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12. Mary E. Hewitt
Biographical information on Mary Elizabeth Hewitt Stebbins is extremely limited. Her maiden name was Moore and she was born in Malden, Massachusetts. Her father, who is said to have been a farmer of good education, died when Mary was but a child, and soon thereafter the family moved to Boston. Here, about 1827, she married James L. Hewitt, a music publisher and the brother of John Hill Hewitt, with whom Poe was to have an unpleasant association in Baltimore. In 1829 the Hewitts moved from Boston to New York. Two years after her husband's death in 1853, Mrs. Hewitt was married to a Mr. R. Stebbins of New York.
By 1839 Mrs. Hewitt's poetry had begun to appear in the periodicals, especially in the Knickerbocker, for which she wrote under the pen name “Ione.” In 1845 she collected her The Songs of Our Land and Other Poems; a second volume, Poems; Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary, appeared in 1854. She edited The Memorial (1850), a tribute to her friend Mrs. Osgood, The Gem of the Western World (1850), a gift book, and Heroines of [page 175:] History (1852).(1)
The consistently agreeable relationship of Poe and Mrs. Hewitt began shortly after the appearance of “The Raven.” Poe's poem helped to inspire one of her own, which she sent to Poe in a letter of March 15, 1845.(2) Her second letter to Poe reveals that he had written for permission to publish her poem, “A Tale of Luzon,” in the Broadway Journal, where it appeared on March 22.(3) “‘You have spoken roses,’” she wrote in granting his request, “and I hardly know how to reply to words so complimentary.”(4) On May 29 she wrote again, enclosing another poem for the Journal and sending her “compliments to Mrs. Poe — whose acquaintance I am happy to have made.”(5) By this date Poe was a guest at [page 176:] the social affairs of the literati,(6) and very likely he occasion met Mrs. Hewitt at Miss Lynch's soirees and elsewhere.
The reader of the first of Poe's three reviews of Mrs. Hewitt's The Songs of Our Land and Other Poems, in the Broadway Journal for October 25, 1845, is likely to be reminded of Poe's admitted reluctance to criticize adversely the productions of women authors.(7) It consists chiefly of quoted matter, the compliments show restraint, and unfavorable comment is at a minimum. The warmest praise is general; the poems, Poe wrote, reveal the author's poetic fervor, classical taste, and appreciation of the beautiful. “No one can read the book without a desire to become please with the woman.”(8) However, Mrs. Hewitt was highly please with the review. She wrote to Poe on November 10: “The Broadway Journal was the Scylla and Charybdis of my fear .... Judge then of the measure and quality of my delight on finding had passed the strait with safety!”(9)
The second notice of the volume, in Godey's for February, generally similar to the first but contains more unfavorable comment. Poe pointed out lines impaired by harsh combinations of consonants and objected at length to nouns which their adjectives and to prepositions which follow their [page 177:] objects.(10)
Poe's final, and most complimentary, review of Mrs. Hewitt's collection appeared in the “Literati” sketch in October. As in his first notice, Poe here found little to censure, his criticism consisting chiefly of approving comment upon quoted passages. But Poe was cautious in making a general appraisal of the poems: “No one of them, perhaps, can be judiciously commended as a whole, but no one of them is without merit .... They lack unity, totality, ultimate effect, but abound in forcible passages.”(11)
Mrs. Hewitt's friendly letter to Poe of April 15, 1846,(12) Indicates that he retained her good will following the scandal of the letters. At any rate, her personal relationship with him and did not end with that affair. On December 20, 1846, she wrote to Mrs. Osgood, then in Philadelphia:
The Poes are in the same state of physical and pecuniary suffering — indeed worse than they were last summer, for now the cold weather is added to their accumulation of ills. I went to enquire of Mr. Post about their condition. Although he says Mrs. Clemm was never told him that they were in want, yet she borrows killing often, to get a letter from the office — but Mrs. Gove had been to see the Poes and found them living in the greatest wretchedness. I am endeavoring to get up a contribution for them among the editors, and the matter has got into print — very much top my regret, as I fear it will hurt Poe's pride to have his [page 178:] affairs made so public.(13)
One wonders whether Mrs. Hewitt's efforts to assist Poe were responsible for the paragraph in the Morning Express on December 15 which, indeed, wounded his pride by making a public disclosure of his poverty.(14)
Poe's final interview with Mrs. Hewitt had unfortunate consequences. In December, 1848, Just prior to his departure for Providence on the trip that resulted in the breaking of his engagement to Mrs. Whitman, Poe called on Mrs. Hewitt, who later gave Mrs. Whitman an account of part of their conversation:
