Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter II.I,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 79-106 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 79:]

Poe's desire to have his mental powers thoroughly appreciated was responsible, I think, for his habit of analyzing his methods of composition, after he felt that those methods showed an experienced artist at work. Unfortunately, this same peculiarity forbade his ever drawing aside the curtains to give a glimpse of himself as a young experimentor in his crude early laboratory. When necessity forced him in 1831 to try his hand at writing stories that would appeal to popular taste, he followed exactly the course which any inexperienced person takes in learning to do something which others are doing but for which he himself commands no technique. He turned to the magazines to see what kinds of stories were winning popular approbation find thus being sold. From these he took suggestions for themes and characters; he analyzed, imitated, and travestied their styles until he found one of his own. That faculty of analysis which he appears to have possessed in marked degree performed excellent service for him when he turned it to the task of finding a pattern of current fashion for his own tales. Aside [page 80:] from any consideration of his own convictions at that time as to the relative merits of the long and short work of fiction, practical common sense must have told him that the shorter was the salable type for a literary novice. Professor Pattee paints out that the annuals and magazines, which had sprung up in surprising number, created a new market for sketches and tales and that “Poe as a writer of tales undoubtedly was created by the magazines.”(1) It has been a matter of frequent comment that Poe's work in its earliest form dealt with those characters and themes which were to preoccupy his attention during his literary life and displayed those qualities of style which have come to be regarded as the trade-mark of his craftsmanship. But it must not be forgotten that he was originally the product of the taste in fiction — particular magazine fiction — current in 1830.

As a rule, one thinks of Poe first as a writer of fantastic and horrible stories; he himself chose to designate this particular type as “arabesque” or “phantasy-pieces” rather than as tales, of horror, a term too suggestive of much of the exaggeration and um-pleasantness of German romance. So far as subject-matter [page 81:] is concerned, one associates with his work physical horrors, death under peculiar and often terrible circumstances, hereditary curses or disease, pestilence; exotic and mysterious settings; ethereally beautiful women who pine away strangely, scholarly men who live solitary lives, men with masterly analytical minds, secret-ridden mortals. As for themes, metempsychosis, premature burial, revenge, the omnipresence of death, the power of mind over matter, the existence of a spirit world, the reality of the unreal — all these find an important place in our impressions of his stories. Moreover, all these themes and fantastic details appear in Poe early work — the tales written before he became associated with the Southern Literary Messenger in August, 1835.

The morbid, inexplicable character of Poe himself has been so thoroughly woven into the study of his work that those of his critics who choose to give his tales and poems autobiographical significance have come to believe, to some degree at least, that these topics of disease, horror, and death and these strangely melancholy men and women were created out of his own eccentric mind end tragic experience. A certain bend of mind had something to do, of course, with his preoccupation [page 82:] with such subject-matter, but there was no need for him to create anything new in the way of horrors; such material existed in abundance in the literature of the period. He was simply throwing into the concentrated form requisite for magazine-publication what he had found in Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, Maturin, Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Irving, Bulwer, Schiller, Goethe, Tieck, Hoffman, Hugo, Balzac, and dozens of other fictionists. The Romantic schools in England, Germany, and France rioted in the wildest and most bizarre imaginings; though the crest of the movement had passed in England and Germany at least, the impulse was still strong and active. France was but entering upon the most exaggerated phase of its Romantic fiction at just the time that Poe began his apprenticeship in tales.

Since he found his materials at hand, it is necessary to consider where and in what state he came in contact with them. Byron, of course, had created perfectly for Poe's hand the singularly gloomy men marked by hereditary curses, love of solitude, and fondness for unholy scholarship. Figure after figure in Poe's tales suggests an adaptation of the Byronic hero.(2) [page 83:] Byron had found his hero in the fiction of the time and had heightened his portrait with touches from his own character. The general tone of the Gothic novel with its strangely cursed figures, its atmosphere of terror, its magnificent old ruins, its machinery of trap-doors, subterrenean [[subterranean]] passages, animated pictures end statues, waving tapestries, ghastly voices and apparitions, and its accumulation of horrors, is so well known that It needs little reviewing to indicate its close kinship with Poe's stories.(3) It is not difficult to see how a young writer steeped in such novels found their intricate plots a perfect mine of incidents and characters. It may be of assistance in estimating his indebtedness to the whole Gothic school to examine some of these tales briefly.

