Text: William Henry Gravely, Jr., “Chapter 09,” The Early Political and Literary Career of Thomas Dunn English Story, dissertation, 1953 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 531:]

The violent quarrel which terminated, the personal association of English and Poe was an Indirect result of the intimate friendship that sprang up during the year 1845 between Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood, wife of Samuel S. Osgood, the artist. This friendship developed rapidly from the very moment that Nathaniel P. Willis introduced Poe to Mrs. Osgood in the drawing room of the Astor House. The meeting must have taken place early in March, for, according to Mrs. Osgood, Poe asked for an introduction only a few days after she had “just heard of his enthusiastic and partial eulogy of” her work “in his lecture on American literature.”(1) The lecture to which Mrs. Osgood referred was delivered at the New York Historical Society on February 28.(2) “I shall never forget the morning,” said Mrs. Osgood, “when I was summoned to the drawing-room by Mr. Willis to receive him. With his proud and beautiful head erect, his dark eyes flashing with the elective light of feeling and of thought, a peculiar, an inimitable blending of sweetness and hauteur in his expression and manner, he greeted me, calmly, gravely, almost coldly; yet with so marked an earnestness [page 532:] that I could not help being deeply impressed by it. From that moment we were friends; although we met only during the first year of our acquaintance.”(3) During the [page 533:] months which followed their first meeting, Poe and Mrs. Osgood expressed their sentimental feelings toward each other in a series of love poems which appeared from time to time in The Broadway Journal; and during a portion of the same period they carried on what was evidently an ardent and not altogether discreet correspondence. Mrs. Osgood described Poe's letters as “divinely beautiful.”(4)

It is quite probable, too, that Mrs. Osgood's short story, “Ida Grey,” published in Graham's Magazine for August, 1845, is a romanticized treatment of this sentimental attachment.(5) Not only are the heroine and her lover strongly suggestive of Mrs. Osgood and Poe, respectively, but the story appeared less than a month, after the occurrence of a series of events which raise the question of whether Poe and Mrs. Osgood were always able to keep their friendship on a strictly Platonic basis. Ida Grey is described as a beautiful and bewitching young widow of twenty-four whose great love came too late. Before she met the passion of her life, she had always been a coquette. But in spite of her apparent wildness, waywardness, and even heartlessness, “everybody seemed to love her and to be happy in her presence.” Although the world indulged her and looked upon her as its own, no one was really “less fitted for its heartless conventionalisms [page 534:] than she”; and even though she had given to her husband “that playful, caressing, yielding, docile affection which she seemed ready to bestow on all who awoke her gratitude by kindness,” he had not been the kind of man whose mind she could respect or upon whose heart she could rest. Consequently, her grief over his death, though poignant while it had lasted, was exceedingly brief.

It was about eighteen months after the death of her husband that Ida first met the man who aroused in her the love and affection of which her heart was capable. She was attending a brilliant party at the house of her friend Mrs. M —— when the latter's husband “asked permission to introduce his friend,” of whom she had already “read and heard so much.” Mrs. Osgood's description of this meeting is surprisingly similar to her description of her own first meeting with Poe, quoted above: “Only a few formal words passed between Ida and her new acquaintance; but I remarked that his keen grey eyes were bent with singular earnestness upon her face, and though his manner and expression were merely and coldly courteous, there was a peculiar depth in his tone, which only some strong emotion could have given it.” Ida knew at once that she had met the man whom she had been destined to love, but, since he was already married, her passion was hopeless.

After this profound experience Ida withdrew from society and at length entered a convent. The rest of her story is told chiefly by means of extracts from her journal. She [page 535:] had hoped to be spared any further meeting with her beloved until she could be united with him in heaven, but he was unwilling to wait as she would have been. He came to see her and wrote her “words of almost divine passion.” Moreover, he bade her tell him of her love “as proudly as if he had a right, an unquestionable, an undoubted, a divine right to demand” it. The story ends with a poem from Ida's journal which Griswold later singled out to illustrate Mrs. Osgood's success in depicting “the struggle of a pure and passionate nature with a hopeless affection.”(6)

It is hardly necessary to point out how careful one should be to avoid the fallacy of reading too much biographical significance into any highly romanticized treatment of a sentimental attachment.(7) Perhaps Mrs. Osgood's feelings [page 536:] toward Poe never went beyond that “affectionate interest in him” which she so frankly acknowledged to Griswold(8) and which may have been primarily motivated by her admiration for Poe's genius and by her pity for his sufferings. It is possible, too, that Poe's pursuit of Mrs. Osgood, though hardly altogether Platonic, was little more than one of “the many little poetical episodes, in which,” according to the poetess, “the impassioned romance of his temperament impelled him to indulge.”(9) Furthermore, it may well be, as Professor Quinn has quite plausibly suggested, that “the very publicity of the courtship, while it caused comment, made it more innocuous.”(10) Yet evidence does exist — however suspect it may be — which has led some students of Poe to believe that the courtship developed into a more serious affair than Professor Quinn's treatment of it would indicate. Unquestionably, it is incumbent upon the objective biographer not to suppress evidence of this kind provided he also points out those facts which tend to invalidate it.

Although the reminiscences of Poe which Mrs. Osgood wrote only a few weeks before her death for inclusion in Griswold's then still unwritten “Memoir” of the poet throw [page 537:] a charming light over her friendship with Poe and his wife, there is a personal letter from Mrs. Osgood to Griswold, written earlier in the year 1850 and printed for the first time in a volume of the latter's correspondence, which presents the relationship in a less attractive light. Because of the forgeries which Griswold committed at Poe's expense and because of his adroit and deceptively palliating device of introducing Mrs. Osgood's wholly sympathetic reminiscences in his “Memoir” in such a way as to make his own falsifications of Poe's life seem less spitefully motivated than they actually were, it is a pity that neither Mrs. Osgood's personal letter to Griswold nor her reminiscences are available in manuscript. Although the reminiscences have the ring of truth, the seemingly self-contradictory letter must be regarded with suspicion until the original can be found.

If the letter in question is authentic and if Mrs. Osgood herself did not misrepresent the facts of her relationship with Poe, serious complications arose almost from the beginning of their acquaintance. “I never thought of him,” she remarked emphatically, “till he sent me his ‘Raven’ and asked Willis to introduce him to me, and immediately after I went to Albany, and afterwards to Boston and Providence to avoid him, and he followed me to each of those places and wrote to me, imploring me to love him, many a letter which I did not reply to until his wife added her entreaties to his and said that I might save him from infamy, and her from death, by [page 538:] showing an affectionate interest in him.”(11) If this account seems difficult to reconcile with the beautiful picture of Poe's home life which Mrs. Osgood painted in her reminiscences or with her statement — also in her reminiscences — that she could not speak too earnestly or too warmly of “the charming love and confidence” which existed between Poe and his wife,(12) one should make some allowance for the circumstances which must have induced her to write it. Near death, and hurt by the cruel realization that her reputation was still suffering from the slanders of certain jealous persons who continued to place the worst possible construction on her friendship with Poe, Mrs. Osgood was no doubt extremely anxious that her proposed reminiscences of the poet should be introduced in any life that Griswold might see fit to prepare in such a way as to establish conclusively her own innocence and to put down those persons who continued to slander her. “I wish the simple truth to be known,” she said,” — that he sought me, not I him.”(13)

Indeed, any seeming discrepancy between the content of the reminiscences and that of the letter is primarily due, in all probability, to the circumstances of composition. Even the charmingly dignified reminiscences, written with definite publication in view, unmistakably reveal that Mrs. [page 539:] Osgood intended to represent herself as a person whose companionship Poe had avidly sought. We are told that he asked to be introduced to her and that during the only year in which they actually saw each other he came to her “for counsel and kindness in all his many anxieties and griefs.”(14) We are also told that when Mrs. Osgood was traveling for her health during the same year Poe could not have persuaded her to maintain a correspondence with him had it not been for “the earnest entreaties of his wife, who,” according to Mrs. Osgood, “imagined that my influence over him had a restraining and beneficial effect.”(15) It is true that Mrs. Osgood's private letter to Griswold suggests that Poe's pursuit of her was impassioned and almost hysterical at times, but there is little in her description of Poe's behavior which cannot be explained in terms of his desperate need of the companionship of a sympathetic and understanding woman who could encourage him and give him renewed hope at a time when his anxieties, domestic and otherwise, had brought him to the point of despair and nervous exhaustion. It is very likely, too, that both Poe and Mrs. Osgood derived much sentimental pleasure from dramatizing their emotional conflicts. But as they were both impulsive and naively unconventional, they laid themselves open to the slanders of persons who were either jealous of their friendship [page 540:] or outraged by their lack of deference to the outward proprieties.

A singular instance of how Poe's relationship with Mrs. Osgood was to blight his reputation many years later may be found in some distorted “recollections” by the Rev. Henry F. Harrington, who, according to William M. Griswold, was a brother-in-law of Mrs. Osgood.(16) Writing thirty-five years after Mrs. Osgood's death, Harrington denounced the editors of The Critic for what he considered to be “an unqualified endorsement of the laudatory estimate” which Professor Minto had placed upon Poe's character in an article written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.(17) In support of his denunciation, Harrington stated that Mrs. Osgood herself, who was visiting at his home in Albany — probably in 1848 — told him that, during his absence, Poe had come to the house “and in passionate terms had besought her to elope with him.”(18) According [page 541:] to Harrington's version of the Incident, Mrs. Osgood described Poe's “attitude as well as reported his words — how he went down on his knees and clasped his hands, and pleaded for her consent; how she met him with mingled ridicule and reproof, appealing to his better nature, and striving to stimulate a resolution to abandon his vicious courses; and how finally he took his leave, baffled and humiliated, if not ashamed.”(19) Among other derogatory remarks concerning Poe's character, Harrington related that in 1847 Mrs. Osgood had also told him that she had just returned from ministering to Virginia Poe at her home in Fordham and that she had found her dying without the commonest conveniences “while her husband was spending his time in the city in a round of selfish indulgences.”(20)

Harrington's so-called recollections — which include another story, based entirely on hearsay, of an actual seduction on the part of Poe — give every indication of being distorted and utterly untrustworthy. In the first place, they are not recollections of Poe and his life — as he labeled them — at all, but are based upon secondhand information from beginning to end. Secondly, Harrington's story of the attempted seduction of Mrs. Osgood about a year after Virginia's death cannot be reconciled with Mrs. Osgood's published statement that she and Poe met “only during the first year” of [page 542:] their acquaintance(21) — presumably not after the spring of l846 — or with her admission that Poe always retained her regard because of “a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably approached all women who won his respect.”(22) Thirdly, the story of Poe's neglect of a dying wife, attributed by Harrington to Mrs. Osgood, is completely at variance, not only with Mrs. Osgood's published testimony that it was in Poe's “simple yet poetical home” that his character “appeared in its most beautiful light,”(23) but with the overwhelming testimony of close friends of the family. Clearly, Harrington's testimony discredits either himself or Mrs. Osgood as a source of accurate information about Poe. The discredited one appears to be Harrington. The whole tenor of his narrative indicates that he was impelled to write what he wrote because of a sense of moral obligation to the youth of the country and that he was not in the least concerned about rendering justice to Poe. As a rabid moralist, he seems to have been bitterly indignant at the very thought of what effect the apotheosis of a man with acknowledged failings like Poe's would have upon the morals of the young. Seldom is such a person sufficiently tolerant of the weaknesses of a sensitively organized man of genius to make an unwarped appraisal of his actions or [page 543:] of his character. It is more than likely that he will exaggerate and otherwise exploit those weaknesses for the purpose of making youth vividly aware, through concrete example, of the kind of man it ought not to emulate.

Let us now proceed to test the validity of the new evidence concerning Poe's relations with Mrs. Osgood which has recently come to light through the publication of Thomas Holley Chivers’ Life of Poe. Not only did Chivers presume to speak from firsthand knowledge, but Professor Davis has held in his interesting Introduction to the Life that there is a considerable amount of “parallel reference” which supports the “absolute veracity” of Chivers’ account of his brief association with Poe during the summer of 1845.(24) Despite this parallel reference, however, the very fullness of detail with which Chivers attempted to reconstruct his literary discussions with Poe, a number of years after acknowledging that “mental excitement” had made him inarticulate whenever he had been in Poe's presence,(25) surely indicates that the discussions recorded in his Life must have been far different from those which actually occurred. How, then, can we justly assume that the record of Chivers's conversations with Poe on nonliterary topics was not similarly fabricated and equally far afield from the truth. Moreover, we must not overlook the [page 544:] fact that when detailed conversations are reconstructed by a man as inordinately conceited as Chivers undoubtedly was, they are especially prone to take their general coloring from the prejudices and dogmatic opinions of the writer who reconstructs them. Indeed — notwithstanding his ostensible admiration for Poe — Chivers managed to saturate his Life with enough of his own egotism to make it pretty evident that his main object in writing about Poe was to use him as a foil to glorify himself. Ironically, Chivers’ aim, in at least one respect, seems to have been identical with that which he contemptuously attributed to Griswold: “to embalm his dying name in the amber of Poe's immortality.”(26)

To reject Chivers’ record of his personal association with Poe on grounds of its distortion of the truth is not necessarily to imply that it was without any factual basis. For instance, it can be clearly seen from Chivers’ letter to Poe of September 9, 1845,(27) that both Tennyson and Shelley had been the subjects of at least some critical discussion between the two men. The reference in the same letter to a statement by Poe to the effect that he had not “touched a drop of the ashes of Hell” since Chivers’ departure from New York surely suggests that Chivers had seen Poe under the Influence of drink during his recent visit there. Furthermore there is no sound reason to doubt that Chivers was in New York about the time that certain events to which he alluded [page 545:] in his reminiscences of Poe — events concerning which he laid claim to firsthand knowledge — are known to have taken place.

