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5. William Kirkland
William Kirkland (1800-1846) was born in New Hartford, near Utica, New York. At Hamilton College, from which he graduated in 1818, he is believed to have prepared for the ministry, but he never entered the profession. In 1820 he accepted an appointment as a tutor in Greek and Latin at Hamilton College. Three years later a group of disgruntled students fired a small cannon [page 307:] into his rooms at the college. The incident permanently impaired his hearing, and the resulting dissension led to his going abroad to study in 1825 and to his resignation upon his return two years later. In 1828 he married Caroline Stansbury. For seven years the Kirklands conducted a girls’ school at Geneva, New York. From 1835 until 1843 they lived in Detroit and Pinckney, Michigan.(1) From here they moved to New York, where they established a school for girls and wrote for the periodicals. In October, 1846, Kirkland joined Henry W. Bellows in founding the Christian Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly, but only one issue of the periodical appeared before Kirkland's death by drowning. It is thought that his poor eyesight and defective hearing caused him to fall from the dock at Newburgh, New York.(2)
Perhaps it was Poe who, in the Broadway Journal for May 17, 1845,(3) called attention to Kirkland's “sensible paper (with some exceptions) on ‘British and American Monthlies”’ in a recent issue of Godey's. It was certainly he who, in a later number of the Journal, censured William W. Turner, the translator of Frederick Von Raumer's America and the American People, for falling to acknowledge in his preface to that work “his indebtedness to [page 308:] those who aided him in his very difficult task — to Mr. Kirkland, for example, and to the accomplished Mrs. Ellet — who, between them, prepared nearly if not quite, one half of the book.”(4) Poe's comments on Kirkland are confined to those remarks and the appreciative “Literati” sketch, in which he listed Kirkland's magazine papers and praised his scant literary output “for its simplicity, and the evidence which it affords of scholarship and diligent research.”(5)
Concerning the likelihood of personal acquaintance between Poe and Kirkland, it can be said only that Poe knew Mrs. Kirkland and that on at least one occasion he was a guest in the Kirkland home.(6) It has been asserted that Kirkland helped to edit the Mirror from 1814 until 1846, which period includes the term of Poe's employment with the paper, but the statement appears to rest on an unsubstantial basis.(7)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 307:]
1 For a more detailed account of the activities of the Kirklands in Michigan, see above, pp. 197-193.
2 Keyes, op. cit., pp.101-114 and passim; the obituary notices in the New York Mirror, IV, 62 (October 31, 1846), and the National Press, November 7, 1846; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (l880), II, 460; and Appletons' Cyclopaedia.
3 I, 316.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 308:]
4 II, 321 (November 29, 1845); Works, XIII, 16. Von Raumer was a professor of history at the University of Berlin.
5 Godey's, XXXII, 200 (May, 1846); Works, XV, 23-24.
6 Above, p. 18.
7 Keyes, op., cit., pp. 269, 279; see also Appletons' Cyclopaedia, III, 556. Neither Keyes nor Appletons’ offers evidence which links Kirkland with the Mirror. Perhaps the idea that Kirkland was editorially associated with the Mirror arose from the unsigned obituary notice of him in that paper (IV, 62; October 31, 1846). The author of the notice, possibly Briggs or Hiram Fuller, wrote that “a daily intercourse of nearly two years has impressed us with the profoundest convictions of his [Kirkland's] worth.” This is not the explicit statement one expects to find in a paper announcing the death of one of its editors.
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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)