Among the older group of Gothic tales Vathek(4) stands alone in its peculiar atmosphere of Oriental horror and arabesquerie. It was imitated often, but not often successfully. In the nineteenth century it was frequently referred to as old-fashioned and outmoded, [page 84:] but it exercised powerful influence on the fiction of succeeding generations. It is an Eastern tale replete with the element of the supernatural and with diablerie in its wildest form. Even in his most extravagant moments Poe never indulged in anything that approached this tale; it made up, however, a part of his literary background. It is the story of a Caliph who had exhausted every known sensation and every conceivable mode of diversion. Although his power and wealth were unlimited, he longed for a new outlet for his ambition. Presently he determined, upon whim, to entertain whatsoever strangers entered his capital. Once a merchant of so ugly and monstrous a mien visited the city that all who saw him were terrified, but the Caliph received him with his customary courtesy. The merchant gave the Caliph elaborate gifts, awakened his curiosity by his display of strange knowledge and by his refusal to talk about himself, and disappeared from orison When Vathek attempted to extort from him an explanation of his mysterious powers. The remainder of the tale has to do with the efforts of Vathek to get into contact with the demon, for such he naturally proved to be, and to make some kind of bargain with him for a share in his knowledge and powers. He waded [page 85:] through crimes of every nature until he at length gained entrance to the domain of Eblis. There he learned all too quickly the futility of wealth and of knowledge if one must ever carry within himself the torture of a flaming heart.

This tale illustrates the most terrible of the conceptions of diablerie common among Gothic writers. The merchant-demon whom Vathek entertained at the opening of the story was a monstrous figure; blacker than ebony, with an enormous paunch, huge eyes glowing like firebrands, long amber-colored teeth be-streaked with green, and a hideous laugh. His master, Eblis, the real prince of Hell, was a young man of noble and regular features tarnished by malignant vapors, whose countenance was twisted by torture and the conflict of pride and despair. Among Poe's earliest themes was that of diablerie. It is true that he treated, it with a lighter touch than is represented by the story of Vathek; yet the latter must be considered as having influenced the taste for diablerie to which Poe catered. Poe's own statement bears evidence that he read and delighted in the Oriental fantasiee. In his “Pinakidia” he wrote: “Montgomery in his lectures on Literature (?) [page 86:] has the following — ‘Who does not turn with absolute contempt from the rings and gems, and filters, and caves and genii of Eastern Tales, as from the trinkets of a toy-shop, and the trumpery of a raree-show?’ What man of genius but must answer ‘Not I?”(5)

Not strictly of the Gothic variety of fiction, but at the same time clearly marked by its influence, are some of the novels of William Godwin, whose work Poe admired profoundly. Godwin's Caleb Williams he cited frequently as an example of a well-constructed plot and masterly handling.(6) This novel deals with a [page 87:] three-fold theme, the experience of a young man, Caleb Williams, under relentless persecution, the injustice of the English penal code, and the ravaging effect upon a high-minded man, of unimpeachable integrity and position, of a secret crime. The last-mentioned phase of the plot is the one with which we are chiefly concerned in connection with Poe's melancholy tales. Caleb Williams, as the secretary of young Falkland, solved the mystery of the sudden change. In the personality of the latter and learned that his melancholia and bitterness had its origin in the murder, by Falkland, of his would-be rival and insulter. Williams watched the mental sufferings of Falkland, his inner writhings under the knowledge that he had allowed two humble tenants to pay the penalty for his crime: He saw the daily struggle which went on between Falkland's pride of position and of unstained reputation end his instinctive sense of justice. In the end Caleb succeeded in extorting:’ a confession from his former employer and then regretted, his act then he saw the extent of Falkland's suffering and his consequent death. Falkland is the prototype of the melancholy Byronic hero, hardly recognizable, however, because we see him through the eyes of his victim. This was Godwin's variation of a well-known theme. [page 88:]

St. Leon, which followed Caleb Williams from Godwin's pen, made use of the more usual manner of presenting events from the point of view of the solitary sufferer. Its story is that of a human being who learns and uses the secret of immortality and the philosopher's stone. The titular figure began life in the sixteenth century as member of an ancient and honorable French family. He knew the experience of distinguished service for his king and of an ideally happy marriage before his losses at gambling robbed him of property and position. After some bitter struggles with poverty, he and his family learned to live happily the simple life of Swiss peasants. Into their Eden, however, came the strange figure of an old man who appealed to the humanity of St. Leon to save him from persecution and in return bestowed upon his protector the secret of transmuting base metals into cold and of securing immortality through the use of a mysterious elixir vitae. The unknown source of St. Leon's sudden wealth first brought insinuations of wrong-doing against his name, alienated his son, broke his wife's heart end hastened her death. It led him later to renounce his daughters for their own sake and ultimately [page 89:] into a long confinement by inquisition authorities. It resulted only in complete misunderstanding when he attempted to accomplish some good in the world with the aid of his unlimited resources. His only satisfaction in the end was his knowledge of the splendid accomplishments of his son, achieved under an assumed name and without any indebtedness whatsoever to his father.

