Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe and the ‘Magic Tale’ of Ellen Wareham,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 128-143 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 128:]

8

POE AND THE “MAGIC TALE” OF ELLEN WAREHAM

EARLY IN 1835 Poe became a “magazinist,” as he proudly termed himself, pouring out almost one hundred reviews for the Southern Literary Messenger in less than two years. This was the start of his career in criticism, the aspect of literature for which he was best known in his own lifetime.(1) During the half century after his death his reputation as writer of tales and poems superseded the fame, or rather notoriety, derived from his keen and often blunt reviews of the second-rate literature that came to his desk.(2) We can now largely agree with Edmund Wilson: “Perhaps more than any other writer, French or English, of the first half of the century, he had thought seriously and written clearly about the methods and aims of literature. He had formulated a critical theory, and he had supplied brilliant specimens of its practice.”(3) Poe's proclivities and experience also led him to rank the short story and the short poem above the long narrative in prose and the epic in poetry. His stress upon “unity of effect” made the aesthetic or psychological response preeminent over the moral.

Even his early criticism indicates his firm advocacy of the superior merits of the short literary work of a non-didactic tendency. Poe faced a dilemma, of course, since the majority of the books sent him for reviewing were novels, which would have to be damned out of hand on the basis of this critical touchstone. In 1836, then, he states his position of compromise. Since I intend later to trace Poe's views of one novel throughout his entire career, as a gauge of his taste in this genre, I must first examine this basic statement: [page 129:]

Incorporated into his review of Dickens's Watkins Tottle, this comment implies the secondary quality of the novelist's genius and of the novel as an art form. Yet, as critic, Poe must still formulate for himself standards for judging those “detached passages” or episodes and whatever of “general design” does exist in the whole work. In effect, most commentators on Poe's writings have been so concerned with his tenets of unity and antimoralism that they have neglected to look for his other standards for determining merit in fiction. I have already indicated that his praise of Godwin was deeply rooted in an admiration for the power to “construct” an effective plot, but this is really another way of saying that the unification of the various elements in the novel brings it closer to the short story as a guarantee of its artistic success. But this still begs the question of evaluating the “detached passages” and the delayed effect of a long narrative. Perhaps a very brief survey of Poe's criticism of novels will reveal empirically a few of his implied standards.

In his August, 1836 review of Ingraham's novel, Lafitte: The Pirate of the Gulf, Poe asserts that we should not judge an historical novel only by reference to its “historical truth,” praises its “vigor” and some of the “admirably colored” descriptive pieces, and offers the generalization that “the most simple, is the best method of narration” (Harrison, 9.106-116). In the same issue of the Messenger he objects to a “glaring improbability” in a “rencontre” as the worst feature in James S. French's novel Elkswatawa and praises it for its well-drawn [page 130:] characters (9.118-122). The next issue of the magazine carries Poe's review of Simms's novel about metempsychosis, Sheppard Lee, the “jocular” manner of which he finds unsuitable. The book fails, Poe says, because of the awkward handling of the effect of six reincarnations upon the same almost “unchanging” character (9.137-138). In the same month, Poe reviewed Mrs. Lydia Child's historical romance, Philothea, the chief merit of which is to reveal “antique manners, costume, habits, and modes of thought.” Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, however, does more, by “commingling” with the “exciting” destruction of the city “human passions wildly affected thereby” (9.153-154; see also, 8.222). In January, 1837, Poe sounds several of the same notes in his evaluation of George Balcombe by Beverley Tucker: “the best American novel” with “invention, vigor, almost audacity of thought-great variety of ... intrigue, and exceeding ingenuity and finish in the adaptation of its component parts” (9.264-265).

