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11. Mary Gove
Mary Sargeant Neal Gove Nichols (18IO-1884) was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Her opportunities for a formal education were few, but in the early 1830's she began to study medical works and soon became interested in such subjects as mesmerism; vegetarianism, spiritualism, and dress reform for women, but more significantly in the water-cure treatment of disease. In 1837 she taught anatomy to classes of young women in Lynn, Massachusetts. A lecture tour took her through the New England states, to New York, Maryland, Ohio, and elsewhere. Por a brief period in 1840 she edited a health journal in Worcester, Massachusetts. [page 170:] In 1844 she moved to New York, where s year later set up a water-cure establishment. Here also she continued her lectures and wrote occasionally for the periodicals, sometimes using the pen name “Mary Orme.”
Her marriage in 1831 to Hiram Gove, who did not share her interest, was an unhappy one, and upon obtaining a divorce in she married Thomas L. Nichols, who was already active in matters of health and social reform. For two years, beginning in 1851, they conducted a school in New York which offered instruction in the water-cure method, and from 1855 until 1857 they edited Nichols’ Monthly in Cincinnati. In the early 1860's established permanent residence in England, where they continued their water-cure practice. Mrs. Nichols was a frequent contributor to the Herald of Health, which her husband founded in 1875.
Her career in reform movements provided Mrs. Nichols with for Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology (1842), Experiences in Water Cure (1846), and A Woman's Work in Water Cure and Sanitary Education (1868). In collaboration with her husband she wrote Marriage; Its History, Character, and Results (1854). Her didactic novelettes include Uncle John; or It Is Too Much Trouble (1846). An autobiographic novel, Mary London; or Revelations of a Life, appeared in 1855.(1) [page 171:]
Almost all the evidence relating to the brief association of Poe and Mrs. Gove Nichols is found in her writings, in which she appears as a sympathetic and helpful friend in time of need and as a defender of his memory after his death. Antedating the events related in her accounts, however, is the publication in the Broadway Journal for October 4, 1845, of her “The Gift of Prophecy,”(2) ostensibly a narration of personal experiences which tend to show that glimpses of the future may be obtained through mesmerism. In the same issue Poe inquired in the “To Correspondents” section: “Shall we not hear again from M. O.? Her many excellences are appreciated by no one more fully than by ourselves.”(3) But no further contributions from her appeared.
In the brief “Literati” sketch Poe commented favorably upon the style of her “many excellent papers” in the magazines but noted that her “subjects are usually tinctured with the mysticism of the transcendentalists.” Perhaps there is a touch of ridicule in his account of her varied interests: “She is, I think, a Mesmerist, a Swedenborgian, a phrenologist, a homoeopathist, a disciple of Priessnitz — what more I am not prepared to say.”(4)
Poe probably became acquainted with Mrs. Gove in the fall or winter of 1845. Her Mary Lyndon indicates that she became a participant in the social activities of the literati soon after [page 172:] her arrival in New York. In that work she party where at a late hour “the refrain of ‘Never more’ fell with a monotonous cadence upon the ear, as poor Poe recited ‘The Raven.’”(5) Her memory of Poe at a New Year's party a week later gave Mrs. Gove an opportunity to record her impression of him:
Poor Poe was there, and his image rises in memory, with those of common men, like a marble shaft among wooden pillars. He was very beautiful, though it was a pale, cold beauty, that was the correspondence of his intellect. His life was not the life of a man, but an artist. He had no conscience but his taste. His perception of beauty, and order, of true harmonic relations was telescopic and microscopic — and he wished much to report all he saw truly, as a just critic; but prophets and critics have a tenacity of life ... and when asked to prophesy smooth things, bread is a powerful argument.(6)
In accounting for the fact that Poe occasionally accepted commissions to write favorable reviews, Mrs. Gove described the extreme poverty of the Poe family at Fordham in the winter of 1846-1847 and her efforts to assist them:
... I learned from the most devotional mother of Mrs. Poe that her daughter was dying of want, and that Poe was very ill. I went to them at once. He seemed lost in a stupor, not living or suffering, but existing merely. The wife ... lay dying of consumption. The husband's overcoat was her chief protection against cold, though she said she derived much warmth from a large cat that lay in her bosom. When he was unable to write, or unable to sell his articles, they had no money to save them from cold or hunger. Some time previous to my visit, when the full horror of the coming woe was upon his most vivid imagination, one came as a friend and gave him money, and then asked [page 173:] him for a criticism. He made the lying payment, and I never knew him express so deep remorse as for that deed. Let those whose lives are warp and woof of the same falsehood, who ask no higher fate than to be bought and sold continually, condemn Poe. Such have, and such will blast his memory, so far as they can.
I immediately brought the great need of the family home to some persons of benevolence, who were admirers of Poe's genius, some persons of benevolence, who were admirers of Poe's genius, and they were provided for, in the most delicate and beautiful manner, till the frail flower — like wife faded into the grave.(7)
In writing the following, Mrs. Gove, whose opinions of love and marriage were unconventional, was perhaps defending Poe from gossip which had arisen out of his association with Mrs. Osgood:
That he loved her [his wife], and sorrowed for her, as few can love and sorrow, I know. That he loved other beautiful and loveful spirits also, will be his honor, and not his condemnation, when our race becomes human. Till then, his memory can wait. The gangrene of a false and sensual moralism can never destroy any of the gold of genius — the immortality of a true love.(8)
Elsewhere Mrs. Gove wrote that previous to the winter of 1846 she had paid at least three friendly visits to the cottage at Fordham.(9) Here she told again of her assistance to the Poes and concluded with a defense of the poet against his detractors:
Poe has been called a bad man. He was his own enemy, it is true; but he was a gentleman and a scholar ... If the scribblers who have snapped like curs at his remains, had seen him as [page 174:] his friends saw him, in his dire necessity and his great temptation, they would have been worse than they deem him to have written as they have concerning a man of whom they really knew next nothing.(10)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 170:]
1 The sketches of Mrs. Nichols and her husband, by Bertha Monica Stearns, in the Dictionary of American Biography; the National Cyclopedia, XXII, 140; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; Hale, op. cit., pp. 760-761; and Mary Lyndon; or Revelations of a Life, New York, 1855.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 171:]
2 II, 187-188. The article was signed “Mary Orme.”
3 II, 201.
4 Godey's, XXXIII, 16 (July, 1846); Works, XV, 61. Vincenz Priessnitz (1799-1851) was the founder of hydropathy.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 172:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 173:]
7 Ibid., p. 342. For a later account by Mrs. Gove of a conversation with Poe about the sale of insincere reviews, see above, p. 64n.
8 Ibid., pp. 342-343.
9 Reminiscences of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 7-12.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 174:]
10 Ibid., p. 14.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)