Several elements in the story are of interest in connection with its possible influence upon Poe. In the first place, St. Leon himself is a mysterious, melancholy figure, doomed to solitude by his secret knowledge and haunted by the sorrows and deaths for which he felt himself responsible. “I felt as truly haunted with the ghosts of those I had murdered, as Nero or Caligula might have been; my wife, my son, my faithful negro; and now, in addition to these, the tender Julie and her unalterable admirer. I possessed the gift of immortal life; but I looked on myself as a monster that did not deserve to exist.”(7) The story is related as a first-person account of St. Leon's experiences, an analysis of his sensations under various circumstances, a perpetual autobiographical plea for [page 90:] sympathy and understanding. After an explanation of the two great secrets which men dream of gaining, the narrator began his story thus:

A number of Poe's stories begin in similar vein, as do many novels and tales of that period. When one reads such painstaking accounts of heritage and training and traits of disposition, it is not difficult to see why Coleridge coined the phrase, “a psychological curiosity,” to describe peculiarities of temperament and by the term, “psychological autobiographists,” whether invented or borrowed by Poe, arose.(9) [page 91:]

Marguerite Louise Isabeau de Damville, the girl whom St. Leon loved and married, was a veritable Poe heroine in her happier moments:

She was the good angel of St. Leon's life, a person of unexceptional wisdom and angelic character. St. Leon's Possession of a secret which he could not share with her broke her heart and caused a mournful decline and early death.

But if Marguerite reminds one strongly of Poe's lovely, fading women, so do many of the heroines of fiction of the same period. Such were the accomplishments and such the melancholy fates of a whole generation of imaginary women. It is not necessary, certainly, that we believe Poe's heart's sorrow is written into salable form in the portraits of a dying Ligeia, Eleonora, Lenore, and even Annabel Lee.

Upon several occasions St. Leon suffered the experience of imprisonment, but his confinement in the inquisition dungeon of Madrid consumed many years and subjected him to untold tortures. Some fifty pages of the narrative are concerned with an account of the dreadful experience. Poe, too, was interested in the powerful Inquisition and its reputed torture chambers, as his “The Pit and the Pendulum” reveals; and so, likewise, were a number of the other fictionists of the time.(12) St. Leon's most terrible incarceration, however, was a private one, imposed upon him by a man whom he had befriended and made his intimate. The misanthropic Bethlem Gabor hated St. Leon because the letter loved humanity and tried to help his unfortunate [page 93:] fellowmen. Bethlem Gabor lured his victim to a remote castle which he owned and invited him to explore with him the numerous apartments of the ghostly old pile. Among these the host mentioned ‘a subterranean of most wonderful extent, interspersed with a variety of cells and lurking places, of which no man hid to his knowledge ever ascertained the number.” Nameless misgivings assailed the mind of St. Leon, but he could think neither of a reason for his apprehension nor a remedy against ill faith if such existed.

St. Leon was so stunned by this strange treatment that he could not at first believe that his host had designed such a situation for him. Hours passed, and he became feeble and exhausted from fear and hunger. He raved in anguish and fancied that he heard the mockery of a human voice howling in answer. At length a swoon mercifully rendered him unconscious. After a time he was aroused by movements about him; he found Bethlem Gabor himself “taking up the apparently lifeless corpse, placing it on a stone-bench in the side of a cave, and chaining it to the wall.” His jailor gave him food, but only to prolong the torture of imprisonment. Bethlem Gabor told him that he hated him as a representative of the whole human race and that upon him he meant to wreak a vengeance for all the injuries he had received from an unhappy existence. Release from his imprisonment came at length by accident; hostile forces stormed the castle, and the owner died in its defense. St. Leon found his way to the outside world and gave himself into the hands of the victorious party.