In his middle period of criticism, reviewing another novel by Simms, The Damsel of Darien (1839), Poe objects to the “grossness of thought” and the exaggeration of expression (10.53). Many of his previous themes are stressed in his long review of Bulwer's Night and Morning. “The interest of plot ... is by no means a popular interest.” Moreover, “a good tale may be written without it,” such as Gil Blas, Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. Length by itself does not entitle a work to respect; only “the unity or totality of effect” is “worth the attention of the critic.” In reading the fashionable “wire-drawn romances ... the pleasure we derive (if any) is a composite one, and made up of the respective sums of the various pleasurable sentiments experienced ... ” (10.122). In the same review, Poe pointedly notes a marked distinction between narrative value and dramatic value; for example, drama requires frequent shifts in scene and a marshalling of events in terms of time because of the absence of a suitable “commenting power.” In his comments of 1841 on The Old Curiosity Shop, Poe objects to the “ultra-accident” of the relationship [page 131:] between Kit's master and the old church bachelor as well as to the painfulness of Nell's death, but he praises the “originality” of the “admirably drawn characters” (10.151-152). Concerning Ainsworth's Guy Fawkes, also in 1841, he objects to the poor motivation of the plot and the use of “accidental or irrelevant circumstances” which negate the implied plan of the whole book. His insistence upon the “autorial comment,” previously seen in his comments on Godwin (chapter vii), again leads him to object to the “merely narrated” escapes in another of Ainsworth's novels, Jack Sheppard.

During the year 1842, in his review of Barnaby Budge, as we have seen, he praises Notre Dame de Paris for showing how to gain “force” through respect for the “unity of place,” and he disparages Dickens's attempt to maintain interest through an appeal to “curiosity” (11.58). His first notice of Twice-Told Tales again asserts the superiority of the tale over the novel and the long poem and objects to three elements in much of the contemporary fiction: “Rosa-Matilda effusions” or sentimentality, “blue-blazing melodramaticisms,” and an attempt to copy “low life.”(5) His promised follow-up review of Hawthorne's work has become the locus classicus for the idea of the merit in the poem or tale that can be read at one sitting; again the novel is relegated to an inferior category (11.106-108). In his 1843 criticism of Cooper's Wyandotte, Poe objects to the lack of “plot” or design in this episodic novel but admits that “the absence of plot can never be critically regarded as a defect” in this genre (11.209-210). He also objects to the “revolting and supererogatory” killing of three characters and approves the “collateral interest” given by the Revolutionary War setting as well as the “skill and truth” used in depicting the love of two characters (11.212).

The last five years of Poe's life provide critiques not markedly different in their views on the novel. In 1845, for example, in evaluating The Wigwam and the Cabin by Simms, Poe appears more partial to the Southern novelist because he is supreme in “vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting [page 132:] interest, and in the artistical management of his themes,” especially in Martin Faber.(6) In the next year, 1846, “The Philosophy of Composition” offers the famous analysis of the writing of “The Raven”; again Poe deprecates the long literary work but exempts “certain classes of prose composition, such as ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ (demanding no unity)” from the single-sitting limitation (14.196). During his last year, in one of the “Marginalia” entries of May, 1849, Poe specifically makes a rare distinction between the novel and the tale: “In the tale proper there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident — mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel. Defective plot, in this latter, may escape observation, but in the tale, never” (16.171). It is superfluous to stress that Poe's manifest incapacity to develop character is the chief basis for this confident dictum; it also implies that Poe was now considering the motivation and revelation of character as equivalent to “mere construction,” at least in the novel.

These instances show that Poe paid his respects to other criteria than the “unity of effect” and the deliberate artistry needed in “constructing” a narrative. The virtues of the novel also included vigor and force, truth in fiction depicting the past, simple and straightforward narrative but always with the observational comment of a perceptive and broadly cultured author, delicacy in the language used by the characters and purity of style in that used by the author, and reticence in presenting the passions, which must, however, be described accurately. There was little in this list to which a critic of the eighteenth century could take exception.

I now propose to examine Poe's implicit application of these criteria to a novel mentioned often by him and yet having the charm for all of us today of being totally unfamiliar. No commentator on Poe has even identified by title the larger work which contains the novel. Eventually we shall find it necessary to seek the causes for Poe's inordinate partiality to a popular work of the time which has now justly disappeared from consideration, [page 133:] even in the histories of literature. In Poe's early criticism one finds three references to a “tale” or novel entitled Ellen Wareham, edited by Lady Dacre; Poe published a fourth and a fifth statement about the same work in 1844, a sixth in 1845, and a seventh during the last year of his life. All these comments, uniformly laudatory, prepare one for a masterpiece of the order of Vanity Fair or Sense and Sensibility.