Sometime during the early summer of 1845 in all probability, Chivers arrived in New York to make arrangements for the publication of his volume, The Lost Pleiad; and Other Poems. Undoubtedly, he was still in New York on July 18, for the brief “Prefatory Apologue” to the volume, appearing over his initials, was written from New York on that date.(28) [page 546:] If the undependable Chivers did not falsify the facts in regard to the time of his first meeting with Poe, he must have arrived in New York before the end of June, 1845. According to his reminiscences, Chivers saw Poe on three out of four consecutive days at a time when Poe was trying to avoid appearing before the literary societies of the New York University to read an original poem. The first of these meetings allegedly occurred during the first week of their acquaintance. Since it has already been established in this study that Poe was scheduled to read his poem on July 1, it automatically follows — if the first meeting occurred at the time indicated in the reminiscences — that Chivers not only arrived in New York no later than June, but must also have met Poe near the end of that month. Of course, Chivers’ assertion that he persuaded Poe not to print an advertisement in The Broadway Journal informing the public of the dissolution of his partnership with Briggs is additional indication of his presence in New York at some time during the period between June 28 and July 12, when the change in the editorial management occurred.

It can be seen, then, that Chivers could have hardly chosen a more unfortunate time for making the personal acquaintance of Poe, who at that time was passing through an exceedingly trying period in both his business and his personal relationships. If he and Charles F. Briggs had not already come to the parting of the ways, they were on [page 547:] the verge of doing so. By that time also, Poe had become much disturbed about the charge of forgery which Mrs. Osgood's friend, Edward J. Thomas, had heard whispered against him and about which Mrs. Osgood herself had informed him. Nor can one discount the possibility that when Poe wrote to Duyckinck on June 26, 1845,(29) mentioning certain “matters of domestic affliction” which were depriving him of his little remaining energy, he was referring not only to Virginia's illness, but to the disrupting effect that his friendship with Mrs. Osgood had produced upon the harmony of his domestic circle. There can be little doubt that, for a time at least, the friendship caused both Virginia and Mrs. Clemm a good deal of anxiety. In view of all these worrying matters, it would be surprising indeed if Poe had been able to compose the poem which he had agreed to deliver before the literary societies of the New York University — especially when such a task was a most difficult one for him to accomplish even under the most favorable circumstances. Small wonder, then, if Chivers had found Poe irresponsibly drunk on at least one occasion; Mrs. Clemm emotionally upset about Poe's behavior; and Poe himself too nervously ill — or, as Chivers and Mrs. Clemm seem undiscerningly to have thought, pretending to be too ill — to appear before the literary societies as he had promised to do.(30) At such times as these Poe was likely to show to others his least attractive [page 548:] side and to be hardly responsible for what he said or did.

In a personal reminiscence of Poe which gives every indication of being untrustworthy and maliciously inspired, Chivers said that he was escorting the drunken poet in the direction of the latter's home on East Broadway when Poe. confided to him that he was involved in a love affair with a lady who was then in Providence. Moreover, the words which Chivers put into Poe's mouth clearly identify the lady as Mrs. Osgood. Chivers described Poe's alleged confession as follows:

According to Chivers, Poe's drunkenness prevented any further discussion of the affair on that particular day. Two days later, however, Chivers took Poe for a ride in a carriage and again broached the subject. “As we were going along,” said Chivers, “looking him full in the face and laughing, I requested him to let me know what lady it was with whom he was so in love? When, walling up his eyes under the narrow [page 549:] brim of his hat, and looking as much abashed as any boy would on being teased about his sweetheart, denied, in the most peremptory manner, his ever having been involved in any love-scrape with any woman either in Providence or any other part of the world.”(32) In the afternoon of the following day, however, Chivers met Poe “drest in his finest clothes” and heading toward the office of The Broadway Journal.(33) He was then on this way to Providence,” said Chivers,” — had not a dollar in the world — borrowed ten from me — requesting me at the same time not to let his wife or Mrs. Clemm know anything about his going — and left me. Some body, he said, had written him to come on there, and he was obliged to go, but would return again the next day. He came back the next day, as he had promised.”(34)

What is one to think of the trustworthiness or good intentions of a man who would seek to publicize the foregoing story regardless of its truth or falsity? Even were one to grant the unjustifiable premise that Poe did make a drunken and ungentlemanly confession to Chivers, he made it in confidence to a man who pretended to be his sympathetic and understanding friend. Moreover, according to his own admission, Chivers endeavored — after Poe had become sober again — to pry from his friend additional information concerning the affair, only to receive a flat denial of [page 550:] everything that his friend had allegedly confessed. Yet Chivers apparently had no scruples about publishing this story in such a way as to create the impression that Poe — although notoriously irresponsible for his remarks when drunk — was actually involved in an amour and that he was merely trying to protect the reputation of the lady in Providence when he later retracted his confession. Would a thoroughly honorable man — especially on evidence so ill founded — have been thus careless of the reputations of the two persons most immediately concerned (even though both of them were dead) or thus indifferent to the feelings of Mrs. Clemm, whose hospitality, along with that of Poe and Virginia, he had eagerly accepted, or to the feelings of the husband of the dead lady, to whom he might have done the grossest kind of injustice?

Although Chivers’ uncritical, obtuse, and deceptively objective account of what he allegedly knew about Poe's relations with a lady in Providence is too contemptible, as it stands, to merit serious consideration, his story may have had some factual basis, however erroneous were its details or however inaccurate was the impression of Poe's behavior which he sought to leave with his prospective readers. According to Chivers, Poe's journey to Providence evidently took place shortly after he had recuperated from the sickness, or pretended sickness, that had prevented him from appearing before the literary societies of the New York University on the evening of July [page 551:] 1. Now it can be conclusively shown that Poe did leave New York almost exactly at this time to attend to a matter in which Mrs. Osgood was directly involved. It was probably in the latter part of June that Mrs. Osgood told Poe of the charge of forgery that her friend, Edward J. Thomas, had heard whispered against him. Considerably worried, Poe brought his problem to Thomas Dunn English, who afterwards testified in the following words when required to state under oath what he knew about the charge of forgery imputed to Poe in an article which had appeared in the New York Evening Mirror of June 25, 1846:

Now it will be recalled from the preceding chapter of this study that English delivered, in person, a note from Poe to Thomas in which Poe demanded to know who was responsible for the accusation that had been leveled against him. On failing to receive at that time any written or satisfactory [page 552:] oral reply, Poe decided to resort to a lawsuit. Therefore, as he mentioned later in his lengthy rejoinder to English, he “left town to procure evidence.”(36) On his return to New York he found, awaiting him at his house, a satisfactory letter of explanation from Thomas dated July 5, 1845.(37) To whom would Poe naturally have gone to procure the evidence which he sought? Most probably to Mrs. Osgood, who had passed on to Poe the information which Thomas had given her. Naturally, too, Poe would almost certainly have wished to talk over with Mrs. Osgood the delicate matter of whether he should bring suit against a close personal friend of hers — especially a suit that might have been exceedingly embarrassing to her. It is quite understandable, also, that Poe would not have wanted to burden Virginia and Mrs. Clemm with this personal problem until he had solved it to his own satisfaction, and all the more so since it involved the reputation of a woman whose affectionate sympathy and interest evidently meant a great deal to him at that time and whose friendly relations with him had already given rise to slanderous rumors which had caused Virginia and Mrs. Clemm considerable anxiety.

It is not unlikely, then, that Poe did make an overnight journey by boat from New York to Providence during the first [page 553:] week in July, 1845, and that he went specifically to see Mrs. Osgood. Perhaps Poe had already written her that he wished to talk over with her his difficulties with Edward J. Thomas and she had replied, inviting him to come to Providence on a certain boat. It may be, also, that Poe did borrow money for the journey from Chivers and that he asked his friend not to say anything about his journey to Virginia or Mrs. Clemm. When Chivers remarked that Poe returned on the following day, he could only have meant that Poe began his homeward journey the day after that of his departure for Providence. In July, 1845, the overnight boats left New York late in the afternoon and arrived in Providence the next morning. Even if he returned to New York on one of the boats scheduled to leave Providence about 6P.M. on the day of his arrival, he would have been compelled to spend at least two nights away from his home.(38) Moreover, if Poe first saw Helen Whitman during this same visit to Providence — and it is at least a plausible assumption that he did —, his absence from home must have been even more protracted. In a letter to Mrs. Whitman dated October 1, 1848, Poe remarked:

Mrs. Whitman herself made a marginal notation on Poe's letter, identifying the year of this incident as 1845.(40) Later, she identified the time even more explicitly as being the same sultry night in July on which Poe had said, in his second poem entitled “To Helen,” that he saw her for the first time.(41)

Although English's testimony under oath unquestionably lends some plausibility to Chivers’ assertion that Poe went to Providence on a mission which he wished to keep hidden from his wife and Mrs. Clemm, it alters considerably the complexion of Chivers’ story of Poe's drunken confession of his amour with a lady in Providence. The very legitimate reason which Poe had for going on such a journey surely lessens the probability that he went to Providence for purposes that Chivers seems to have taken for granted, notwithstanding Poe's alleged retraction of what he had said when drunk. That Poe was “involved” in a matter vitally concerning Mrs. [page 555:] Osgood is clear, and it is possible, of course, that when he was in a drunken and irresponsible condition he may have said things which caused the none-too-astute Chivers to form the wrong Impressions. At any rate, one cannot escape the conclusion that in recording an alleged drunken confession of this nature Chivers was intentionally maligning Poe. Despite Chivers’ seeming ascription to himself of that quality of manliness which he accused Poe of lacking,(42) it is extremely doubtful whether Poe would have ever yielded to the unmanly impulse to engage in such petty scandalmongery as this. One must not overlook the fact that although Chivers ostensibly praised Poe as a poet and pronounced him to be “one [of] the greatest — if not the very greatest Critic [sic] that ever lived,”(43) he prepared his Life of Poe not long after he had written to Griswold as follows:

The intemperance of expression and utter lack of discernment Indicated by these remarks are often duplicated in [page 556:] Chivers’ Life, as when he cites Poe's letter of January 4, 1848, to George W. Eveleth, as definite proof that Poe “did not have a spark of love for his wife.”(45)

It is to Thomas Dunn English's credit, even though he became a bitter enemy of Poe and thereafter held a very low opinion of him as a man, that he never gave countenance to the slanderous rumors Involving Poe and Mrs. Osgood. Even though his angry testimony under oath Indicates that he knew considerably more about the matter than Chivers did, he always remained convinced that the friendship was an innocent one. Apropos, too, of the lack of sensitivity evinced by Chivers in his willingness to publicize Poe's irresponsible drunken ravings, if we assume for the moment that Poe uttered them, are some exceedingly sympathetic remarks by Mrs. Osgood herself. “I have been told,” she said of Poe, “that when his sorrows and pecuniary embarrassments had driven him to the use of stimulants, which a less delicate organization might have borne without Injury, he was in the habit of speaking disrespectfully of the ladies of his acquaintance. It is difficult for me to believe this.”(46) Then, in language which indicates that she would have been compassionate and discerning enough to understand, even though Poe, in one of his irresponsible moments, had spoken disrespectfully of her, as well as of other ladies, she added: [page 557:]

If these words are a fitting rebuke to certain female gossips who slandered both Poe and Mrs. Osgood, how much more do they serve as a lasting rebuke to Chivers, who, after professing the warmest kind of friendship for Poe, deliberately sought to malign him by recording for publication an allegedly drunken confession which he acknowledged Poe to have emphatically repudiated and which, if given currency, he must have known would cast a permanent shadow over both Poe's reputation and that of the unidentified lady in Providence should her Identity ever be disclosed.

But enough has been said about Chivers’ self-incriminating testimony concerning the relationship between Poe and Mrs. Osgood. Unfortunately, the friendship did arouse a considerable amount of disapproving comment among members of the literary coterie to which Mrs. Osgood belonged. Much of this comment was almost certainly motivated by both personal and literary jealousy. Poe — as we have already seen — was assiduously courted by the female literati of New York [page 558:] during the year following the publication of “The Raven,” and some of them unquestionably resented his marked attentions to the vivacious, gay, and charming Mrs. Osgood. At some undetermined time during the first half of 1846, this smoldering resentment came to a head.(48) It so happened that one of the coterie — Mrs. Elizabeth Fries Ellet visited Poe's home on a certain occasion and that, while there, she saw and read a letter from Mrs. Osgood to the poet which she considered to be compromising. Consequently, according to Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Ellet “took that lady to task for her indiscretion, and prevailed upon her to consent that a demand should be made for the return of her letters.”(49) A committee of two was then appointed, consisting of Margaret Fuller and Anne Lynch, who agreed to go to Poe's home for the purpose of performing this delicate task.(50) Basing her remarks on Miss Lynch's account of Poe's reception of the committee, Mrs. Whitman wrote, as follows, to Gills “Irritated by what he regarded as an unwarrantable interference on the part of Mrs. Ellet, Poe indignantly replied to the demand by saying, that ‘Mrs. Ellet had better look to her own letters.’”(51) Because of this reprehensible, [page 559:] though not unprovoked, remark, Poe gained an implacable enemy for the rest of his life in the person of the vindictive Mrs. Ellet.