The resemblance between this account and Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado” is apparent from even a [page 95:] brief summary of the incident in St. Leon. For this particular tale of Poe's there happens to have been a wealth of sources suggested. It has been pointed out that Poe might have borrowed for it details from the scene. In The Last Days of Pompeii, in which the Egyptian Arbaces lured his victim into the cellars, and to the walling up incident in Balzac's “Le Grande Bretche.(14) More recently, Mr. Joseph S. Schick has convincingly linked the walling up device with the Reverend Joel Tyler Headley's description in Letters from Italy (1845) of the finding of a skeleton thus walled up in an Italian church niche.(15) None of these sources more closely parallels the Poe narrative than Godwin's description of St. Leon's terrible experience.(16) It would seem almost as if Poe had determined to tell the story from the point of view of the aggressor in contrast with Godwin's use of the victim as narrator. The two accounts have in common 1) first-person point of view, 2) revenge as a motive, [page 96:] 3) distrust of the victim partially dispelled, 4) unending subterranean passages and “numerous cells and lurking places,” 5) the accumulated dampness of centuries, 6) slow realization of his situation on the part of the victim, 7) ravings and answering screams, 8) chaining to the wall.

As similar as these two accounts appear to be, I am unwilling to assert that Poe was directly indebted to his reading of Godwin for a part of his handling of the details of Fortunato's immurement in the vaults of Montresor. The very fact that additional parallels continue to be pointed out seems to me to indicate that Poe was perhaps making use of a stock situation in tales of revenge and torture.(17) Indeed, I can add another parallel which has not, I think, been noted thus far. Its resemblance to the Amontillado episode equals, in my opinion, that of any of the [page 97:] other suggested sources. The major portion of Melmoth the Wanderer,(18) and certainly the most interesting, deals with the experiences of Monçada, a young Spaniard, who was forced to enter monkhood against his wishes, was subjected to unbelievable tortures in the monastary [[monastery]] itself, fell into the hands of the Inquisition when he attempted to escape from the monastary [[monastery]], and released from the inquisition prison, just as he awaited execution, by the accident of fire. Aided by his brother, Juan, Monçada found within the convent a renegade priest, who had taken sanctuary there after the murder of his father, to help him in his plats for escape. In reality in the services of the Inquisition itself, the monk lured him into a trap and murdered Juan. But before the actual escape from the walls of the monastary [[monastery]], the betrayer subjected his victim [page 98:] to a horrible experience in the vaults beneath the church.

On the pretense of shoring him the only means of egress from his prison, the monk conducted Alonzo in the dead of night to a secret door in the Church. The younger man feared duplicity and had an unaccountable sense of impending tragedy; he imagined that he was being conducted to witness some horrid compact or black mass of Satan — or even a diabolical feast on rotting flesh. The monk was uncertain of their exact route; delay or failure to find the right passage meant death in the caverns. Their wanderings seemed endless. At length their only candle crew dim and expired, and they sank down to perish, like rats in a trap, in the awful dampness and foul, charnel-house air of the vaults. After a time a gleam of light revealed the secret door for which they sought, but it was necessary that they wait till darkness to effect their escape. Monçada's companion fell asleep and raved horribly of parricide: “An old man? — yes — well, the less blood in him. Grey hairs? — no matter, my crimes have helped to turn them grey. Hush, — how the stairs creak, they will not tell him it is his son's foot that is ascending? They dare not, the stones of the wall would give them [page 99:] the lie. Why did you not oil the hinges of the door? — now for it. He sleeps intensely, — aye, how calm he looks! — the calmer the fitter for heaven.” When he could bear these ravings no longer, Monçada roused his companion.

The monk whiled away the day with a tale of terror. He had, been, he confessed, the chief executioner of the convent. Once he had detected a young monk and a novice in love — the novice as a girl in disguise. He had grown to hate the young monk because of fancied slights and because he envied him his youth and noble bearing; so he welcomed with delight a change to be revenged upon him. He had betrayed them to the monastic authorities and then pretended to aid them in making their escape. He had led them through these very passages on their supposed route to safety. Indeed the very recess in which he and Monçada were secreted had been their tomb. He had hidden them there to wait for darkness to make their escape, and had closed and locked the door which formerly was across the niche. He had gone then to summon the Superior. “The Superior and four monks came and with their own hands drove several nails ... into the door, that effectually joined it to the staple, never to be disjoined ... [page 100:]

The work was soon done, — the work never to be undone.” The two within shrieked in terror when they thought themselves detected; they shrieked again when they heard the hammers without — “O how different was the accent of its despair! — they knew their doom.” The monk watched at the door and listened gleefully to the sounds that betrayed their agonies; before death released them, they grew to hate each other, and the man had actually attempted to save his own life by feeding from the body of his sweetheart. After the lapse of some time, the cell had been opened, the door removed, and the bodies taken elsewhere.