His first statement consists of a brief announcement of a second collection of “tales,” which Lady Dacre is alleged to have edited rather than written, according to Poe. It occurs among the “Critical Notices and Literary Intelligence” of the August, 1835 Southern Literary Messenger (SLM, 1.715-716).(7) Since it is uncollected by Harrison, I shall give the comment in toto:

The extravagance of this praise of her earlier work (of 1833) may be gauged by the fact that in the December, 1835 issue of the Messenger (SLM, 2.43) Poe terms the Bride of Lam-mermuir “that most pure, perfect, and radiant gem of fictitious literature.”

It is likely that his August notice of the Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry was based simply upon an advertisement of the English edition in one of the monthlies that Poe was then digesting for the Southern Literary Messenger, for in the December, 1835 issue of the magazine he includes a full review of the New York reprint of the three-volume work, which begins: “We had been looking with much impatience [page 134:] for the republication of these volumes, and henceforward we shall look with still greater anxiety for any thing announced as under the editorial supervision of Lady Dacre.”(8) It must be explained that Recollections of a Chaperon had also been published as “edited” by Lady Dacre with no authorship indicated. In reality, both collections were by her daughter, Mrs. Ara-bella Jane Sullivan, but Lady Dacre's name carried much more weight in the social and literary world. She had been born Barbarina Ogle, the daughter of Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle: he was an eccentric who early taught her the Italian which she was to use for her famous translations. After the death of Barbarina's first husband, Valentine Henry Wilmot, wealthy lawyer and secretary to Lord Chancellor Camden, she married Thomas Brand, Baron Dacre, in 1819. Readers of Byron biography know him as one of the referees in the settlement of Lady Noel's estate, which greatly enriched Byron. A few years later Lady Dacre was separated from her husband and devoted herself to her art work, her writing, and the education of her daughter, Arabella Jane Wilmot. Arabella, who was married to the handsome and genteel Frederick Sullivan, produced these two sets of tales, edited by her mother, Lady Dacre.(9)

The preface to the American edition of Recollections of a Chaperon seems to have given Poe the impression that Lady Dacre wrote them, for the rest of the first paragraph of his December, 1835 review can allude only to the earlier set of volumes (1833); nothing in the preface to the Tales of the Peerage supports Poe's inference:

His reading of the preface must have been hasty, for the Quarterly Review notice of the book repeatedly alludes to Mrs. [page 135:] Sullivan as the author and asserts that Lady Dacre's “editorship has been confined to a preface.”(11) We know from the family papers that Mrs. Sullivan had relied upon the Quarterly to resolve the mystery of authorship.(12) I cannot check the preface to the American edition of Recollections, for the book seems to be unprocurable.(13) The British Museum copies of the 1833 first edition and the 1848 and 1853 reprints contain a pseudo-preface, which is part of the fictitious text and purports to be written by the chaperon herself — a widow with seven daughters. There is no mention of Lady Dacre as the author.

In reality, none of Lady Dacre's writings consisted of prose fiction. She was the acknowledged author of translations of Petrarch's poems (1815, 1818, 1819, and 1836), which had received high praise and had been reprinted, in part, by Ugo Foscolo in his Essays on Petrarch (1823), dedicated to Lady Dacre. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine thought hers the best translation of Petrarch in its review of Foscolo's book.(14) In her two-volume Dramas, Translations and Occasional Poems (1821) she reprinted four of her own plays, including Ina, which was produced in the Drury Lane Theatre on April 22, 1815. This had the distinction of an epilogue by Thomas Moore, on which he had lavished some wit and attention; the failure of the April 22 performance is humorously told by Byron in a letter to Moore, of the next day. This drama, the only work (save for a play for children) which Lady Dacre did not publish privately, went into three editions in 1815. Byron speaks of it as having “good language but no power.”(15)

There is little evidence of this “good language” or of any merit at all in Arabella Jane's fiction. Her mother's aptness of diction in Ina and in her many letters in A Family Chronicle is completely missing. Poe would disagree sharply with my view. Concerning Winifred, Countess of Nithsdale, one of the Tales of the Peerage, he writes: “A thrilling and spiritual story, rich with imagination, pathos, and passion,” every part of which contributes to “the unity of effect” achieved by the “fair authoress.” He asserts: “There can be no doubt that Lady [page 136:] Dacre is a writer of infinite genius, possessing great felicity of expression, a happy talent for working up a story. ... ” His last and climactic paean here concerns Arabella's earlier work:

The modern reader's appetite for this work is whetted even further by his meeting it five more times in widely spaced Poe criticisms. In the review of Bulwer Lytton's Rienzi, in the February, 1836 Messenger, he is told that “Lady Dacre has written Ellen Wareham, a more forcible tale of Passion” than Bulwer's (SLM, 2.197; Harrison, 8.223). After many years, Poe took up the critical touchstone of this novel again, both at the beginning and end of 1844. In the January issue of Graham's Magazine (24.46) is a review of Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast’ (1843) — an article which has not been collected by Harrison, although unmistakably Poe's. Here Poe explains the reason for his persistent attribution of the Recollections to its “editor,” showing an extremely personal motivation in the matter. Since the review has not been reprinted, it will be necessary to give a rather long excerpt:

Professor Mabbott early had concluded that this review was Poe's on the basis of the reference to Pym, while Professor Hull assigned the entry to Poe largely because of its reference to Recollections of a Chaperon.(16) Clearly it was the manner in which Poe had presented The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to the public — “edited” by Poe, the real author — that led him to the assumption about Lady Dacre. Poe, by the way, may have been correct about Ned Myers, sometimes included in the canon of Cooper's works. On the other hand, it is not printed in the collected works of Cooper and seems to cause some disagreement among Cooper scholars.(17) One would judge that Poe had some justification for his views about Cooper's use of details; as he says later in the review, the marine aspects of the work were convincingly close to those in The Pilot.(18)

At the end of 1844, in the Democratic Review of December, Poe makes a fifth allusion to Ellen Wareham in his notice of Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Ellen Middleton. The fact that this novel too had a heroine called Ellen — Poe's favorite name — and a titled author may have triggered Poe's comparison: “Who is Lady Georgiana Fullerton? Who is that Countess of Dacre, who edited ‘Ellen Wareham,’ — the most passionate of fictions — approached in some particulars of passion, by this?” [page 138:] (Harrison, 16.34). Lady Dacre, one might add, never called herself by that very unusual, almost unEnglish title of “countess.” (The DNB styles her “baroness.”) It is clear that the passionate nature of the plot and possibly of the heroine was somehow associated in Poe's mind with the “blue blood” of each of the authors.

The two ladies and Bulwer Lytton, as a writer, are still associated in Poe's mind for his sixth reference, a few months later. In his magazine, the Broadway Journal of February 8, 1845, Poe is reviewing the New York edition of Bulwer's Poems, edited by Macleod. The article is not printed in the text of Harrison's edition, although it is correctly listed in his bibliography of Poe's writings (Harrison, 16.372). Poe writes: “As a novelist then, Bulwer is far more than respectable — although he has produced few novels equal and none superior to ... three or four of Godwin's, to the ‘Ellen Wareham’ of Mrs. Sullivan, or to the ‘Ellen Middleton’ of Lady Georgiana Fullerton.”(19) Apparently he had discovered finally that Lady Dacre is not the author of Ellen Wareham, but his admiration is undiluted. He still associates the novel with Ellen Middleton as similar in genre and quality.

The link between Bulwer and the novel must have lingered in Poe's memory throughout the next four years, for in May, 1849, the “Marginalia” of the Messenger included a seventh comment: “As a novelist, then, Bulwer is far more than respectable; although generally inferior to Scott, Godwin, D’Israeli, Miss Burney, Sue, Dumas, Dickens, the author of ‘Ellen Wareham,’ the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ and several others.” Poe is now disinclined to impute the book either to Lady Dacre or to her daughter, Mrs. Sullivan, but he compensates for depriving the author of her original nobility by placing her among even more eminent authors than in 1835-36. This is, by the way, Poe's only reference to Charlotte Bronte and Fanny Burney.

