Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 002: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Jan. 13, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 5-8 (This material is protected by copyright)

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2. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 115

Dear Sir:

I have this morning received thro’ Mr. Carleton your letter of Dec. 20.

While I am gratified to know that you are preparing a memoir of the great genius whose character has been hitherto chiefly known thro’ Griswold's distorted narrative, while I shall be most happy to assist you in any way which you may suggest, I cannot but fear that you will find the facts of his life so elusive, the dates so contradictory, the details so perverted by relentless enemies & injudicious friends that you will have a very difficult task before you. Have you seen in Harper's Monthly for September 1872 an article entitled “Edgar Allan Poe”?(1) It is not very satisfactory & has not much in it that is new. Portions of it, especially the opening paragraphs on Poe's parentage & ancestry, are taken almost verbatim from Edgar Poe & His Critics though without any reference throughout the article to the little book or its author. The article was written by Mr. R. H. Stoddard & I learn that he has been revising it for the new London Edition of Poe by Routledge & Sons. Have you seen it or do you know anything of it? In the article as published in Harper's, he introduced from my brochure, without quotation, an anecdote about Poe's love for the mother of one of his schoolmates, & adds, “The memory of this lady is said to have suggested the lines beginning, ‘Helen, thy beauty is to me’ — & may have done so, though I am not aware that Poe himself ever countenanced the idea.” Now, since he copied the anecdote from my book, he must have known that I had quoted, in connection with it & in confirmation of it, passages from a letter written to me by Mr. Poe within a twelvemonth of his death.

On reading his article in Harper's, which seemed to me on its first perusal candid & rather friendly in its spirit, I wrote to him to say that though pleased with the general tone of his article, I was pained to find that he had expressed doubt of Poe's having countenanced a statement for which I had given his letter as authority. He replied that so many months had elapsed since he wrote the article (just published in Harper's), that he was “unable to remember” what he had said in it! This seemed to me a palpable evasion of the matter in question. He declared however that he had no intention to discredit any statement that I had made in Edgar Poe & His Critics, & if he had done so, he asked my forgiveness. He then went on to say —

I had said in my letter to Stoddard that I had evidence in my possession that Poe was not expelled from the University. To prove this I sent him copies of two letters written in May (I think) 1860; one from Dr. Stephen Maupin, president of the University, & one from Mr. Wertenbaker, the secretary, written at the request of Dr. Maupin.(2) They contained a record of the date of Poe's entrance into the University & of his age as entered by himself in the matriculation book of the college. He entered the University in Feb. 1826 & gave his age as 17.

The record states that he was not at that time intemperate but was known to have a passion for cards which had not however drawn upon him any censure from the faculty. I suffered Mr. Stoddard to retain these copies of letters hoping that he would use them at some time to clear up at least one stain on the record of the unfortunate poet. Perhaps I can obtain them or copies of them. Before writing to Stoddard I wrote an article for the Providence Journal in which I commented favourably on his article but regretted his repetition of the slander about Poe's expulsion. I enclose to you this printed article which I should like to have you preserve & at some time return to me.

I also in my first letter to Mr. Stoddard offered to place in his hands letters which were written to me by Mr. Poe which would show that I had not spoken without authority in what I had said of the lines about the mother of one of his schoolmates. But all this I must leave for the present because I am anxious to let you know at once that I have duly received your letter. I will try then to answer some of your questions briefly, in the order in which you present them.

About Mr. T. C. Clarke. I presume it is the Mr. Clarke who was to have been associated with Mr. Poe as publisher of the Stylus. I saw him for the first & only time in New York in the autumn of 1859. It was just after it had been announced in the Philadelphia papers that Rudd & Carleton were about to publish Edgar Poe & His Critics, by Mrs. Whitman. He came to New York, sought out my address, & came to see me. He had a long talk with me, expressed great pleasure in learning that I was about to protest against the injustice of Griswold — he evinced an affectionate & admiring interest in Mr. Poe, as a man & an acquaintance. Mr. Clarke was a plain, honest man, apparently, & without much literary culture — at least such was my impression. He told me of his own projected work, asked for my assistance respecting certain particulars of my personal acquaintance with Poe — of my engagement & the cause & manner of its dissolution. He wrote me one or two letters the following spring, & then I heard little or nothing [page 7:] more of him until some three months ago a young gentleman by the name of Wm. F. Gill, a partner in the publishing house of Gill & Shepard, Boston, having been in correspondence with me for the last two or three months, in relation to a lecture which he was proposing to write on E.A.P. (in which he intended to introduce readings & recitations from the poems) told me that he was in hopes of inducing Mr. Clarke to make over to him the facts which he had been so long storing up for publication.(3) Mr. Clarke is, I should think, quite an old man.