Maturin's account is longer and embellished with more variations [[variations]], but the same general outline of incidents as in “The Cask of Amontillado” is there. It is told in the first person, the first part from the point of view of the young Spaniard, the second part in the words of the avenging monk himself. The victim is beset by nameless misgivings; the wanderings in the foul caverns seem endless; they stumble over the bones of those who have been interred here in former years. There is the same niche, or recess, in which the victim is imprisoned, this time by walling up instead of chains. The door is nailed, “never be disjoined.” [page 101:] The shrieks from within reveal the increasing despair by the change in tone. In both accounts the victims perish and the betrayers gloat over their deeds malevolently.

I have mentioned five sources which might have furnished suggestions for “The Cask of Amontillado,” two of the walling-up incident, two of the avenger's luring his victim through subterranean passages, and one, Melmoth, which includes both phases. In neither St. Leon nor The Last Days of Pompeii is the victim's agony increased by the process of being walled-up and in neither of them does the incident result in the death of the victim. It may be of interest in judging the relative merits of these suggestions — certainly it is justice to Godwin — to point out that St. Leon preceded by some years any of the others; it dates from 1799, Melmoth from 1820 “Le Grande Bretèche from 1832, The Last Days of Pompeii from 1834, Headley's account, based of course upon fact, from 1845, and Poe's tale from 1846. St. Leon, therefore, might very well have served as the direct or indirect inspiration of subsequent accounts. Balzac's treatment can be traced more directly to Melmoth, I think, because he is known to have been so greatly impressed by that [page 102:] novel that he attempted a variation and continuation of the life of the wanderer.(19) Indeed, a veritable, Melmoth cult sprang up in France in the 1820's and 1830's. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, so far as the origin of Poe's tale is concerned, it is obvious that its real merit lies not in the material he used but in his masterly treatment of it. He was combining originally incidents that were not particularly original. With variations, Poe might have expressed himself, had he been equally frank, as did Irving in regard to his Tales of a Traveller: “I have read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more than all my brain is filled with all kinds of odds and ends. ... so that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it.”(20)

There are other details in Melmoth from which Poe might have borrowed in his search for incidents of horror. The tortures devised for young Monçada by the [page 103:] Jesuit brotherhood, of which he was an unwilling member, rival anything Poe ever imagined. He was thrown into the blackness of a hideous dungeon; no part of his horrible experience was more awful than his awakening in “the darkness of day.” He tried to compute time by the visits of the monk with his food. He counted sixty over and over in order to try to take account of the passage of time, but he found, to his unaccountable dismay, that he counted more rapidly than time passed. He tried vainly to beat off the loathesome reptiles and to keep them from his bread and water. And always there was the horror of the darkness. Perhaps among the many more startling modes of torture, the terrifying darkness which greeted the victim in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,” when he regained consciousness, has been forgotten.

The first period of his confinement was pawed in total darkness as he sought gropingly to explore the bounds of his prison. He was preoccupied with the task of trying to measure the extent of the dungeon [page 104:] in much the same fashion that Monçada in Melmoth tried to keep track of time.

No doubt it will be remembered that the iron walls of the inquisition prison, in which Poe's character was thrown, were “rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstitions of the monks had given rise.” He saw upon the walls “The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images.” When he first noticed these figures, the outlines were faded and blurred. Later when the mode of torture was chanced, the figures also changed appearance markedly.

Monçada suffered a similar experience, but one which in some respects seems like a very much weakened version, toned down for a weaker victim. One could like [page 105:] to think that Poe was conscious of his following and use of Maturin's idea in order to appreciate fully just what he could accomplish by a deliberate heightening of effect.

In the course of the story these figures are alluded to several times; for example, when Monçada was describing to the Bishop his tortures, he related that the monks “covered the walls of my cell with representations of demons the traces of which still remain.”