Just how Mrs. Ellet managed to make herself acquainted with the contents of Mrs. Osgood's indiscreet letter to Poe is uncertain. Professor Quinn accepts the explanation given by Mrs. Whitman to Ingram that the lady in question chanced to see an “open note or letter, from Mrs. Osgood.”(52) But it must be remembered that Mrs. Whitman was relating an incident which she had heard Miss Lynch tell more than a quarter of a century before. Moreover, Mrs. Whitman indicated in her letter to Gill that she was uncertain whether Mrs. Ellet had been shown the letter or whether she had seen it by chance.(53) In a letter of apology to Mrs. Osgood dated July 8almost certainly in 1846 — Mrs. Ellet herself said that Poe's wife had shown her the letter. “Had you seen,” she remarked, “the fearful paragraphs which Mrs. Poe first repeated and afterwards pointed out — which haunted me like a terrifying spectre — you would not wonder I regarded you as I did.”(54) In view, however, of Mrs. Ellet's evident lack of compunction about reading the private papers of other persons,(55) and in [page 560:] view, also, of the obviously hypocritical tone of her letter of apology, as well as of her tendency to tamper with factual truth to serve her own purposes,(56) small reliance can be placed upon her unsupported statement.

Mrs. Osgood's letter to Griswold — if authentic — indicates that Mrs. Ellet may have obtained her precious information in still another way. In this letter Mrs. Osgood referred to a letter which Virginia Poe had impulsively written her, confirming her innocence, because she felt that Mrs. Osgood “had been cruelly wronged by her mother and Mrs. E.”(57) “She, Mrs. Poe,” said Mrs. Osgood, “felt grieved that she herself had drawn me into the snare by imploring me to be kind to Edgar, — to grant him my society and to write to him, because, she said, I was the only woman he knew who influenced him for his good, or, indeed, who had any lasting influence over him.”(58) If Mrs. Osgood described Virginia's motives accurately, it is not unlikely that Mrs. Clemm — who, according to Thomas Dunn English, did not look with favor on the friendship between her son-in-law and Mrs. Osgood — showed the letter to Mrs. Ellet. It must be admitted, too, that there is little indication that Mrs. Ellet would have been above removing one of Mrs. Osgood's letters from its envelope and reading it if the opportunity happened to present itself. [page 561:] But in any event, there seems to be little justification for the positive statements made by almost all Poe's biographers as to how the contents of Mrs. Osgood's letter became known to Mrs. Ellet.

It is by no means certain, either, just when and where this fateful incident occurred. All of Poe's biographers, beginning with Ingram, have evidently settled the approximate time and place on the basis of information furnished by Mrs. Whitman to Ingram. According to Mrs. Whitman, the ladies appointed to rescue Mrs. Osgood's letters “repaired to Fordham presented their credentials & made their demand.”(59) If this information is dependable, the incident must have occurred in either May or June, 1846, for Poe did not move to Fordham until sometime in May at the earliest, and by June 25 English had already made public his version of the matter. But information which Mrs. Whitman derived from Miss Lynch more than two years after the incident occurred and which she related to Ingram more than twenty-five years after she had first heard it is especially liable to error insofar as the exact time and place of the incident in question is concerned. Any evidence, then, which points to a different time and place should be considered with special care.

In his attack on Poe of June 25, 1846, English said, [page 562:] in regard to Poe's recently published sketch of him in “The Literati”: “But a series of events occurred in January last, which, while they led to my complete knowledge of Mr. Poe, has excited his wrath against me, and provoked the exhibition of Impotent malice under my notice.”(60) Now the last of these events which, according to English, occurred in January, 1846, was the fist fight resulting from a dispute over Poe's remarks concerning Mrs. Ellet and her letters. As forgetful of dates as English sometimes was, it is hardly conceivable that in an article written in June he would have referred to an incident which had occurred either earlier in the same month or in the month before as having taken place in January. On the other hand, if it took place no later than February, he might easily have made the mistake of dating it several weeks or even a month earlier than the time of its actual occurrence. Again, in her letter of apology to Mrs. Osgood dated July 8 and almost certainly written in the year 1846, as we have previously noted, Mrs. Ellet pretended to be greatly concerned because she had gossiped about the content of the letter which (according to her) Virginia Poe had shown her. After expressing her regret that she had not given Mrs. Osgood a full explanation sooner, Mrs. Ellet added: ‘it was written months ago — [page 563:] but I feared you would not receive It in a candid spi[rit] and therefore destroyed it.”(61) Surely, Mrs. Ellet's statement of July 8 that she had written an unmailed explanation to Mrs. Osgood “months ago” would rule out May or June as the month in which the incident occurred and consequently, Fordham, as the place of its occurrence.

It is not unlikely, then, that the unhappy event took place while Poe was still living at 85 Amity Street,(62) and that it was this affair, together with the extreme nervous illness resulting in large measure from it, that determined him to withdraw from the social life of New York and to seek solace in the countryside for himself and for his ill wife — first at Turtle Bay and a little later at Fordham. Poe and his family probably left their home on Amity Street during the latter half of February, for the envelope in which Virginia's valentine of February 14, 1846, was enclosed is addressed to Poe at 85 Amity Street, and in a letter writ I ten April 16, 1846, to Philip Pendleton Cooke, Poe said that he had “been living in the country for the last two months (haing [sic] been quite sick).(63)

There is reason to believe, too, that Poe's sketch of [page 564:] English for the “Literati” series was written no later than February, 1846, and that its unfavorable tone was due, as English maintained, to his quarrel with Poe over the matter of Mrs. Ellet's letters, as well as to a previous falling-out early in January. On July 22, 1846, Poe wrote Chivers that he had “not been able to write one line for the Magazines for more than five months” and that the “articles lately published in ‘Godey's Book’” had been “written and paid for a long while ago.”(64) This statement would certainly Indicate that at least the May, June, and July installments of “The Literati” — the last of which included the sketch of English — were completed sometime during the preceding February. In his reply to English dated June 27, 1846, Poe flatly stated that the entire series, including those papers which were yet to be published, had “been long since written.”(65) Indeed, notwithstanding some evidence to the contrary, it is likely that most, if not all, of the papers were written during January and February.(66) Certainly, Mrs. Osgood's [page 565:] reminiscences suggest that the series was nearing completion before Poe moved away from Amity Street. “I recollect, one morning,” wrote Mrs. Osgood, “towards the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay and lighthearted. Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a pressing invitation to come to them; and I, who never could resist her affectionate summons, and who enjoyed his society far more in his own home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity street. I found him just completing his series of papers entitled ‘The Literati of New-York.’”(67) Mrs. Osgood then proceeded to relate an anecdote which indicates that Poe's sketch of her, which first appeared in the September number of Godey's, had been completed by the time of her visit(68) — [page 566:] probably not later than the middle of February. The series was discontinued only a month after the sketch of Mrs. Osgood appeared.

Inasmuch as Poe's trouble with Mrs. Ellet led directly to his violent quarrel with English and since the two men have left utterly conflicting records of what actually took place, as well as diametrically opposite opinions of Mrs. Ellet herself, let us examine what each had to say about the whole unfortunate affair. Writing to Mrs. Whitman at a time when Mrs. Richmond had undoubtedly replaced her as the main object of his affections, but when he still planned to go through with his marriage to her, Poe warned her that Mrs. Ellet would try to interfere with their plans.(69) Predicting that Mrs. Whitman would soon receive anonymous letters from Mrs. Ellet, as well as calls from strangers instigated by her to malign him, Poe proceeded to relate his own unhappy experience with her. Even the astute Mrs. Osgood, according to Poe, had been slow to see through Mrs. Ellet's machinations:

Poe's version of his difficulties with Mrs. Ellet was not generally known until many years after his death, although English seized an early opportunity to publish his side of the story in his libelous article on Poe.(71) After both Poe and Mrs. Osgood were dead, Griswold included in his “Memoir” the following distorted version of the affair:

Mrs. Botta, who, when she was Anne Lynch, had gone with Margaret Fuller to demand the return of Mrs. Osgood's letters, wrote Gill many years later that never, in Poe's lifetime, had she heard the story told by Griswold in his “Memoir.”(73) Many years later, too, Mrs. Whitman wrote [page 569:] both Gill and Ingram that she believed Griswold's story to be false.(74) It was not until then, in fact, that Mrs. Whitman furnished each of these biographers with the version of Poe's involvement with Mrs. Ellet which she had received from Miss Lynch in the summer of 1848, and also with the explanation which Poe had written her in the following autumn concerning his part in the unfortunate affair. The death of Mrs. Ellet in 1877 provided Gill with an opportunity to introduce into the 1878 edition of his life of Poe a paragraph in which he pronounced Griswold's story to be a fabrication.(75) in the notes to that edition he supported his contention with citations from Mrs. Whitman's letter.(76) Ingram, in his two-volume life of Poe, first published in 1880, unqualifiedly rejected Griswold's version of the affair, and came to Poe's defence with a full account of the episode as related to him by Mrs. Whitman in her letter of February 11, 1874.(77) Not only had Mrs. Whitman given Ingram more copious information than she had given to Gill, but her death in 1878 probably persuaded Ingram to treat the matter more fully than he would have otherwise felt permitted to do. [page 570:]

Even though Mrs. Whitman was eager to render justice to Poe, it is evident from her letters to Ingram in 1874 that she was fearful of whether Ingram would exercise tact enough in handling a delicate situation. A few days after mailing Ingram her long letter of February 11, in which she had blanked the name of Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Whitman followed it up with another letter which indicates that she was disturbed about having said too much to the discredit of that unnamed lady. “On the 13th,” she remarked, “I mailed to you a letter & copy of Harper's Sept. No. 1872. In that letter I told you what I suppose to have been the origin of the story about ‘a distinguished woman of S. Carolina.’ The lady was Mrs. Ellet.... Perhaps she was not altogether so evil & perfidious as Poe seemed to think in the extract from his letter which I sent you. There may have been extenuating circumstances on her part.”(78) Again, less than a month later, she wrote:

When Ingram's biography appeared, however, it contained little balm for anyone who might have admired the then-deceased Mrs. Ellet. Although he expressly stated that he could not mention her name on account of her “death and her sex,” Ingram made no further concession for this reason except thinly to conceal her name as “Mrs. E——.” He called her an “implacable woman” and remarked that her “own advances to the poet” had been “anything but pleasant.”(80) Thomas Dunn English, who had himself been roundly attacked by Ingram, came indignantly to his own and Mrs. Ellet's defense in two long open letters to the biographer. His defense of Mrs. Ellet, which occupies a substantial portion of the second letter, is as follows:

An examination of the foregoing extract will reveal that English, as was his custom when violently assailed, allowed his high temper to betray him into making some rash and inaccurate statements. His account implies that Poe, without sufficient grounds, blamed Mrs. Ellet for in iterfering with his private affairs. Yet, the letter of apology from Mrs. Ellet to Mrs. Osgood(82) previously referred to in this study is sure proof that its writer read a note from Mrs. Osgood to Poe and circulated a scandalous story based upon its alleged contents. This letter, then, all but confirms Mrs. Whitman's statement, made on Miss Lynch's authority, that Mrs. Ellet “was the acknowledged instigator & Grand Inquisitor of the movement” to compel Poe to return Mrs. Osgood's letters.(83) English's statements that Griswold “told the truth so far as he told it, about this matter” and that his failure to tell more was due either to ignorance or to his kindheartedness are both patently absurd. In the first place, Griswold's story is utterly irreconcilable with English's own account of what took place and can be credited only on the ridiculous assumption that Poe, on two different occasions and for two different reasons, accused Mrs. Ellet of having written him compromising letters and that on each occasion her brother demanded satisfaction of Poe. In the second place, Griswold's [page 575:] story presents Poe's conduct in a far more unfavorable light than does English's. Hence, English's suggestion that Griswold may have been trying to spare Poe by suppressing some of the truth is surprisingly inept, to say the least. Griswold was clearly trying to malign Poe by making his conduct appear worse than it actually was, for it is inconceivable that he was ignorant of the cause of Poe's offensive remark, in view of his close friendship with Mrs. Osgood during the last two or three years of her life and in view, also, of his actual possession of Mrs. Ellet's letter of apology to Mrs. Osgood for more than a year before he wrote his “Memoir” of Poe.(84) Griswold's story simply fails to ring true. Even though we were to concede that Poe was an arrant rascal, how could we be persuaded that he was so lacking in common 3ense as to threaten the exposure of letters that were nonexistent in order to avoid acknowledging a personal debt? If by any chance it could be proved that he did make such a threat, we should be compelled to assume either that he really possessed letters which would have been embarrassing to Mrs. Ellet, if exhibited, or that he made the threat when he was unconscious of what he was saying and therefore not responsible for his speech or his actions. [page 576:]

In addition to making the inaccurate statements already mentioned, English flatly contradicted himself when he said that his conversation with Poe in regard to Mrs. Ellet's letters “occurred in the presence of a third party.” In his original account of the episode, English specifically stated that Poe broached the matter only after he had sought, and been granted, a private conversation.(85) True, according to the original account, “a nephew of one of our ex-presidents” was in English's chambers during Poe's visit,(86) but nothing pertaining to Mrs. Ellet was said in his presence. This was a particularly reprehensible distortion of the truth on English's part, for it imputed to Poe ungentlemanly behavior of which he was evidently quite Innocent.