I have not heard from Mr. Gill very lately but saw it stated in one of the Boston papers that he was thinking of the stage as a profession. I fancy that his genius is rather too versatile for him to succeed as an author.

You ask if I can point to any one anecdote of Griswold's which has been publicly refuted or even denied in print.

In the New York Tribune for June 7th 1852 you will find a letter to the editor from Wm. J. Pabodie of Providence in direct & specific denial of the account published by Griswold of outrages committed in the house of a New England lady on the evening of the appointed marriage.(4)

Mr. Griswold on seeing this printed denial wrote a savage & unmanly letter to Mr. Pabodie threatening if he did not withdraw it to do dreadful things.

Mr. Pabodie not only did not withdraw it but in a printed letter to Griswold brought forward incontrovertible proofs of other & greater falsifications indulged in by the irate Doctor in his “Memoir.” From that time he was discreetly silent.

I will mail to you this evening if possible a copy of Edgar Poe & His Critics, & if I can obtain it, a copy of Stoddard's article in the magazine of Sept. 1872. I shall be very glad to receive a copy of your magazine article on Poe, your “prelude.” You see that I am getting very tired. I will attend to some of your other questions soon. I have never seen Miss Rosalie Poe. Mrs. Clemm, who was an occasional correspondent of mine until within a year of her death, never mentioned her to me. Mr. Poe once, when speaking of the loneliness of his life, said in reply to a question I asked about his sister, that there had long been a coolness or estrangement between them. I have heard through the papers that she was very destitute. There is, I think, a Mr. Neilson Poe, who was a cousin of theirs, but whether in Baltimore or Richmond, I have forgotten.(5)

It was not Mrs. Macready but Mr. Macready who sent “The Fire Fiend” to the Star. I enclose you a fragment of it, sent to me anonymously some years ago. I knew at once that it was a forgery, & am glad that you recognized it as such. [page 8:]

Any letter addressed to me at Providence, Rhode Island, will duly reach me.

I shall be anxious to know that my letter reaches you safely.

I may not be able to send the Critics tonight, but if not, will do so soon.

Mr. Carleton's present address, should you ever have occasion to write to him again, is G. W. Carleton & Co., publishers, Madison Square, New York.

If any one of the biographical dictionaries speaks of my having written of E.A.P. elsewhere than in “The Critics,” it must allude to to [[sic]] a vol. of poems, a small edition of which was published by a Providence publisher, by his own request, in 1853.(6) If you would like to see it, I will send you a volume.

 

1. R. H. Stoddard, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 45 (1872), 557-58. Many references to this article and its author, none of them complimentary, are ahead. Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903) was a poet, reviewer, and an editor of merit, despite Ingram's unrelentingly savage estimates of him. Stoddard had met Poe and later, as editor of the Broadway Journal, Poe had refused, in print, to accept for publication Stoddard's poem “The Grecian Flute.” Ater that, Stoddard understandably disliked Poe; he never did really understand or appreciate Poe's own writings, even though he wrote much about him from 1853 until the end of his own life.

2. Dr. Socrates (not Stephen) Maupin, presiding officer of the University of Virginia faculty, directed William Wertenbaker, librarian and former classmate of Poe's, to draw up a statement on May 12, 1860, about Poe's scholarship and acceptable behavior at the university, denying that Poe had been expelled, apparently in answers to the many inquiries beginning to reach the university authorities. Dr. Maupin appended a note to Wertenbaker's statement on May 22, 1860, attesting to its validity. See Item 92 in the Ingram Poe Collection.

3. William Fearing Gill (1844-1917 [[1918]]) was an impulsive, erratic, but apparently sincere admirer of Poe and his writings. He published a hastily and badly written biography of Poe in 1877, which has value simply because it contains some new materials about Poe. He continued to lecture and write about Poe for the remainder of his life; he became a bitter vocal enemy of John Ingram's; and he broke faith with Mrs. Whitman by publishing portions of Poe's letters to her which she had allowed him to read but had expressly forbidden him to publish.

4. William J. Pabodie of Providence, R.I., was educated as a lawyer but chose to spend his life as an occasional poet and a full-time dilettante. He was a close friend and neighbor of Mrs. Whitman's and, on occasions, Poe's host when Poe visited Providence to see Mrs. Whitman. After Poe's death Pabodie wrote articles in the Tribune in his defense. Pabodie committed suicide in 1870.

5. Neilson Poe (1809-1884) was a cousin of Edgar's who married Josephine Emily, daughter of William and Harriet Clemm. In Virginia and in Maryland his first name was pronounced “Nelson,” and Mrs. Whitman and Ingram regularly spelled it so.

6. Sarah Helen Whitman, Hours of Life and Other Poems (Providence: George H. Whitney, 1853).