Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter VI.I,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 536-545 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 536:]

Poe's habit of sedulous and effective revision has been a matter of frequent comment on the part of his biographers and critics. The- most complete account of his alterations in his tales is that by R. A. Stewart in his “Introduction to the Notes” and his textual collations in the Harrison edition of 1802 [[1902]]. Since that time others have made use of Mr. Stewart's findings in his work of collation. Additional original versions of Poe's tales have been examined, and bit by bit most of: the striking emendations in the form of his stories have been noted. Thomas O. Mabbott did belated justice to The Gold Bug” in his handsome edition of that tale in 1928 and attempted to restore its authentic text in accordance the corrections and additions made by Poe in the Lorimer Graham copy of the Tales of 1845. More recently, John Grier Varner, Jr., has made accessible in a facsimile edition the text of the five tales printed in 1832 in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, and has pointed out in his “Introduction” some of the striking changes which were made in them for the Messenger publication. [page 537:] But l know of no attempt to discuss in detail the inferences which may be drawn from a general examination of the revisions in Poe's tales, as Professor Killis Campbell discussed, in his edition of the Poems in 1917, the changes in the poems. Certainly one of the surest ways of determining Poe's development as a tale-writer is to consider his repeated alterations in his stories.

All his life long Poe was a merciless critic of his own style. I have sometimes thought that if those who cringed under his critical b1udgeonings had taken account of his severity with himself, they might have derived comfort from it. More and more, as the years passed, him revisions revealed his insistence upon verbal accuracy and his appreciation of elegant phrasing. At times some of his stories contained, and continue to contain, the elements of what he might have termed bad taste in others, but for the most part he succeeded in weeding out a sentence or detail here, a paragraph there, that were tinged with repulsive suggestions. He was doing for his own stories exactly the kind of thing he suggested in his critiques that others do. The all-important consideration for us, however, is the fact that he had learned to detect [page 538:] and analyze the faults of the story before him, whether it was his own work or that of another. That tone of his early critiques may have, in some cases, been suggested by current review in the British journals is of little importance in this connection. Whether these early opinions and standards were borrowed by Poe or were his own, they became the measure of his own work after he had written them. The critic, in this case, proved the generation of a story-writer of exact and discriminating taste and workmanship.

Then toward the close of his life Poe wrote “The Philosophy of Composition,” he explained that he meant to expose the progressive steps by which he had attained the finished product, “The Raven.” He believed, he wrote, that only “autorial vanity” or sheer inability to retrace such steps had been responsible for the fact that no author had previously written such a paper. As for himself, he had no repugnance in exposing his own methods and not the least difficulty in recalling the various steps of his composition. Some of his critics have been inclined to believe that he probably flattered his own “autorial vanity” by overdrawing the smooth machinery by which his poem attained its “ultimate point of completion,” that he [page 539:] may have been suiting his analysis of method to the thing produced. He wrote, however, at least one paragraph of sincere confession, I think, when he gave a general sketch of an author in his workshop.

It is the purpose of this chapter to go behind the scenes of Poe's own literary productions and investigate cone of the minute secrets of the wheels and pinions, the red paint and the black patches, of which he wrote. For this examination there has at least been no setting of the stage and no oilling of the machinery. It gives, however, no less favorable impression of the industry and skill with which he wrought. A study of his revisions, in his attempt to make his practice conform to his theoretical conception [page 540:] of a short story, is necessary to a complete account of Poe the craftsman.

Such a study appears hopelessly detailed when one considers that he published seventy stories, and that of these, two appeared five times within his lifetime, fifteen appeared four times, fourteen appeared three times, twenty-four appeared twice, fifteen but once. In other words, there were one hundred and seventy-five separate publications of his tales. Some of these were definitely reprints without changes in the form of the text; nineteen of the total number of printing may be dismissed on this ground. There are, then, one hundred and fifty-six texts to be taken into consideration, each one representing a different version with revisions varying in extent “from a few unimportant emendations to the careful reconstruction of almost every sentence.”(1)

Nor was Poe in many cases satisfied with the last published form. The Lorimer Graham copy of his Tales of l845 bears, as Mr. Stewart has pointed in Poe's handwriting. The files of the Broadway Journal which Poe owned and gave to Mrs. Whitman show manuscript changes; and Griswold probably [page 541:] had further revisions, as his versions of the stories sometimes vary considerably from the last printed copies as well as from the known manuscript revisions. Besides these correction, there exist manuscript versions of some of the tales which differ from the printed forms. Poe's revisions show more than a natural artist's desire to put his work into the most finished form; they indicate either the fluctuations of his taste or a conscious and painstaking effort to write what the public demanded. They show also the solidifying, or rather the taking shape, of a formula for testing the short story. And most of all, they show a growth in critical acumen and surety that most of us are too much inclined to believe was Poe's natural endowment.