Again, English's attempt to prove by means of a quotation from Poe's rejoinder that Poe gave Mrs. Whitman a false explanation of his troubles with Mrs. Ellet is abortive. The quotation merely indicates that Poe scorned a public discussion of a conversation which he and English had held privately. Although English may have been speaking the truth in asserting that this conversation taxed Poe “with the false assertion of possessing compromising letters,” his original account of the episode does not bear out his statement to Ingram that Poe maintained he possessed the letters even after he had been threatened. Yet, in his [page 577:] “Reminiscences of Poe,” English repeated essentially what he had said to Ingram — that, although Poe admitted he still retained the letters, he expressed his unwillingness to “produce them under compulsion.”(87) At any rate, according to all these accounts, English told Poe to his face that he was lying. Hence, although Poe was probably in his cups when he sought English's assistance, it appears that English himself was largely responsible for the fist fight which followed and which each claimed later to have won.

In his “Reminiscences” English identified the third person who chanced to be at 504 Broadway when his famous altercation with Poe occurred as John H. Tyler, a nephew of ex-President Tyler. English's account of the actual fight is as follows:

Poe's account of the fight differs decidedly from English's, not only insofar as the outcome is concerned, but with respect to the identity of the professor who parted the two combatants:

In a letter to Hirst, Poe said: “I gave E. a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death — and, luckily, in the presence of witnesses.”(90) But Lane's letter to English seems to establish pretty conclusively that English had the upper hand as long as the brief tussle lasted.(91) True, Lane was not present, but he heard of the struggle directly from Tyler. Since Lane's letter also indicates that Poe had been drinking, it is unlikely that the latter was in condition to emerge from the contest a victor. Poe's [page 579:] statement that he remembered nothing that had taken place except having been dragged from the body of the prostrate English suggests, too, that he was not himself when the fight occurred and that his memory of its progress and outcome may have been exceedingly hazy and inaccurate.

A day or two after the fight, according to English's original account, Poe “sent a letter to the brother of the lady he had so vilely slandered, denying all recollection of having made any charges of the kind alleged, stating that, if he had made them, he was laboring under a fit of insanity to which he was periodically subject. The physician who bore it said that Mr. Poe was then suffering under great fear, and that the consequences might be serious to the mind of his patient, if the injured party did not declare himself satisfied. — The letter being a full retraction of the falsehood, he, to whom it was addressed, stopped further proceedings, and the next day Mr. Poe hastily fled from town.”(92) Since Griswold's garbled version of Poe's relations with Mrs. Ellet agrees with this particular portion of English's original account, it is quite probable that Poe did write a letter of retraction as English alleged. Having done so, however — doubtless because he felt that honor required such action — he placed himself in a position which enabled both English and Griswold, later on, to charge him with having told a falsehood about the matter. Several years after he [page 580:] had written his “Memoir,” however, Griswold seems to have reversed his opinion — at least, privately. In a letter written to the third wife of Griswold, Mrs. Ellet maintained that Griswold had informed certain persons that she had written to Poe, “when he well knew that I never had done so, and that I possessed written evidence of the falsehood of such an assertion, in Mr. Poe's retraction of and apology for a slander of the kind once uttered by him, as he alleged, in a fit of lunacy.”(93)

The fight with English was the culmination of a series of unhappy events which cost Poe the companionship, though not the friendship, of Mrs. Osgood and gained for him the bitter enmity of English and Mrs. Ellet. In the whole sordid business, Mrs. Ellet cuts a particularly sorry figure. She emerges as a jealous, meddlesome, vindictive woman, who hardly deserves the charitable comment of Mrs. Whitman that there may have been extenuating circumstances in her case.(94) At any rate, notwithstanding the apparent insincerity of some of Poe's remarks in his letters to Mrs. Whitman, those having to do with the spiteful behavior of Mrs. Ellet were evidently made in good faith. As we have already observed, Poe maintained that Virginia was tortured for the rest of her life by Mrs. Ellet's anonymous letters. On October 18, 1848, Poe wrote Mrs. Whitman: “But, alas! [page 581:] for nearly three years I have been ill, poor, living out of the world; and thus, as I now painfully see, have afforded opportunity to my enemies — and especially to one, the most malignant and pertinacious of all fiends — [a woman whose loathsome love I could do nothing but repel with scorn — ] to slander me, in private society, without my knowledge and thus with impunity.”(95) in a letter to Mrs. Annie Richmond, dated February 19, 1849, Poe said: “I scorned Mrs. Ellet, simply because she revolted me — to this day, she has never ceased her anonymous persecutions.”(96)

Because of the overcharged emotionalism of his later love letters, one might naturally suppose, from remarks like these, that Poe was suffering from a persecution complex. He probably was, to some extent. But appearances are very much against Mrs. Ellet. Even before Poe's death, Griswold incurred the enmity of Mrs. Ellet because he had dared to champion Mrs. Osgood against her calumnies and because she thought Griswold had underestimated her literary attainments. Notwithstanding the small trust that can ordinarily be placed in Griswold's testimony, his well documented Statement grimly attests to the fact that his last years were made miserable by the same sort of persistent persecution on the part of Mrs. Ellet that Poe and [page 582:] Virginia had been subjected to. After Griswold obtained his decree of divorce from Charlotte Myers — with whom he felt that he had been tricked into marriage and whose physical incapability of a normal marital relationship was unknown to him when he married her(97) — Mrs. Ellet became one of a small group of persons who sought to have the decree set aside. According to Griswold, this group sought to attack him “by a course of systematic public and private calumny.”(98) Less than a month after Griswold's remarriage, his unsuspecting wife received from Mrs. Ellet — who was a complete stranger to her — a letter which, according to Griswold, was “filled with abusive falsehoods” about him.(99) From time to time during the following three years, said Griswold, “anonymous letters about me, made up of almost every species of slander and vituperation, were continually appearing in the public journals.”(100) In a Charleston paper, it was even pronounced that Mrs. Ellet had brought about his arrest on a charge of bigamy.(101) “If I was observed,” said Griswold, “to be a visitor at the house of any gentleman of social or professional eminence, an anonymous letter against me was addressed to him. Gentlemen or ladies called at my own house at the peril of receiving communications of the same description.” According to Griswold, these calumnious communications could all [page 583:] be traced “to the same circle, and the larger part of them to a single individual.”(102) Mrs. Ellet was one of three women whom Mrs. Oakes Smith mentioned to Ingram as having pursued Griswold “with the most vindictive malice.”(103)

Perhaps the persecution which came to Griswold during his last years may be regarded as just retribution for his infamous “Memoir” of Poe and particularly for his malicious distortion of the episode involving Mrs. Ellet's letters. Be that as it may, the persecution meted out to Griswold by Mrs. Ellet is too similar in pattern to that which Poe said he and Virginia had suffered at her hands to lend much plausibility to the view that Poe was merely laboring under the delusion of persecution by the same woman. Thus, English's staunch defense of Mrs. Ellet as a gentlewoman who was spotless in character and worthy of the highest admiration and respect, although perhaps commendable to the extent that it is indicative of his desire to protect the reputation of a woman whom he believed to be blameless, is hardly a tribute to his ability to judge character.

In striking contrast to the meddlesome and spiteful Mrs. Ellet stands the generous and kindhearted Mrs. Osgood, who seems to have suffered most unjustly for her close friendship with Poe. Unlike Mrs. Ellet, Mrs. Osgood evidently [page 584:] had a remarkable capacity for winning and retaining the devoted friendship of those who knew her well. “Mrs. Osgood was a paragon,” said Stoddard. “For, loved of all men who knew her, she was hated by no woman who ever felt the presence of her charm.”(104) She could win and hold permanently, for example, the affectionate esteem of persons so temperamentally unstable, yet so widely different, as Griswold and Poe. For all Griswold's transgressions, his association with Mrs. Osgood seems to have brought out something commendable in his nature. “The character of Mrs. Osgood,” he wrote, after her death, “to those who were admitted to its more minute observance, illustrated the finest and highest qualities of intelligence and virtue. In her manners, there was an almost infantile gaiety and vivacity, with the utmost simplicity and gentleness, and an unfailing and indefectable grace, that seemed an especial gift of nature, unattainable, and possessed only by her and the creatures of our imaginations whom we call angels..... Her friendships were quickly formed, but limited by the number of genial hearts brought within the sphere of her knowledge and sympathy.”(105) Speaking of the admiration with which women regarded her, Griswold said: “Probably there was never a woman of whom it might be said more truly that to her own sex she was an object almost of worship. She was [page 585:] looked upon for her simplicity, purity, and childlike want of worldly tact or feeling, with involuntary affection; listened to, for her freshness, grace and brilliancy, with admiration; and remembered, for her unselfishness, quick sympathy, devotedness, capacity of suffering, and high aspirations, with a sentiment approaching reverence.”(106) Poe's earlier tribute to Mrs. Osgood in “The Literati,” if less sentimentally put, was no less sincere: “Her character is daguerreotyped in her works — reading the one we know the other. She is ardent, sensitive, impulsive; the very soul of truth and honor; a worshiper of the beautiful, with a heart so radically artless as to seem abundant in art — universally respected, admired and beloved.”(107) In connection with this appraisal of Mrs. Osgood's character, it is interesting to note what Poe said in a letter to Mrs. Richmond written in the last year of his life, long after he and Mrs. Osgood had ceased to meet. His romance with Mrs. Whitman had just come to an end, and Poe was bitter toward “literary” women. “They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set,” he wrote, “with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem. Mrs. [Osgood] is the only exception I know.”(108) Tributes like these — especially when they can be duplicated from a wide variety of sources — are significant. They do not usually come to persons who have not merited them, and they should impose on the biographer [page 586:] a solemn responsibility not to give undue credence to the calumnies of a few of Mrs. Osgood's envious contemporaries, who were probably willing enough to malign her.

Sometime after her friendship with Poe had given rise to persistent rumors of scandal, Mrs. Osgood contributed to The Broadway Journal a poem entitled “Slander,” which she revised slightly before it appeared in the 1850 volume of her verse under the title of “Calumny. ‘* Although the poem is too sentimental for the taste of the twentieth century, it very probably reflects in large measure her own shocked sensibilities when she suddenly realized that malicious tongues were slandering her. The poem follows as it originally appeared in Poe's magazine:

Slander.

It is unlikely that the enmity of either Mrs. Ellet or English would have proved nearly so disastrous to Poe as it turned out to be had Poe not given English an excellent opportunity to publicize a biased account of the episode involving Mrs. Ellet's letters, as well as other scurrilous information about him. Poe gave English this opportunity when he allowed an exceedingly contemptuous sketch of his now-bitter enemy to appear in the July installment of “The Literati.” It is probable that Mrs. Ellet herself furnished English with information concerning the letter of retraction which Poe had written her brother and in which Poe allegedly pleaded temporary insanity as an excuse for any false accusation which he might have made. But most of English's libelous article, though biased and grossly unfair to Poe, is clearly made up of charges growing directly out of his own association with the poet and was the direct result of Poe's insulting sketch. Apparently Poe himself was guilty of an extension of the truth when he [page 588:] twice indicated that the libelous portion of English's article had been inspired by Mrs. Ellet. Writing to Mrs. Whitman on October 18, 1848, Poe clearly hinted as much. when he referred to a particular “instance, where the malignity of the accuser hurried her beyond her usual caution....”(110) Consequently) “the accusation was of such character,” said Poe, “that I could appeal to a court of justice for redress. The tools employed in this Instance were Mr Hiram Fuller and Mr. T. D. English.(111) Again referring to Mrs. Ellet in a letter to Mrs. Richmond dated February 19 [l8], 1849, Poe remarked: “When she ventured too far, I sued her at once (through her miserable tools) & recovered exemplary damages.”(112) As we shall see later, Poe did not bring suit on the basis of any information that Mrs. Ellet could have furnished English. Nor, as his earlier scurrilous attack on Henry A. Wise attests, did English need any outside encouragement to write an abusive article, if he felt that he had been publicly held up to ridicule or that he had been covertly assailed.

Even before Poe's sketch of English appeared, the preliminary skirmishes of the War of the Literati had occurred Godey himself evidently realized that the publication of articles so personal as those which Poe had written would undoubtedly have violent repercussions. In the May number [page 589:] of his magazine, he said: “We are much mistaken if these papers of Mr. P. do not raise some commotion in the literary emporium.”(113) But Godey was not at all averse to making capital out of the sensational appeal of these articles. By the end of April, the May number of his magazine was completely sold out, and orders for additional numbers could not be met.(114) From New York came letters — some anonymous and some signed by personal friends — urging Godey to beware of what he permitted Poe “to say about the New York authors.”(115) these warnings Godey replied: “We are not to be intimidated by a threat of the loss of friends, or turned from our purpose by honied words. Our course is onward.”(116) So, in order to satisfy the interest which the first installment of “The Literati” had aroused, Godey not only published in the June number of his magazine the second paper of Poe's series, but he reprinted the first paper as well.

