degree remembered Mary Shelley's novel. I believe that several factors favor this premise. The book had been issued twice during 1826 by the well-known London publisher, Henry Colburn and also in Paris by Galignani. After the cholera epidemic in America, beginning in Baltimore in 1831 and attacking New York in 1832,(43) a great demand for a novel about plague must have stirred the important Philadelphia publisher, Carey, Lea, and Blanchard to pirate it in a two-volume edition in 1833. Poe was well acquainted with the works and the prestige of this company, to whom he had offered Al Aaraaf in May, 1829, when it was called Carey, Lea and Carey.(44) In 1834, the year after the Philadelphia publication of The Last Man, he offered his “Tales of the Folio Club” to the firm, which declined it. Carey, at least, did accept “Ms. Found in a Bottle” for the first issue of the annual The Gift for 1836 (published in 1835), and “William Wilson” was in The Gift for 1840 (1839).(45) Clearly Poe was fully aware of the books which bore the imprint of this firm in its transformations during the 1830's.

Secondly, one might ask whether the name of Mrs. Shelley would mean anything to him, aside from his known and often professed admiration for the works of Shelley. During his Philadelphia period, particularly, Poe had reason to become aware of Mrs. Shelley as a writer. In 1838-39 Mary Shelley [page 89:] and a group of collaborators published in London a book entitled Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France. This was reprinted or, rather, pirated by Lea and Blanchard in Philadelphia in 1840 as Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers and was reviewed by Poe in Graham's Magazine in January, 1841. The item has not been collected by Harrison but is so typical of Poe's method of brief reviewing and of his authoritative style as to warrant fairly certain attribution. The last sentence speaks of Mrs. Shelley's reputation with the implication, I believe, that readers as well as the reviewer are familiar with her writings. I shall furnish the whole of this short item, not easy of access:

In addition to the writers mentioned, the book contained articles on Condorcet, Mirabeau, Mme. Roland, and Mme. de Stael; in the last account, undeniably by Mary, the reader finds information about Byron's visit in 1816 when they were all together on the shores of Lac Leman, where “Darkness” was written.(47)

Another compilation was prepared by Mrs. Shelley during [page 90:] this period, in collaboration with Sir David Brewster, James Montgomery, and others; it was called Lives of Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy and was similarly pirated by Lea and Blanchard in 1841. This too was reviewed by Poe in Graham's Magazine, not long before he began planning and writing “The Masque of the Red Death.” Perhaps the Boccaccio article suggested the Italian mise-en-scene to the tale. This brief review, also uncollected by Harrison, will be given in tato and literatim:

And finally — Poe's deep awareness at that time of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is attested through the published memories of one of the Smith family. Poe was accustomed to visit the matriarchal Mrs. William Moore Smith, whose fine house was at the falls of the Schuylkill River. “His favorite seat was in the doorway of the family mausoleum ... where he read such books as Lewis's ‘Tales of Terror,’ Mary Wolstonecraft's [sic] ‘Frankenstein,’ and ‘Five Nights at Saint Albans.’ ”(49) The account is entirely credible. One might justifiably conjecture that Poe sought out and read another of her macabre novels, if he had not indeed seen it earlier, not long before he wrote “The Masque of the Red Death.” Certainly, there were many other influences working to produce this small, colorful tapestry of a story, but Byron and his admirer Mary Shelley contributed their threads to its total fabric.