Professor D. L. Clark has suggested as an origin of the hideous pictures of “Poe's tale the crazed fancies of the victim in “The Man in the Bell,” a Blackwood's story, in which a man is caught in a bell tower with the huge bell sweeping from side to side within an inch of his face.(21) “In the vast cavern of the bell [page 106:] hideous faces appeared, and glared down on me with terrifying frowns, or with grinning mockery, still more appalling. At last the devil himself, accoutred, as in the common description of the evil spirit, with hoof, horn, and tall, and eyes of infernal lustre, made his appearance.”(22) Miss Alterton accepts also this explanation of the spectral figures.(23) Poe had undoubtedly read “The Man in the Bell,” for he referred to it satirically in his “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” burlesqued it in “A Predicament,” and mentioned it in the letter of April 30, 1835, to T. W. White. His “The Pit and the Pendulum” shows other traces also of the Blackwood's story. Whatever his unconscious indebtedness to various sources may have been, Poe himself probably was not consciously making use of any one source when he created the weird drawings in the Inquisition prison. As in the case of the entombment of Fortunato, he was using a device which was perhaps common property in the romances of his period. And again, comparison with the two sources [page 107:] suggested for the detail of the hideous figures reveals the superiority of Poe's handling; if there was an indebtedness for the idea, his use of that idea, amply justified his borrowing it.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 80:]

1.  Op. cit., 130.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 82:]

2.  An excellent discussion of “The Byronic Hero” may be consulted. In Eino Ralio's The Haunted Castle, London, 1927, Chapter VI, 219ff.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 83:]

3.  See Railo, op. cit., and Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, London, 1921, for detailed discussions of the Gothic romance.

4.  William Beckford, 1786. I have used the American edition of Pollard and Moss, New York.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 86:]

5.  Southern Literary Messenger, August, 1836. Works, XIV, 45.

6.  In a review of Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers, S. L. M., December, 1835, Works, VIII, 92, Poe wrote name of the author of Caleb Williams, and of St. Leon, is, with us, a word of weight, and one which we consider a guarantee for the excellence of any composition to which it may be affixed.” He liked to allude to the reputed manner in which Godwin involved his hero in a web of difficulties and then wrote a first volume of his tale in order to explain the involvement. His “The Philosophy of Composition” (April, 1846, Graham's Magazine) began with a discussion of plot with Caleb Williams cited as one method of developing plot.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 89:]

7.  St. Leon, London, 1850, 363.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 90:]

8.  Ibid., 3.

9.  Poe used the phrase, “In the Manner of the Psychological Autobiographists” as a tag for “Siope — A Fable” when it appeared in The Baltimore Book, 1838, and in the volume of 1840.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 91:]

10.  Ibid., 33.

11.  Ibid., 293-94.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 92:]

12.  See particularly Maturin's treatment of the proceedings of the inquisition in his Melmoth, Lewis's in The Monk, and Mrs. Radcliffe's in The Italian.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 93:]

13.  Volume IV, chapter VII, 408ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 95:]

14.  Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe, 170-171.

15.  “The Origin of the Cask of Amontillado,” American Literature, VI (March, 1934), 18ff.

16.  Through Professor J. S. Wilson, I am indebted to Professor A. B. Shepperson of the University of Virginia for calling my attention to this resemblance.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 96:]

17.  Certainly an experience in subterranean vaults was a common device of the horror novels. Walpole subjected his Theodore and Isabella (The Castle of Otranto) to the terrors of a mysterious underground passage in their escape from pursuit. Mrs. Radcliffe made use of the device in one way and another in practically all her novels. Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly adapted the underground experience to a cavern. Much of the terrible story of Lewis's The Monk took place in the subterranean portion of the monastary [[monastery]].

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 97:]

18.  Charles Robert Maturin. Edinburgh, 1820, 4 volumes. Poe's acquaintance with. Maturin's novel is established by direct allusions to it. In his “Letter to B——,” which prefaced the volume of poetry of 1931, he wrote: “In such case I should no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in Melmoth, who labors indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand.” (Killis Campbell, The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Appendix, 314.) Practically the same statement occurs in his review of Stanley Thorne, Graham's Magazine, Jan., 1842 (Works, XI, 13).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 102:]

19.  Balzac's continuation of Maturin's story, “Melmoth reconcilie,” dates from 1835; it first appeared in a miscellany, Le Livre des Contes. In it Melmoth effected his escape from immortality by forcing his unnatural power upon a French bank clerk who in turn passed it on in succession to a number of others. Its final owner succeeded in dying, contrary to the contract, through excessive debauchery.

20.  “To the Reader,” 14.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 105:]

21.  “Sources of Poe's ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ” Modern Language Notes, XLIV (June, 1929), 347ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 106:]

22.  “The Man in the Bell,” Blackwood's, X (Nov., 1821), 373ff.

23.  Margaret Alterton, “An Additional Source for Poe's ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ” Modern Language Notes, XLVIII (June, 1933), 349ff.