The misgivings of some of the New York literati were apparently justified, for it became evident with the publication of the very first paper that certain persons with whom Poe had quarreled were not likely to fare particularly well at his hands. Charles F. Briggs was the first to feel the [page 590:] sting of Poe's remarks.(117) “Mr. Briggs,” said. Poe, “has never composed in his life three consecutive sentences of grammatical English. He is grossly uneducated.” Commenting on Briggs’ unprepossessing personal appearance, Poe called attention to his “gray and small eyes.” Poe further characterized Briggs as “priding himself upon his personal acquaintance with artists and his general connoisseurship,” and at the same time implied that his taste in artistic matters was negligible. Among other traits which Poe ascribed to him may be mentioned “a perfect mania for contradiction,” which made it “impossible to utter an uninterrupted sentence in his presence,” and an assumed knowledge of the French language concerning which he was “profoundly ignorant.” Comments like these must have been extremely galling to Poe's former associate on the staff of The Broadway Journal, and were undoubtedly colored by Poe's dislike of him, true though some of them may have been.

Almost immediately, one of the leading magazine editors came to Briggs’ defense. Lewis Gaylord Clark, whom, according to Chivers, Poe had threatened to attack in the summer of 1845(118) and who had later published an exceedingly spiteful review of The Raven and Other Poems,(119) evidently made [page 591:] the sketch of Briggs an excuse for an insulting editorial attack on Poe and on the series of papers that Poe was writing for Godey's. Clark's contemptuous comments are as follows:

The New-York Mirror of May l6 pronounced the sketches of William Kirkland and Doctor Francis to be “very just.”(121) It is therefore surprising to find the Evening Mirror coming out only ten days later with a scathing attack on Poe,(122) for both journals were under the same management — that of Hiram Fuller. True, the second of Poe's series of papers had meanwhile appeared in the June number of Godey's, but there was nothing in the second paper to give rise to the offensive article. The writer opened his attack by ridiculing the fanfare with which Poe's series of papers had been heralded. He then made fun of Poe's severe nervous illness during the spring of 1846 in his remark that certain “students in Dr. Anthon's grammar school made a pilgrimage to Bloomingdale to gaze upon the asylum where Mr. Poe was reported to be confined, in consequence of his immense mental efforts having turned his brain.”(123) Rumors persisted during the spring of 1846 that Poe had been, or was to be, confined in a hospital for the Insane at either Bloomingdale or Utica,(124) and the writer of the editorial — as did Thomas [page 593:] Dunn English later on(125) — evidently saw In these reports an opportunity for a peculiarly Insensitive sort of ridicule. But the momentous efforts of “Mr. Poe,” according to the writer, proved disappointing, for it developed that there was only a great deal of froth on a very small amount of beer. After ridiculing Poe for including among his New York literati one whom he accused of never having written “three consecutive lines of grammatical English in his life,” and after also taking him to task for the patronizing tone of some of his sketches, as well as for the weak and inaccurate characterization prevalent in all of them, the writer closed his article with a ludicrous sketch of Poe himself, written in mock imitation of the latter's method of character portrayal:

On June 15 Poe wrote a confidential letter to Joseph M. Field, editor of the St. Louis Reveille, enclosing a copy of the article from which the foregoing passage is taken and asking him not only to condemn it in his paper, but to say something that would correct the impression which the article might have conveyed in the western part of the country concerning Poe's personal appearance.(127) Poe attributed the attack to Hiram Fuller, who had been associated with Willis and Morris on the staff of the Mirror while Poe himself was still working in the office of that paper:

Poe did not know why Fuller had attacked him, for, as he remarked to Field, he had “never said a word about the vagabond” in his life. “Some person, I presume,” said Poe, “has hired him to abuse me.”(129) In a letter to an unknown correspondent, however, written on the following day, Poe seems to have changed his mind concerning the authorship of the editorial.(130) He now spoke of Briggs as the author — whether on the basis of definite knowledge, it is impossible to say. Inasmuch as both this editorial and Clark's attack in The Knickerbocker contained either open or veiled references to Briggs, and since Poe, in his answer to English's libelous article, replied also to Fuller, Clark, and Briggs, it is possible that Poe suspected his enemies of combining against him and that he remained convinced that Briggs at [page 596:] least had a hand in the Mirror editorial.

The War of the Literati did not break out in full fury, however, until Poe's sketch of English appeared in the July number of Godey's. That the storm would then break was a dead certainty, for English was in his own element when engaged in vituperative controversy, and had long held the doubtful distinction of being a “tomahawk” critic of no mean ability. Indeed, it was an evil day for Poe when he decided to include English in his series of papers. Poe was too sensitively organized to show to advantage in the clashes that were to follow. True, he eventually won a suit for libel, but he lost far more than he gained. He invited an attack — however false or distorted the greater part of it may have been — which became the medium through which his weaknesses were noised abroad for the edification of a curious and unsympathetic public. Poe's sketch follows, in its original form:

English may have seen this studiedly contemptuous sketch as early as June 20, for the July number of Godey's was issued promptly on that date.(132) It is quite understandable that he was infuriated by Poe's treatment of him. About nine months later, Poe insisted, in replying to Horace Greeley's charge that the sketch had been “impelled by personal spite,” that what he had written was not a personal attack, but “a literary criticism having reference to T. D. English.”(133) Yet Poe immediately added the following qualification: [page 599:] “The only thing in it which resembled a ‘personality,’ was contained in these words — ‘I have no acquaintance, personally, with Mr. English’ — meaning, of course, as every body understood, that I wished to decline his acquaintance for the future.”(134) Although the public denial by Poe of any personal knowledge of a man with whom he had been closely associated during the preceding year must have been extremely irritating to English, it was by no means — as Poe maintained in his letter to Greeley — the only remark in the sketch intended to be personally offensive. Without substantiating his charge, Poe accused English of plagiarizing from Hirst — apparently for the sole purpose of annoying English, who had always regarded Hirst as an exceedingly poor poet and who, it will be recalled, had hilariously criticized his poetry in The Aristidean. Poe sought to create the inaccurate impression that English was utterly uneducated, and he represented him as having made himself ridiculous by employing transparent shifts to cover up his ignorance. Furthermore, in suggesting that English, because of his youth, still had ample time to acquire an education, Poe said that the subject of his sketch was not more than thirty-five years old when he undoubtedly knew that English was still only twenty-six. In addition to these obviously spiteful statements, there are the more subtle — and consequently more cutting — sarcastic and ironical comments with which [page 600:] the sketch is saturated from beginning to end. Because of its maddeningly contemptuous and condescending tone, this sketch is much more effective than Poe's more abusive, though less subtle, revision of it some two years later under the title of “Thomas Dunn Brown.”

On June 23 — three days after the July number of Godey's was issued — English's answer to Poe's contemptuous sketch of him appeared in the New York Morning Telegraph under the heading of “Mr. English's Reply to Mr. Poe.”(135) The opening paragraphs of this lengthy communication, including the passages which later proved to be libelous, are as follows:

English then proceeded to ridicule and to denounce Poe for behaving as he had done after accepting invitations to read special poems — first, at the New York University and later, before the Boston Lyceum. Next, he ruthlessly laid bare certain successive events which he said were the direct cause of Poe's “exhibition of impotent malice” toward him and which he assigned, chronologically, to the preceding January. The first of these events involved alleged drunken and ungentlemanly conduct on the part of Poe which compelled English “to treat him with discourtesy.” The remainder had [page 602:] to do with the efforts of Poe to enlist the assistance of English after he had become entangled with Mrs. Ellet and her brother; English's refusal to mix in Poe's affairs; the fist fight that followed; and, finally, Poe's retraction of what he had said about Mrs. Ellet and his alleged flight from the city. The arrogance of English's manner is especially noticeable in his insulting account of how Poe had humbly sought his assistance even though he had just recently received discourteous treatment at English's hands:

After intimating that he knew enough about Poe's life, both in Philadelphia and in New York, to add considerably to the list of discreditable deeds which he had already mentioned, English taunted Poe for belittling the literary attainments of one whose work he had formerly praised in glowing terms. Then, after caustically accusing Poe of dishonesty because of his complete change of front, English concluded: [page 603:]

After his bitter attack on Poe appeared in the columns of the Morning Telegraph, English lost little time before trying to give it wider circulation. He later testified under oath that he himself had handed it “to Mr. Fuller the Editor & proprietor of the Mirror with a request that he would publish it.(139) In answer to a question requiring him to state [page 604:] whether he had made any “inducement or offer” for the publication of the article, English said: “I made no inducement or offer for its publication beyond the fact that as Mr Poe had libeled me I urged that the Mirror as a public newspaper should be open to my reply.”(140) Fuller said that the article had been brought to him “printed in a morning paper,” and that he had been “assured that it was to be published in every newspaper in the city on the day that it appeared in the Mirror, and that every word it contained was true.”(141) “An appeal was made to us,” said Fuller, “on the score of justice; a gross attack had been made upon the literary reputation of a man who depended on his pen for bread, and it was but fair that a strong reply should be made.”(142)

It was an ill-considered move on Fuller's part, however, when he agreed to reprint English's reply as a card. For it was in the Evening Mirror that Poe first saw the attack and it was against the editor of that paper, as well as against English, that his extreme ire was directed. Already angry with Fuller on account of the editorial attack on him in the Evening Mirror of May 26, Poe was further infuriated, not only because Fuller had published English's attack, but because he had expressed a sense of pity for its victim in the following paragraph: [page 605:]

Hence, there developed the unusual situation of a libel suit's being brought against a newspaper which had only reprinted, in the form of a card, an article which had already been published in another newspaper as a regular communication. No reparation of any sort was asked of the publisher of the Telegraph.

The War of the Literati created considerable excitement in the daily press, and readers were continually informed of new developments in the struggle. In spite of the viciousness of his attack, English seems to have had the sympathy, such as it was, of most of the newspaper editors. A few editorial comments will serve to give a cross section of newspaper opinion at that time. “Edgar A. Poe,” said the editor of the New York Morning News, “attacked Thomas Dunn English most ridiculously in a late number of Godey's Lady's Book, and Mr. English in the papers of yesterday, replied in a most caustic and fearful article. When Mr. P. attacked English he took hold of the wrong man.”(144) The editor of the Philadelphia Times remarked: “Mr. Poe, in an article in the July number of the Lady's Book, made an [page 606:] ungenerous attack upon Thomas Dunn English, and among other things asserted that he did not know Mr. E. The latter is back upon the literary meat-axe in a style which shows pretty conclusively that he knows Mr. Poe very well.”(145) A more amusing comment came from the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, who apparently relished the idea of the struggle which was then raging and which promised to grow even fiercer:

If, however, English expected his article to be reprinted Some of the editors frowned upon the unseemly struggle that was developing and preferred to have no part in it. Typical of this group was George P. Morris, who refused to reprint English's article in his National Press. “The reply of Mr. English to Mr. Poe,” said Morris, “is one of the most savage and bitter things we ever read — so much so that we are obliged to decline the requests of several correspondents to [page 607:] publish it in these columns. We condemn all literary squabbles — they are in very bad taste; but when attacks are made, rejoinders will follow.”(147)

Even Rufus Griswold was shocked by the savagery and bad taste of English's article. Writing to Evert A. Duyckinck about a month after its appearance, Griswold said:

In view of his brutal “Memoir” of Poe, published after its subject was no longer alive to defend himself, Griswold's profession of shocked sensibility on account of the tone of English's article may seem hypocritical. But Griswold was probably expressing his genuine feelings at that time. His dislike of Poe, no doubt, increased in its intensity with time, but it is at least debatable whether he would have ever resorted to the gross distortions and forgeries of his “Memoir” if he had not been so violently assailed for his earlier unsympathetic treatment of Poe in the New York Tribune. We have the testimony of Charles Godfrey Leland that Griswold became savage when he was attacked.(149) [page 608:] It may therefore be that his vindictiveness made him impervious to any sense of remorse at the thought of destroying Poe's reputation by falsehood if, by so doing, he could outwardly justify his earlier ill-considered remarks and thereby preserve his own good name. But if Griswold was shocked by English's article, Mrs. Ellet was evidently quite satisfied with the manner in which Poe had been seemingly demolished. In her brazenly hypocritical letter to Mrs. Osgood,(150) evidently written two days before Poe's answer to English's attack appeared, Mrs. Ellet professed to believe that the letter from Mrs. Osgood to Poe which she had been shown “must have been a forgery.” She also expressed the opinion that “any man capable of offering to show notes he never possessed” would hardly “hesitate at such a crime.” After indicating that Poe's wife had shown her the letter in question, she gloatingly remarked: “But her husband will not dare to work further mischief with the letter; — nor have either of us any thing to apprehend from the verbal calumnies of a wretch so steeped in infamy as he is now.” Evidently, Mrs. Ellet felt that the recent exposure by English of Poe's alleged conduct toward her — based, perhaps, on dubious information which [page 609:] she herself had. furnished — had vindicated her in the eyes of her gossip-ridden social and literary coterie.