An examination of Poe's work in the field of the short story reveals distinct waves of creation, publications, revision, and republication. Between the publication of his first seven stories in the Courier, the Visiter, and Godey's, and the reappearance of these stories in revised form in the Messenger, Poe was busy in his work-shop, tinkering, chopping off bite, adding others, polishing even changing the contour of his design in some cases. These early stories [page 542:] were subjected to the most thorough revisions. If it is permissible to resort to mathematic terms in discussing a matter of literary technique, we may say that the work of revision which Poe did on his earliest group of stories, before they were published the second time, was five times as great as that which he did before their third appearance in 1840. Again when these seven stories and the next seven published during his connection with the Messenger appeared in the versions of the 1845 volume of Tales and in the Broadway Journal of the same year, his revisions approximated four times as much pork as the revisions of the same stories far the 1840 volume. Of the six new stories published in 1845, four had a second printing in the same year with few or no changes and one, “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” was issued four times in America and England. None of the eight tales which appeared after 1845 had a second printing in Poe's lifetime; it is, therefore, impossible to tell just what his revisions would have been like in his last years except as we may judge from the Griswold texts and the few changes made in manuscript on the various texts of 1845. It seems fairly evident that he would probably never again have re-worked his [page 543:] stories with such thoroughness as he had previously done. After all, there comes a time when even a literary artist must admit that he has very nearly done the best that he can with the materials in hand.

Poe had, then, to great periods of revision so far as his stories are concerned — between the years 1833 and 1835 and between the years 1843 and 1845. A comparison of his two periods of abundant revision with the events of his life confirms a rather obvious fact: he revised most patiently and carefully when he was jobless. In the year between 1833 and 1835 a driving purpose of recasting his work so at to win the public favor urged him to meticulous reworking of his stories. And a desperate need for food and lodging for his wife, her mother, and himself drove him to painstaking care in the years between 1843 and 1845. Of course a change in his own literary ideals must be taken into account in both periods. In 1835 he was acquiescing in Judge Tucker's criticism of “MS. Found in a Bottle” because it “was written some years ago — one among the first I ever wrote,” and estimating proudly the progress of his own art.(2) Before 1843 he [page 544:] has formulated definitely his conception of the artistic tale. In each of these two periods also he had high hopes of securing volume publications. He had been encouraged to believe in 1833 that he might look forward to an early issuance of his “Tales of the Folio Club,” and in 1843 he was desperately trying to republish his tales in order to increase his chances of establishing his own magazine and, as he wrote Doctor Anthon, had prepared then in every respect for the press. At any rate, he was without a definite job in these two periods, and his energy took the form of careful and complete revision of his old tale's as well as or the creation of some excellent new ones.

Consequently, since Poe's work of revision looms largest at two periods in his life with a lapse of ten years between them, a study of the changes which he made in certain stories, first for the 1835 appearance and later for the 1845, together with some general comparisons and observations on the nature of the revisions made at each of the two periods, should be helpful by way of acquainting us with Poe's methods. I have chosen for detailed study, therefore, the seven stories which appeared before he began his editorial duties: “Metzengerstein,” The Duc de [page 545:] L’Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” “Bon-Bon,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and “The Visionary” (“The Assignation”). The texts of these stories in their earliest form were not collated in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James A. Harrison, which may be consulted in regard to the variant versions of most of Poe's stories.(3) In addition to the detailed examination of the revisions in these seven tales, I have considered the changes made by Poe in all of his stories in order to substantiate the conclusions in regard to the selected stories and to suggest some general inferences on the nature of his revisions.(4)

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 540:]

1.  R. A. Stewart, “Introduction to the Notes,” Complete Works, 1902, II, 299.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 543:]

2.  December 1, 1835. J. S. Wilson, “Unpublished Letters of Edgar Allan Poe,” loc. cit., 654.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 545:]

3.  In spite of the fact that there are many inaccuracies in the collation of the Harrison edition, it gives a clear view of the principle changes made by Poe from time to time, and it remains thus far the only attempt at anything like a full examination of his revisions in the tales.

4.  In general I have relied upon the Harrison edition for details of revision, but I have compared, whenever it has been possible, the material in Harrison with the original versions. Among original texts, the most important consulted are: Philadelphia Saturday Courier, Baltimore Saturday Visiter, Godey's Lady's Book, Southern Literary Messenger, The Gift for various years, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, 1837-39, Graham's Magazine, Snowden's The Ladies’ Companion, The Dollar Newspaper for 1843, Broadway Journal, American Review, Democratic Review, The Columbian Magazine, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840, and Tales of 1845. The most important original texts as yet uncollated are those of Poe's tales which appeared in 1849 in The Flag of Our Union. The bibliography gives specific information as to the various texts which I have used.