As Mr Poe arose to leave he said “I am going to Providence this afternoon [.]” “I hear you are about to be married” I replied. He stood with the knob of the parlour door in his hand, and as I said this drew himself up with a look of great reserve and replied “that marriage will never take place[.]” “But” I persisted, “it is said you are already published[.]” Still standing like a statue with a most rigid face, he repeated “It will never take place.” These were his words and this was all. He bade me good morning on the instant and I never saw him more. Mr. Griswold came in the afternoon and in reply to my “Mr Poe was here this morning” said “He has gone to be married I think [.]” In answer to which I repeated what Mr Poe had said.(15) [page 179:]
Mrs. Hewitt was writing in reply to an inquiry from Mrs. Whitman which had been prompted by Griswold's account of the incident in the “Memoir.” Griswold, in proof of his assertion that Poe deliberately broke the engagement, had reported the conversation in terms which supported his view and had added details of Poe's conduct in Providence which had no basis in fact:
He said to an acquaintance in New-York, who congratulated with him upon the prospect of his union with a person of so much genius and so many virtues — “It is a mistake: I am not going to be married.” “Why, Mr. Poe, I understand that the banns have been published.” “I cannot help what you have heard, my dear Madam: but mark me, I shall not marry her.” He left town the same evening, and the next day was reeling through the streets of the city which was the lady's home, and in the evening — that should have been the evening before the bridal — in his drunkenness he committed at her house such outrages as made necessary a summons of the police.(16)
Like Griswold, Mrs. Hewitt appears to have felt that Mrs. Whitman was unwise in becoming engaged to Poe. In her letter to Mrs. Whitman of October 2, 1850, she wrote that Griswold “regretted your intended marriage, knowing upon what a wreck (pray forgive [page 180:] me) you were about to embark so trustingly.”(17)
Poe apparently found no reason to alter his critical or personal estimate of Mrs. Hewitt in his later years. The revised “Literati” sketch of her is in the commendatory vein of the original “Literati” paper and the earlier reviews, from which it is largely derived.(18)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 175:]
1 The Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 554; the National Cyclopedia, XIII, 364; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; Hale, op. cit., p. 829; Rufus W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1852, p.157; May, op. cit., p.342; and John Tasker Howard, “The Hewitt Family in American Music,” Musical Quarterly, (January, 1931). The birth and death dates of Mrs. Hewitt are obscure. No death date is given in the sketches; the National Cyclopaedia gives 1818 as the year of her birth, but 1827 is widely accepted as the year of her marriage. I have found no definite evidence concerning her subsequent to the publication of her poem “The Uprising of the North” in the Knickerbocker, LVIII, 500 (December, 186l). For Poe and John Hill Hewitt, see Richard B. Harwell, ed., John Hill Hewitt's Recollections of Poe, Atlanta, 1949. [[She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, MA, and although the inscription is rather worn, it reads December 23, 1807 - October 9, 1894. During Poe's era, it was quite common for people to feel free to alter their birth years — JAS]]
2 Mabbott, “Letters from Mary E. Hewitt to Poe,” op. cit., pp. 116-117.
3 I, 186. Seven other poems by Mrs. Hewitt appeared in the Journal in 1845.
4 Mabbott, “Letters from Mary E. Hewitt to Poe,” op. cit., pp. 117-118
4 Ibid., p. 116.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 176:]
6 Above, pp.17-19.
7 Above, p. 62.
8 Broadway Journal, II, 247 (October 25, 1845); Works, XII, 255.
9 Mabbott, “Letters from Mary E. Hewitt to Poe,” op. cit., p. 119.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 177:]
10 XXXII, 90-91; Works, XIII. 98-105.
11 Godey's, XXXIII, 158-159 (October, 1846); Works, XV, 123-126.
12 Above, p. 20.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 178:]
13 Woodberry, op. cit., II, 219-220. Israel Post was the publisher of the Columbian Magazine.
14 Above, pp.79, 81n.
15 A copy, apparently by Mrs. Whitman, of part of Mrs. Hewitt's letter to her, October 2, 1850; MS in the Griswold Collection, Boston Public Library. In another copy of the letter, Poe is reported to have said “That marriage may [rather than will] never take place” (Quinn, op. cit., p.583).
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 179:]
16 Literati (1850), pp. xxxix-xxx. In letters to the New York Tribune and to Griswold, William J. Pabodie, a friend of Mrs. Whitman and an associate of Poe in Providence, reported that the account of a disturbance at Mrs. Whitman's home was untrue and denied that Poe deliberately broke the engagement (Works, XVII, pp. 408-410, 412-415); concerning Poe's conversation with Mrs. Hewitt, he wrote: “At the time of his interview with Mrs. Hewitt, circumstances existed, which threatened to postpone the marriage indefinitely, if not altogether to prevent it. It was undoubtedly with reference to these circumstances that his remark to Mrs. H. was made — certainly not with any intention, on his part, of breaking off the engagement ...” (ibid., XVII, p. 412).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 180:]
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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)