Because he was ill at Fordham when English's abusive article first appeared, Poe did not know that he had been attacked until he received from Godey, several days later, a copy of the article as it had been reprinted in the Evening Mirror immediately below Fuller's brief comment.(151) He at once began to plan his counterattack. On June 27 he wrote to his friend, Henry B. Hirst, asking for an account of the latter's duel with English. “I would take it as a great favor, also,” he added, “if you would get from Sandy Harris a statement of the fracas with him. See Du Solle, also, if you can & ask him if he is willing to give me, for publication, an account of his kicking E. out of his office.”(152) Poe also asked for a copy of the attack which English had made on Henry A. Wise if Hirst could procure one for him. On the same day, Poe began his rejoinder to English, and two days later it was ready to be mailed to Godey, whom Poe expected to publish it. First, however, he was anxious that one or two of his friends should examine it. On June 29, therefore, he sent it to Evert A. Duyckinck, with the request that he should read it over and then let Cornelius [page 610:] Mathews see it. “The particulars of the reply,” he cautioned Duyckinck, “I would not wish mentioned to any one — of course you see the necessity of this.”(153)

Poe's long-awaited rejoinder appeared at last in the Philadelphia Times of July 10 — seventeen days after English's attack upon him.(154) According to Fuller, Poe had been offered the free use of the columns of the Mirror “to vindicate himself from the charges contained in the ‘card,’ an offer which he at the time accepted, but was probably advised differently by counsel, who hoped to find something worth picking from this ‘bone of contention.’”(155) in his letter to Greeley, February 21, 1847, Poe said: “The ‘columns of the Mirror’ were tendered to me — with a proviso that I should forego a suit and omit this passage and that passage, to suit the purpose of Mr Fuller.”(156) What advice Poe received from Duyckinck and Mathews, if any, is unknown, but Godey was unwilling to publish the reply in the Lady's Book because of its “tone.”(157)

English maintained that Poe had experienced considerable difficulty in getting his rejoinder before the public. “Poe's reply,” said English, “was hawked about New York by him, but no journal in that city would publish it. He [page 611:] sent it to Philadelphia. The Gazette, The Inquirer, and other journals there declined its publication on account of its scurrility; but the publisher of the Ladies’ [sic] Book finally had it inserted in the Spirit of the Times, published by John S. Du Solle, a virulent personal enemy of mine.”(158) That Poe's reply was “hawked about New York,” however, is questionable. His letter to Duyckinck indicates that from the beginning he had planned to send it to Philadelphia for publication in the Lady's Book. Of course, Godey may have returned it after refusing to publish it, and Poe may have then “hawked it about New York” and afterwards sent it back to Godey when he was unable to find a willing publisher in New York. Or perhaps Duyckinck, Mathews, or his attorney advised him to seek publication in New York before sending it to Godey. At any rate, the long period of time that intervened between the publication of English's article and Poe's rejoinder suggests that English was right in asserting that Godey was not the only Philadelphia editor who found the reply objectionable, notwithstanding what Poe said in defense of its general tone in his letter to Godey written six days after the Times had published it:

However much his rejoinder to English may have been I “precisely adapted to its purpose,” Poe was hardly a discerning critic, for once at least, of the comparative merit of his own writings if he meant to be taken seriously when he said: “I have never written an article upon which I more confidently depend for literary reputation than that Reply.” Nonetheless, it aroused a great deal of interest [page 613:] and comment at the time of its publication, even though most of the comment was unfavorable. Although by far the greater part of the reply was a counterattack on English, Poe directed some of his uncomplimentary remarks at Clark, Briggs, and Fuller — especially, at the last of the trio. He opened fire in the following manner:

Having thus fired his opening shot at English and having then digressed to explain the nature and purpose of his series of papers, Poe turned again to the chief object of his counter-attack. “What is not false,” he remarked, “amid the scurrility of this man's statements, it is not in my nature to brand as false, although oozing from the filthy lips of which a lie is the only natural language.”(161) Poe did not deny his own irregularites — by which he meant the intermittent sprees of drunkenness with which English had taxed him — although he hinted that there was much that could be said in extenuation for them. He refused to deny anything that he had said privately to English, on the ground that he did not recollect what had occurred and that consequently there was a remote possibility that even so habitual a liar as English was might have been telling the truth. This conversation, it will be recalled, concerned Poe's entanglement with Mrs. Ellet and her brother. Poe admitted that he might have offered English his hand. “I have been too often and too justly blamed,” he remarked, “by those who have a right to Impose bounds upon my Intimacies, for the weakness of ‘offering my hand,’ without thought of consequence, to any one whom I see very generally reviled, hated, and despised.”(162)

Poe then proceeded to review a series of personal chastisements — no less than twelve, in number — allegedly [page 616:] meted out to English for indecorous behavior of one kind or another. Poe implied that English had always submitted ingloriously to these chastisements and that there was a definite connection between his cowardice and the fact that he had long been known in Philadelphia under the name of Thomas Done Brown. Poe also gave his own version of a duel supposedly arranged between English and Hirst which never I materialized. Poe may have been relying on his memory of Lippard's satirical treatment of the same incident, for it is evident that Poe's story was not based on Information which Hirst had recently given him. To his ludicrous account of chastisements inflicted upon English, Poe added his own version of English's quarrel with Henry A. Wise. Although some of these episodes may have had sufficient foundation in fact to give point to his article, Poe obviously exaggerated them for the sole purpose of heaping ridicule on English. Under no circumstances would one be justified in assuming that English had been chastised as often or as humiliatingly as Poe indicated in his intentionally ludicrous account. According to English, Hirst “offered to write a contradiction” of Poe's story in which he and English were allegedly involved. English, however, “did not think the game worth the candle.”(163)

Next, Poe went on to make fun of other statements by English. He admitted having attempted to patronize English [page 617:] by bestowing undeserved praise on his writings, but he insisted that everything he had said was unmistakably ironical. He scoffed at the accusation of plagiarism which English had leveled against him and stressed that such a charge was particularly irrelevant in his own case. Then, after remarking that he was “really ashamed of indulging in a sneer at this poor miserable fool, on any mere topic of literature alone,” Poe continued:

After the foregoing paragraph — perhaps the most scurrilous of the entire reply, — Poe moved on to the more serious business at hand. He now centered upon two specific charges by English on which he intended to base his demands for redress in the courts: [page 618:]

After thus indicating that he would confine his efforts to obtain legal redress to a consideration of only two of the charges directed against him — that he had borrowed money under false pretenses and that he had virtually admitted having been guilty of forgery, — Poe brought his lengthy reply to a close with a violent attack upon Fuller for giving publicity to English's article: [page 621:]

Although Poe was evidently much pleased with his reply to English, the reaction of the press was not favorable. The editor of the New York Morning News admitted that it was “a most terrific” rejoinder — full of “bitterness and satire unadulterated.”(167) But he added; “This is rather small business for a man who has reviled nearly every literary man of eminence in the United States.” In Philadelphia, the Public Ledger carried a full-length editorial, calling for a cessation of hostilities. “The war between the literati,” said the editor of the Ledger, “increases in violence. Mr. [page 622:] Poe, whose ‘Sketches of the New York Literati’ drew from Mr. English such a caustic attack, has replied in a manner equally biting and severe. We suggest a truce or treaty of peace among these ecclesiastics of the church literary; for ‘Billingsgate’ is not the wide gate or the straight gait to Parnassus or Helicon, any more than to the White Mountains or Saratoga.”(168) Then in words of disapproval evidently for Poe and Godey, respectively — the one for writing the “Literati” papers and the other for publishing them, the editor continued:

However desirable as an ideal the remarks of this writer may be, he was far from being realistic or perceptive in asserting that “the public are interested in authors only through their works, and care nothing for their personal affairs.” The very success of the “Literati” papers attests to the naïveté of his observation.

More than a year after the publication of his rejoinder to English, Poe received a letter from his friend, George W. Eveleth, to whom he had sent a copy of his lengthy counterattack. Eveleth approved the severity of the reply, but said that it contained some things which he would have preferred not to see. “in some instances,” he wrote, “you have come down too nearly on a level with English himself.”(170) Eveleth also remarked that Poe had made himself more “liable to be laughed at by answering in such a spirit” that he would have done had he remained calm. “I imagine,” he added, “that your illness made you a little peevish.” In answering these specific objections more than five months later, Poe defended the general tone of his rejoinder:

Three days after the publication of Poe's rejoinder, English renewed hostilities by replying, as follows in the Evening Mirror:

Under the caption, “THE WAR IS STILL RAGING,” the Morning News briefly noticed English's second reply. “T. D. English,” said the editor, “replies to Poe's bulletin No. 2, in last evening's Mirror. He dares Poe to a legal battle, and threatens to prove all the assertions made in his first official despatch [sic]. We shall see in what all this warm work will result.”(173) Poe, however, did not elect to continue the battle through the medium of the newspapers, for he had made up his mind to have the issue decided in a court of law. It is quite likely that even before the publication of his rejoinder to English he had turned the entire matter over to Enoch L. Fancher, a competent New York lawyer. Certainly, as his letter to Godey attests, he had done so by July l6. On July 17 Poe wrote to John Bisco, whose interest in The Broadway Journal he had purchased in October of the preceding year, and requested him to consult Fancher. “You will confer a very great favor on me,” Poe wrote, “by stepping in, when you have leisure, at the office of E. L. Fancher, Attorney-at-law, 35 John St. Please mention to him that I requested you to call in relation to Mr English. He will, also, show you my Reply to some attacks lately [page 627:] made upon me by this gentleman.”(174) Less than a week later, Poe's suit against the Mirror was under way, for on July 25 the plaintiff's declaration, drawn up by Fancher, was filed in the New York Superior Court.(175) According to this declaration, Poe brought suit for five thousand dollars. It was nearly seven months later, however, before the case was finally concluded.

Meanwhile, on the very day that Poe's rejoinder to English appeared in the Philadelphia Times, the New York Evening Mirror carried an advertisement of the Weekly Mirror announcing that the latter journal would shortly begin publishing “a new novel, written expressly for the Mirror.”(176) After referring to the novel as “a tale developing the secret action of parties in the late election canvass,” the writer of the advertisement — evidently Hiram Fuller continued:

Having disclaimed responsibility for the political views of the author, the reviewer remarked: “We pay the hidden and venerable author a liberal price for the work, trusting to a large return from the public from the general interest which it cannot fall to excite. We expect the opening chapter will bring us many subscribers.”(178)

The title of this novel was 1844, or, The Power of the “S. F.,” and the “hidden and venerable author” with “twenty years connection with one of the great parties” was no other than the twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Dunn English. The novel began to appear in the Weekly Mirror for July 25, 1846, and continued regularly until it was concluded in the number for November 7 of the same year. Although anonymously published in its serial form, it appeared in 1847 as a book, to which English's name was appended “in violation of agreement. ”(179) Beginning with Chapter II of Book IV, in its [page 629:] aerial form, the novel contains a series of malicious attacks on Poe, who is caricatured in the person of one Marmaduke Hammerhead.(180) The abruptness, however, with which Hammerhead is Introduced into the novel, as well as his slight connection with the main plot, suggests that English may have decided to attack Poe in this manner only after he had been ridiculed by Poe in the July number of Godey's.

The main action of English's novel is largely centered in a section of New York known as the “Five Points,” which Dickens had described a few years earlier in his American Notes. English depicted this section as a veritable den of iniquity, abounding in drunkenness, lewdness, adultery, incest, petty thievery, swindling, and various other vices. In order to show how politicians sought to use the corrupt vote of this section to their own advantage, English devised a wild, sordid, and melodramatic narrative. Although extremely loose in plot, 1844 is perhaps the most effective of English's novels as far as sheer narrative power is concerned. Ludicrously conceived in many respects, the main plot is woven round the character of Charles Campbell, who seeks by intrigue to gain control of the corrupt vote of [page 630:] “Five Points” and thereby, for the purpose of furthering his own ruthless political ambitions, to bring about the election of Henry Clay as President of the United States. The “S. F.,” or “Startled Falcon,” is described as a powerful secret political organization, whose activities extend to foreign lands and whose aim is to bring about “the perfect political self-government of man.”(181) Yet the “S. F.” is represented as adopting the principle of employing craft and cunning on the side of right. It is mainly through the power of this secret organization that Campbell's scheme to control the vote of the “Five Points” goes awry and Henry Clay is defeated. But this end might not have been achieved if members of the “S. F.” had not realized that it was necessary to “meet cunning with cunning — fraud with fraud.”(182)

As the writer of a notice in the Saratoga Republican observed, however, the scene is not confined to the “Five Points,” nor are “the actors all chosen from among courtezans and felons. It carries you into the halls of fashion, the parlors of the wealthy and highborn, and the circles of literature, and describes each boldly, without dressing guilt in enticing colors, or extenuating the vices of the great.(183) But it is this very hybrid nature of the work — together with numerous satirical digressions only remotely [page 631:] related to the plot — that causes the novel to fall far short of attaining an essential artistic unity.

Notwithstanding its lurid melodrama and structural weakness, however, 1844 received some substantial commendation from contemporary literary critics. The writer of the notice just cited from the Saratoga Republican thought the novel well worth reading at a time when the press was “so overloaded with trash.”(184) After it appeared in the form of a book, a reviewer in The Literary World, edited by Charles Fenno Hoffman, recalled that it had “attracted no little attention when published as a feuilleton in the New York Mirror,”(185) and he also treated it as an interesting example of a much-neglected literary genre in the United States. “The first American political romance that we remember,” said the reviewer — probably Hoffman himself —, “is one, attributed to Mr. St. George Tucker, put forth at the time when Mr. Van Buren was a candidate for the Presidency. As the novel has now measurably succeeded the drama in holding up the mirror to the age, we marvel that in our novel-reading country the political novel has not, in the years that have since intervened, become as much a feature of American literature as the fashionable novel is of modern English letters.”(186) [page 632:]

In the present study, however, we are chiefly concerned with English's brutal caricatures of Poe. In Book IV, Chapter II, of the novel as it was published serially, the reader is suddenly transferred “from a dance house at Pete Williams’, in the Five Points, to a conversazione in one of the fashionable avenues,”(187) where Marmaduke Hammerhead is a guest. Foreseeing that this transition may be objected to on purely artistic grounds, English facetiously remarks: “Yet it is necessary, or we should not make the change; and be it understood by all persons, little or great, that we intend telling our story in our own way, and snap our fingers in the faces of the critics.”(188) Before introducing Hammerhead, however, English satirizes a typical conversazione, or soirée, such as Miss Anne Lynch was accustomed to hold at her home in Waverley Place. This particular conversazione is represented as having been held at the home of four young ladies — the Misses Veryblue. In the passage quoted below, English's contempt for gatherings of this sort may be observed:

English's extreme malice toward Poe at this time is clearly revealed in the following conversation between two of the men who are present at the Misses Veryblue's soirée:

Then follows a story of Hammerhead's persistent courtship of a woman who had written a certain melodrama.(191) According to the narrator, when Hammerhead realized that his efforts to win the lady's hand were in vain, he suddenly arose from his knees and asked the lady to lend him ten dollars.