No library catalogue or bibliography will produce the novel, Ellen Wareham, as such, for the interested reader, since it is [page 139:] the last of the five stories in Mrs. Sullivan's Recollections of a Chaperon and occupies the third volume by itself in the first English and American editions. The titles of the other stories or novelettes have some significance for evaluative purposes: The Single Woman of a Certain Age; Milly and Lucy; Warren, or the Piping Times of Peace; and An Old Tale, and Often Told. His comments on both of Mrs. Sullivan's collections of tales, but especially on Ellen Wareham, are obviously part of what Harrison calls “this mass of criticism ... lavished on volumes that have succumbed into oblivion” (8. ix). I intend briefly to pluck the book out of that merciful oblivion in order to ask what could have led Poe to his commendation. Despite the fact that the Recollections of a Chaperon went into two editions after the 1833 publication (both the 1849 and 1853 reprints are listed as No. 114 of Bentley's “Standard Novels”), it is a very scarce work in libraries today.(20)

First, however, I must devote a few words to a remarkable coincidence: William Evans Burton — the owner of the Gentleman's Magazine of Philadelphia, which Poe joined as editor in May, 1830 — had adapted Ellen Wareham for the London stage in 1833. In its first edition it bore the subtitle “A Domestic Drama in Three Acts,” and upon being reprinted in 1858 it was called Ellen Wareham, the Wife of Two Husbands.(21) Indeed, Billy Burton, as he was jovially known both as actor and magazine journalist, had even taken the role of Dick in the play at some time in his long stage career. It was being played in the London theaters, back in May, 1833 — in fact, in five at the same time.(22) It must be admitted, however, that this may not have been totally a tribute to Burton's adaptation, for the novel had also been adapted by J. B. Buckstone for performance at the Haymarket Theatre as early as April 24, 1833, with the famous Mrs. Yates as Ellen.(23) There is no doubt that Burton, setting much store by his reputation for acting in comic roles and also for his version of Ellen Wareham, expected to be well received when he came to America in 1834.(24) The play itself had not been acclaimed when it [page 140:] opened at the American Theatre in New York City, November 6, 1833, in one version or other.(25)

Burton's subsequent career in the theater and in Philadelphia publishing need not concern us, but it is significant that in a draft of his letter to Burton, of June 1, 1840, bitterly complaining of his treatment and apparent dismissal after a year of arduous service on the magazine, Poe mentions Burton's “design to give up your journal, with a view of attending to the Theatre” (Harrison, 1.167). This led to the merger of Burton's magazine with Graham's Casket, which provided Poe with his next position as editor and with the outlet for several of his masterpieces. Poe undoubtedly knew about Burton's adaptation of Ellen Wareham, which was produced by Burton himself in Philadelphia at the Arch Theatre on July 3, 1837, and at the Chestnut Street Theatre on June 11, 1840, virtually the date when Poe was complaining in the above letter about his “attending” to the drama rather than to the magazine.(26) There is further evidence that Poe must have seen the play in Philadelphia. He was familiar with theatrical people there, such as Richard Penn Smith (1799-1854), well known for his plays and his many adaptations of English and French works.(27) Quinn speaks of a tradition that Poe associated with actors in Philadelphia and postulates that Burton secured Poe regular admission to the Walnut Street Theatre, during 1839-1840, before the break in their cordial relations.(28) Certainly Poe's knowledge of the play and of the melodrama of the novel's plot would have kept alive more vividly his early memories of the tale which became almost a touchstone for genuine passion throughout Poe's criticism. Its rarity today will justify, I trust, my enabling the reader to savor its “magic” quality.

Ellen Wareham is the daughter of a half-pay captain, retired to a resort town, where he hopes that the balls and visitors will help him to marry off his three daughters: Caroline, Ellen, and Matilda. At seventeen Ellen captures a dull but prosperous merchant, Mr. Cresford (we are never told his first name), and they have two children within five years. Her older sister Caroline marries Lord Coverdale. Unfortunately, Cresford, [page 141:] while traveling on the Continent, is “detained” by Napoleon in 1803, and within a year Ellen receives an announcement of his death in the prison at Verdun. She has met Algernon Hamilton, Esq., through the Coverdales, and he begs her to grace his large Elizabethan mansion of Belhanger as his wife. After waiting two years and two months, she makes him and herself happy, and within a proper time these two become three, plus Cresford's children. Ellen admits to herself that she had never really loved the crass and unimaginative Cresford. Picture her consternation to discover, five years after her second marriage, that he has just been released from imprisonment in Germany, to which he had escaped from France through the ruse of a mock funeral. (Could this have suggested to Dickens Barsad's escape in the Tale of Two Cities?)