Mrs. Ellet is introduced at the Misses Veryblue's soirée under the name of Mrs. Grodenap.(192) She is referred to as a South Carolinian who has been visiting in New York and as being both a pretty woman and an accomplished linguist. Mrs. Grodenap is conversing with Hammerhead when the two are approached by Mrs. Flighty — “a languishing would-be-juvenile lady,” with a “laughable affectation of manner” — who is clearly intended to represent Mrs. Osgood.(193) When one of the men present inquires about the latter guest, the following dialogue ensues:

The cleverness displayed by English in ridiculing Poe for one of his chief critical failings — that is, his tendency to bestow undue praise upon the work of female writers whom he admired as women — is evident in the foregoing dialogue. This very fault in Poe gave English an excellent opportunity to chide his enemy for being deficient in precisely those critical qualities which Poe possessed perhaps in greater abundance than any other American of his time. In the same dialogue, moreover, English not only champions Mrs. Ellet by making her more attractive and accomplished than Mrs. Osgood, but inserts a veiled, yet unmistakable, allusion to the successful attempt by Mrs. Ellet's brother, William Lummis, to force Poe to apologize for having intimated that he possessed indiscreet letters from Mrs. Ellet. By emphasizing Mrs. Ellet's accomplishments in contrast with Mrs. Osgood's insipidness, English also slyly implies that Poe's indifference to Mrs. Ellet's work was due to personal prejudice.

Also in this same chapter of his novel, English belittles Poe's ability as an author. Hammerhead is represented as always striving in his writings to seize some idea [page 636:] which he is unable to grasp. He is conceded to have wit and humor only Insofar as lying and brazen effrontery may be so classified. “There is an immense deal of charlatanry, however, in all his productions,” remarks one of the characters. “He affects ignorance in general of the author's real name, and seems to think that sarcasm and scurrility are identical.”(195) Hammerhead is also described as a man of limited education who makes himself ridiculous at times by interlarding his works with Irrelevant quotations from the writings of others.

Chapter IV of Book V is prefaced with a quotation from The Tempest — “A most drunken monster” and, as one may surmise, contains a satirical attack on Poe for his behavior under the influence of drink.(196) Hammerhead is described as being in a “beastly state of intoxication,” wishing to fight everybody, continually referring to his recent review of Longfellow's poems, and making a fool of himself in general.

In Chapter II of Book VI, Horace Greeley, along with Poe, is the target of English's satire. Greeley appears in the novel as a newspaper editor named Satisfaction Sawdust. We have observed more than once in the present study that English evidently took keen delight in holding Greeley's opinions up to ridicule. But English always made fun of Greeley in a good-natured manner. Greeley's political views — [page 637:] almost diametrically opposed to those of English — as well as his addiction to fads of various kinds, made him a natural and vulnerable target. That Poe had borrowed money from Greeley without repaying it provided English with a good excuse to bring the two together in his novel. Greeley's faddism is ridiculed amusingly, though rather crudely, in the following passage:

When the paths of Hammerhead and Sawdust cross, Hammerhead is drunk again, though less so than when last introduced to the reader. On recognizing Sawdust, Hammerhead buttonholes him and asks for a loan, precisely as Sawdust has foreseen. When the request is refused, however, Hammerhead becomes abusive, for he has had enough to drink to make him quarrelsome :

In Chapter II of Book VIII is perhaps the most brutal attack on Poe in the entire novel, for English does not hesitate to make capital out of the persistent report during the spring of 1846 that Poe was seriously ill, or even out of the rumor that he was to be taken for treatment to the asylum for the insane at Utica, New York. Not only does Hammerhead go mad from the continual use of alcohol, but he is committed to the very institution to which, according to rumor, it had been decided to take Poe. Hammerhead's mental breakdown is described as follows:

Later in the same chapter, the reader is told that two of the characters in 1844 — John Melton and Mary Blair, having just married, are spending part of their honeymoon in Utica.(200) During a visit to the asylum for the insane in that city, they learn from the superintendent that a new man has recently been confined there — “a Mr. Hammerhead, who was an author in a small way, but whose constant intemperance has driven him mad.”(201) Inasmuch as Melton has met Hammerhead [page 640:] before, he expresses a desire to see the patient. He and Mary are taken at once to Hammerhead's cell, where Melton .introduces the inmate to Mary. After borrowing a shilling from Melton, Hammerhead begins a long tirade against Carlyle and the Transcendentalists, which English clearly intended to be a burlesque of Poe's style as a critic. It will be observed that in the following paragraphs some of Poe's literary criticism in The Aristidean is specifically burlesqued, Including parts of his essay entitled “American Poetry”:

After listening to further abuse of Carlyle, Melton and his bride take their leave. Nor does the reader hear anything further concerning Hammerhead's activities until he is told in the final chapter of the novel that the unfortunate patient “is still in the mad house, writing as vigorously as ever.”(203)

English's novel was by no means the only source of the merciless persecution meted out to Poe in unfriendly magazines and newspapers during the latter months of 1846. On September 19 the following contemptible piece of doggerel appeared in the Mirror: [page 642:]

EPIGRAM. ON AN INDIGENT POET.

Sometime in December a paragraph appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post which ran as follows: “it is said that Edgar A. Poe is lying dangerously ill with the brain fever, and that his wife is in the last stages of consumption — they are without money, and without friends”(205) it was this paragraph, rather than a more friendly one appearing in the New York Morning Express,(206) which offended Poe and which caused him to impugn the motives of its author in a letter to Willis.(207) Willis had written an editorial in the New York Home Journal, referring to the paragraph in the Morning Express and suggesting that financial aid to Poe and his family might be “timely and welcome.”(208) He had also warmly defended [page 643:] Poe's character against the aspersions that had. recently been cast upon it.(209) After writing this sympathetic editorial, Willis had sent it to Poe, along with a letter In which he had suggested that Poe might like to “express anger about it .... in print.”(210) Willis had said, furthermore, that he thought the editorial would “have a good bearing” on Poe's lawsuit.(211) In his reply, Poe thanked Willis for his “kind and manly comments in ‘The Home Journal,’ ” although he expressed his displeasure at the newspaper paragraph through which his private concerns had been “piteously thrust before the public.”(212) Poe also availed himself of this opportunity to expose the ruthlessness of his enemies. He stated that his hopelessly ill wife had received, at different times, two “anonymous letters — one enclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs ——, for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.”(213) The published calumnies, of course, were those of Hiram Fuller and Thomas Dunn English, and the anonymous letters, presumably, were two of those which Poe attributed in other letters to Mrs. Ellet.

While Poe and his slowly dying wife were thus being subjected to an extremely cruel kind of systematic abuse, Enoch L. Fancher was evidently experiencing some difficulty [page 644:] in his efforts to have Poe's suit against the Mirror brought to a speedy trial. On August 4, 1846, William H. Paine, representing Hiram Fuller and Augustus W. Clason, Jr. — the proprietors of the Mirror — , appeared before the justices of the New York Superior Court to contest the charges that had been set forth by Fancher in the plaintiff's declaration about two weeks before.(214) At this hearing — Fancher, of course being present also — the Court ordered the case to be tried at the September term.(215) But when the respective attorneys again presented themselves before the justices at the time agreed upon, the case was postponed until February of the following year.(216)

Long before the opening day of the February term, however, ‘ i further complications had developed. English was no longer available as a witness in person, for he had moved to Washington toward the end of 1846 to serve as a newspaper correspondent during the short session of the Twenty-ninth Congress. Whether fear of prosecution, as Poe alleged,(217) had anything to do with this move on English's part is by no means certain. At any rate, his unavailability in New York made it imperative, if a further postponement of the case were to be avoided, that his deposition be taken in Washington and returned as [page 645:] soon as possible to the New York Superior Court. Consequently, on February 1, 1847, Justice A. Vanderpoel ordered that a commission should be issued to J. Ross Browne, J. B. H. Smith, and Lorimer Graham, Jr., of Washington, to examine English on oath “upon interrogatories to be annexed to the said Commission.”(218) For the purpose of allowing sufficient time for the deposition to be taken and returned, Vanderpoel ordered “that all proceedings in this cause be stayed until the third Monday of February,”(219) Or until the fifteenth day of the month. On February 8, apparently, the printed form of the commission, signed by T. Oakley, Clerk, and witnessed by Chief Justice Samuel Jones, was dispatched, and, along with it, a series of six interrogatories and ten cross-interrogatories to be answered by English.(220) The printed form stipulated that English could be examined either by all or by any one of the authorized commissioners.

On February 11, English's deposition was taken before J. B. H. Smith at the latter's office in Washington.(221) Smith [page 646:] certified that J. Ross Browne was unable to be present “on account of his official duties as a Clerk in the Treasury Department” and that John L. Graham “was not notified to attend because he could not be found.”(222) English answered all but two of the six interrogatories very briefly.(223) He stated how long and how intimately he had known Poe, denied that he had ever been connected with him as an editor, and gave an extremely unfavorable estimate of his general character. Inasmuch as two of the interrogatories — the fourth and fifth — had to do specifically with the charges which had caused Poe to bring suit, they drew longer explanations from English. The fourth interrogatory was worded as follows:

This interrogatory pertained, of course, to English's charge that he held Poe's “acknowledgments for a sum of money” which Poe had obtained from him “under false pretences.” English answered it thus: [page 647:]

Part of English's answer to the fifth interrogatory has already been quoted and discussed In connection with Poe's relations with Mrs. Osgood. English was called upon to state what he knew “of the Charge of Forgery imputed to Edgar A. Poe. in an Article alluded to in the last interrogatory.” English, it will be recalled, asserted in answering this question that Poe had related to him a tearful story to the effect that a jealous merchant in Broad Street who had designs on Mrs. Osgood had charged him with forgery in order to injure his supposed rival in Mrs. Osgood's eyes. English also said that Poe had come to seek his advice on the matter. The rest of his sworn testimony in answer to the fifth interrogatory follows: [page 648:]

English's answers to the first six cross-interrogatories may be summarized briefly. He testified that he had been an author and editor for the past two years except for a period of “some eight or nine months or more” during which he had been Weigher of Customs for the port of New York and that he knew both Fuller and Clason, although not intimately. Fuller, he testified, was both editor and proprietor of the Evening Mirror in June, 1846. He assumed entire responsibility for the authorship of the article which had appeared in the Evening Mirror over his name on the twenty-third of [page 649:] that month and asserted that he had offered Fuller no inducement for publishing it except to appeal to his sense of justice. He denied emphatically that he was under any obligation or promise to indemnify either of the defendants, “or to share or pay the damages and costs,” in the event that the plaintiff won his suit.

The last four cross-interrogatories were all concerned with the alleged pecuniary transaction to which English had referred in his attack on Poe and because of which he had accused Poe of having borrowed money from him under false pretenses. Fancher, of course, had devised these cross-interrogatories with a view to undermining English's anticipated answer to the fourth interrogatory. Phrased, presumably, by the defendants’ attorney, William H. Paine, the fourth interrogatory required English merely to state the particulars of his financial transaction with Poe and was naturally designed to enable him to give his side of the transaction without revealing any information that might be prejudicial to the cause of the defendants. True, in answering the fourth interrogatory, English was unable to avoid giving an unconvincing explanation as to why he could not produce the written evidence of Poe's indebtedness to him which, less than eight months before, he had said was in his possession. But he gave it of his own accord, undoubtedly knowing that the plaintiff's attorney would charge him, anyhow, with having made an unqualified statement of fact which he could [page 650:] not substantiate. He realized, probably, that it would be better for him to give an unconvincing explanation of his own free will than to be cornered by the opposing counsel and hence forced to give it.

At any rate, in the seventh cross-interrogatory English was called upon to testify whether Poe, personally, had received directly from him a sum of money for which he held an acknowledgment at the time of his examination, or had held such an acknowledgment in the preceding June. If so, English was asked to “state when and where” Poe had received the money and “to produce such acknowledgment and set forth a copy of it.” In answering this cross-interrogatory, English was of course forced to repeat that he did not hand the money directly to Poe and again to admit that he no longer held the acknowledgment of indebtedness which, during the preceding June, he had said that he possessed.