Algernon is equally shocked: “Striking his forehead, he rushed out of the room, darted down the stairs, out of the house, and plunged into the most retired part of the park, where he wildly paced the ground, beating his bosom, and almost dashing his head against the trees.” Ellen immediately leaves her second husband, and returns to her father to await the arrival of Cresford, who now shows himself to be a demon. Although his business partners too had believed in his death, he is irrationally convinced that Ellen knew the truth about his survival. At the confrontation scene he says to Ellen herself with masterful irony: “She has given the loose to her profligate fancies, under the specious veil of marriage. Well done, your sanctified hypocrite! The mourning wife of Ephesus with a vengeance!” Then “he laughed an appalling withering laugh. ... His eyes glared, with the fire of madness.”(29)

The relentless Cresford insists that Ellen be prosecuted for bigamy, and he challenges Hamilton to a duel, which is refused. Although Hamilton's lawyer defends Ellen and although the friend who was to deliver a message from Cresford years ago is proved to have died en route to England, Ellen is judged guilty but fined merely a shilling. Still, since she is legally married to Cresford, she continues to live with Papa, until her first husband, in his mad fury and ambition, drives [page 142:] his repossessed business into bankruptcy and himself into the grave. The deathbed scene is most affecting, for no proper wife of that period could fail to pray for the life of her legal spouse. After another decent interval of mourning, Ellen remarries Algernon and regains happiness.

This is the “magic tale” of Ellen Wareham, whose author, says Poe, knows more about “the springs of the human heart ... than any of her female contemporaries.”(30) And this is the reviewer to whom James E. Heath wrote, in 1839, “Your dissecting knife, if vigorously employed, would serve to rid us of much of that silly trash and sickly sentimentality with which puerile and conceited authors, and gain-seeking booksellers are continually poisoning our intellectual food.” (Harrison, 8.xi). Poe is generally thought to have been shaping his taste in his early criticism. His praise of Ellen Wareham matched his praise in February, 1836, of Henry F. Chorley's Conti the Discarded,(31) which Edward H. Davidson excerpts as a fine example of the whole period's delight “in fashionably exquisite, nubile young women in erotic poses of death.”(32) He also praised Chorley in September, 1836, for his papers on music (Harrison, 9.145). Yet, as Poe became more mature in judgment, he outgrew his reverence for the third-rate dilettante and in November, 1844, says of Chorley: “The author speaks of music like a man, and not like a fiddler. This is something — and that he has imagination is more. But the philosophy of music is beyond his depth” (Harrison, 16.8). In the first review there may have been a tinge of Poe's early idolatry of British literary circles and also a hope that a man as powerful on the Athenaeum as Chorley might help to advance his own career as author. Moreover, even in February, 1836, Poe was quite capable of administering the axe, or rather the tomahawk, to Morris Mattson's Paul Ulric: or the Adventures of an Enthusiast — “four hundred and forty-three pages of utter folly, bombast, and inanity” (Harrison, 8.179); perhaps this severity came from his fear of the “absurdities with an inundation of which our country is grievously threatened.”

Yet, in his continuing praise of Ellen Wareham, this piece of [page 143:] literary claptrap, Poe allows himself to be misled by a host of factors which cannot be precisely defined but merely suggested. He thought that he found in the work a unity of effect, although only its “passionate” nature is specified; one suspects that it aroused Poe's gallant sense of pity for the poor wronged female. He also hints at verisimilitude of details, the last quality that we find in this book. It is true that being only one volume long, unlike the typical three-decker Victorian novel, it may tell its sad story with a little more superficial directness and simplicity, qualities which Poe praised in the novel. A sense of force and vigor may result from this relative conciseness, in which the “dead-alive” theme, so near to Poe's morbid interests, shapes the whole direction of the plot. Poe may also have given the author credit for her “construction of plot” through entering Ellen into a loveless marriage and sending Cresford into the dangers of a business mission on the Continent during Napoleon's wars.

There are other factors, I suspect, basic to his praise. I have mentioned his reverence for authors of nobility, which actually led to his misconception about the writer of the work. Yet, Poe himself issued an effective and well-founded warning to the American readers of British books in one of the “Marginalia” of 1849:

Certainly he failed to heed his excellent advice in considering this “gilded pill.” A lady offering this tale of woe would naturally receive more than her just tribute from the susceptible writer of “Annabel Lee.” In general, Poe's unfailing commendation of Ellen Wareham is proof of the wide variety of his literary judgments and of his yielding at times to the fashions of the period.