Fancher's aim in framing the eighth, ninth, and tenth cross-interrogatories was to compel English to put himself on record, under oath, as to whether he was not actually indebted to Poe for manuscript material which he had published in The Aristidean, but for which he had not paid. In his rejoinder to English's attack upon him, Poe had maintained that English was indebted to him, rather than vice versa, and Fancher evidently felt that he had grounds for establishing the validity of Poe's claims. The question of who was indebted to whom appears to have hinged upon whether [page 651:] English owed Poe for the critique entitled “American Poetry,” which had appeared in The Aristidean for November, 1845. English flatly denied that he owed Poe for that article or for any other manuscript material. “I never published any thing from the pen of Mr Poe,” said English, in answering the ninth cross-interrogatory, “for which I did not pay him promptly on the delivery to me of the manuscript; except an article on American Poetry or a portion of an article on said subject which was given to me by Mr Poe without solicitation in the presence of Mr Thomas H. Lane.” In his answer to the tenth, and final, cross-interrogatory as to whether he had ever “paid Mr Poe for literary articles,” English said that he had, but that he did “not recollect how often.”

The written answers to the various interrogatories and cross-interrogatories, subscribed and sworn to by English, reached the New York Superior Court on February 15, 1847, and were opened and filed there during the same day.(224) On February 17 the long-delayed libel suit of Edgar A. Poe vs. Hiram Fuller and Augustus W. Clason, Jr., was tried before Chief Justice Samuel Jones, William H. Paine appears not to have taken part in the final courtroom proceedings, the case for the defendants being conducted entirely by Clason. Poe was not present at the trial. Virginia had died less than three weeks before, and, as Poe said not long afterwards [page 652:] in a letter to Mrs. Locke, her death had so overwhelmed him with poignant sorrow that he had been deprived “for several weeks of all power of thought or action.”(225)

On the basis of a report of the proceedings carried by several of the New York newspapers of February l8, supplemented by information that can be gathered from English's deposition and from the rough minutes of the trial, it is possible to reconstruct with considerable accuracy what actually took place in the courtroom. A writer reporting the trial for the New York Sun began his summary of the proceedings by explaining the general nature of the litigation, after which he quoted the two specific passages from English's article on which Poe's suit for libel was based. He then went on to give the following detailed report:

The New York Morning Express, which on February 18 carried the same report of the trial as that published by the Sun,(227) contained in its next issue the following important correction of that report: “The verdict obtained by Mr. Poe in his Libel Suit against the Evening Mirror, was ‘$225 and 6 cents costs,’ instead of ‘$2,25’ [sic] (as misprinted yesterday.)”(228) [sic] The six-cent award for costs by the jury was most important from Poe's point of view, for it was evidently only a nominal sum to indicate that the jury considered the plaintiff to be entitled to the expenses that he had incurred, over and above what he. had been awarded for damages. According to the Judgment Record, signed by the Clerk on February 22, the Court affirmed that the jury had found the defendants guilty of both the premises of which they had been accused and in the following decision adjudged that the plaintiff was entitled to $101.42 for legitimate costs in excess of the $225 for damages and 6 cents for costs which the jury had awarded him:

Poe seems to have been, well satisfied with the outcome of the suit, for in a letter to Eveleth several weeks after the conclusion of the trial he made the following comment on his victory over the defendants: “The costs and all will make them a bill of $492. Pretty well — considering that there was no actual ‘damage’ done to me.”(230) In asserting that the defendants would be liable for a bill of $492, Poe must have been referring to their liability, not only for the plaintiff's damages and costs, but also for all other legal expenses which they had Incurred as a result of the suit.

It is clear, both from English's deposition and from the final courtroom proceedings, that the defendants had pinned their hopes of victory on two developments: first, that they would be able to prove that one of the defendants — Augustus W. Clason, Jr. — was not a co-owner of the Mirror and that the suit against him was therefore invalid; and second, that they could prejudice the jury against Poe's character. Otherwise, they had no case; for they could uncover no evidence to verify those specific charges by English which had induced Poe to bring suit. Not only was English unable to make good his positive accusation that Poe was indebted to him for money obtained under false pretenses, but he was not even able to prove that Poe owed him any money at all. Furthermore, the plaintiff's witness, Edward J. Thomas, completely confirmed the explanation of the charge of forgery [page 656:] which Poe had given in hie rejoinder to English. It is also clear, however, that the defendants met with no success whatever in either of their strategic moves. Clason's motion that he himself be discharged and a verdict of acquittal rendered was denied by the Court, and no testimony was forthcoming, or allowed at any rate, which reflected in any serious way upon Poe's character. Poe's remark to Eveleth, however, that “‘the Mirror’ could not get a single witness to testify one word against” his character(231) was perhaps a slight ex I tension of the truth, for three of the plaintiff's witnesses — Thomas, Noah, and Freeman Hunt — admitted that Poe occasionally got drunk. Otherwise, they had nothing derogatory to say. The rough minutes of the trial also reveal that one of the defendants’ witnesses was Mrs. Ellet's brother, William Lummis. Undoubtedly he had been called to testify against Poe's character, and he was evidently placed on the witness stand.(232) But there is no record of his having given any testimony — possibly because whatever testimony he was called upon by Mr. Clason to give concerning either his own or Mrs. Ellet's relations with Poe was considered irrelevant by the Court.

Fuller accepted his defeat with a fair measure of resignation, [page 657:] nation, “it is customary with editors,” he remarked editorially,(233) the day after the case had gone against him, “when they have been mulcted for any considerable amount in a case of libel, to come out in a bitter tirade against judge, jury and law, and to propose an Immediate reform of the statute under which they have been tried and victimized. We do not intend to indulge in any such strictures, notwithstanding the remarkable verdict rendered against us yesterday in the Superior Court, for allowing one literary individual to reply to another through our columns, in the shape of a ‘Card to the Public.’ The facts in the case are well known to our readers, and also the parties, who by resorting to low personal abuse of each other, have lost more in character than they have gained either in money or fame.” Fuller expressed surprise that a man who, with the possible exception of Bennett, had “probably written and published more libelous articles than any other man in the whole country” should have resorted to a libel suit. “This is the first instance in our recollection,” he also remarked, “of an action brought against an editor for publishing a ‘card.’” Fuller was especially insistent, however, that he alone was both editor and proprietor of the Mirror. Commenting on Poe's suit against the paper, he remarked: “The action we have alluded to was brought against another gentleman conjointly with ourselves, whose only connection with this paper consisted in a bill of sale taken by [page 658:] him of Morris & Willis, as security for money loaned. The Mirror, since the dissolution of partnership in 1845, has had but one editor and one proprietor, whose name daily appears as such on every copy of the paper issued. No other person has any control over its columns or affairs,” Fuller closed his editorial with a gibe at Poe's attorney, Enoch L. Fancher, for testifying in court that he had heard from Clason's own lips that Fuller was proprietor of the Mirror in name only. “in the meantime,” Fuller observed, “we shall beware of contending with lawyers, who, when the testimony of their witnesses falls short, do not hesitate to go upon the stand and swear to the private conversation of their opposing counsel.”

Numerous newspapers commented on the outcome of Poe's suit. The Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, which had published Poe's rejoinder to English, was far from jubilant over his victory. “We regret to see Mr. Poe bring libel suits against authors,” the editor remarked, “for [sic] all his consummate ability he is not himself apt to speak mincingly of other writers. ‘Bear and forbear’ is a very good matter.”(234) One of the most unsympathetic editorials, however, appeared in the New York Tribune and was almost certainly, therefore, from the pen of Horace Greeley. In reviewing the literary warfare leading up to the libel suit, the writer referred to Poe as a well-known poet having “more [page 659:] wit than wisdom” and as one “making no pretensions to exemplary faultlessness in morals” and even fewer “to the scrupulous fulfillment of his pecuniary engagements.”(235) After referring to Poe's contemptuous sketch of English published in Godey's Lady's Book, the writer continued:

Evidently indignant and disturbed about the tenor of the foregoing remarks, Poe cut the editorial from the Tribune and mailed it, along with a personal letter, to Greeley.(237) In this letter he urged Greeley to disavow the opinions that had been expressed in the editorial. Poe was unconvincing in his attempt to prove to Greeley that his sketch of English had not been actuated by personal spite. He was also unconvincing [page 660:] when he argued that English would not have dared to make his libelous charges if he had not counted on the expected death of Poe for security. But Poe was thoroughly logical and right in enforcing the point that English had been guilty of actionable charges and in implying that they were therefore altogether different in kind from any charge contained in the sketch. After stressing the base and cowardly nature of the accusations against him, Poe said:

The tone of these remarks clearly indicates that Poe was trying to shame Greeley into publicly repudiating the opinions that had been expressed in the Tribune editorial. Greeley, however, was evidently in no frame of mind to say anything in Poe's favor. For well over a year, Poe had owed him fifty dollars,(239) and this same debt, no doubt, accounts for the insulting assertion in the editorial that Poe was not one who made any pretensions “to the scrupulous fulfillment of his pecuniary engagements.”

But if Greeley felt indignant that Poe's suit against [page 661:] the Mirror was successful, Edward J. Thomas, who had helped to spread the charge of forgery upon which English had based one of his libelous accusations, was convinced that the verdict was just. It was through his testimony, as Poe observed in his letter to Greeley, that the charge was proved to be entirely baseless. Less than a month after the termination of the suit, Thomas wrote a letter to his friend, Mrs. Osgood — who for some time had been staying in Philadelphia with her husband and children — in which he commented on certain aspects of the trial. Naturally, he had been worried — inasmuch as Poe, according to English's testimony, had represented him as having had designs upon Mrs. Osgood — for fear that his friend's name would be made known to the jury when English's deposition was read aloud in the courtroom. The letter, which indicates that Thomas was a warm friend of the family and which he evidently wrote to reassure Mrs. Osgood concerning the matter about which he had been apprehensive, follows in part:

The rest of the letter, which is chiefly concerned with Mr. Osgood — or Sam, as Thomas called him — is not pertinent here. But the final comments quoted above may be pointed out as typical of many others which make painfully clear how much Poe's reputation had suffered as a result of the violent controversies in which he had become enmeshed. However much his weaknesses may have been exaggerated, they had been ruthlessly exposed and were now generally taken for granted. His legal victory was small compensation for such an unhappy [page 663:] turn of events.

English and Poe never saw each other again after their quarrel in the early part of 1846, and of course the events which followed merely served to increase their enmity. As long as Poe lived, neither man manifested the slightest inclination to forgive the other. When English, in conjunction with George G. Foster, edited The John-Donkey in 1848, he continued from time to time to make Poe the butt of his jesting remarks. Also in 1848, Poe revised and considerably lengthened his original sketch of English. This revised and much more abusive sketch was entitled “Thomas Dunn Brown, “ and exists today in Poe's own handwriting as a part of a fragmentary manuscript of a book bearing the following title: “Literary America, Some Honest Opinions about our Autorial Merits and Demerits with Occasional Words of Personality.”(241) The general plan of “Literary America” appears to have been no different from that which Poe revealed to Philip Pendleton Cooke in a letter of April l6, 1846. After describing to Cooke the nature of his series of “Literati” papers, Poe remarked: “Pending the issue of this series, I am getting ready similar papers to Include American litterateurs generally — and, ‘by the beginning of December, I hope to put to press (here and in England) a volume embracing all the articles under the common head ‘The Living Literati of the US.’ [sic] or something similar.”(242) [page 664:]

The most abusive part of “Thomas Dunn Brown” is that in which Poe undertook to explain to foreigners why he had given English any space at all in his book. In this part of the revised sketch there is no repetition of material contained in the earlier one:

The passages from “Thomas Dunn Brown” quoted above are not the only ones that stamp the later article as personally more abusive than the earlier one. Elsewhere in the revised sketch, Poe spoke slightingly of his enemy's real name as being a nom de plume; referred contemptuously to, English's father as “a ferryman on the Schuylkill”; and pronounced English himself to be a windbeutel in character.(244) Thus it can be seen that the revised sketch, unlike the original, contains a good deal of scurrilous matter and that it exhibits relatively poor taste. But it must always be borne in mind that Poe did not revise his sketch until long after English had libeled him in an article which shocked even Griswold because of its ungentlemanly nature, or until after English had maliciously portrayed him as Marmaduke Hammerhead in the novel, 1844.

In the light of these facts, Griswold was guilty of an unpardonable distortion of the truth when he omitted Poe's earlier published sketch from his 1850 edition of The Literati and inserted in its stead the later manuscript version entitled “Thomas Dunn Brown.” In addition to denying countless [page 666:] persons the privilege of reading the series of sketches precisely as Poe had written them for the Lady's Book and as Godey had printed them, Griswold made matters worse by reprinting Poe's Introduction to the original papers and prefacing it with the following comment: “The series was introduced by the following paragraphs, and the personal sketches were given in the order in which they are here reprinted, from ‘George Bush’ to “Richard Adams Locke.’”(245) This statement is simply untrue. Not only did Griswold insert five sketches which are considerably different from those originally appearing in Godey's, but the substituted sketch of English, aside from its never having appeared in Godey's, was not even given in the proper order! Despite this falsification of the facts, Griswold had the effrontery to make the seemingly generous assertion, in his “Memoir,” that the attack on Poe in the New York Mirror was “unworthy of Dr. English, unnecessary, and not called for by Poe's article, though that, as every one acquainted with the parties might have seen, was entirely false in what purported to be its facts.”(246) Yet for more than fifty years — because of Griswold's misrepresentation — if a casual reader happened to turn to Poe's sketch of English in any published edition of Poe's works, for the purpose of judging for himself how much provocation Poe had given his libeler, he could base his conclusion only on the content of a sketch [page 667:] that had not even been written until long after the time of provocation.(247)

Griswold's misrepresentation enabled English — years later — to defend the scurrilous tone of his reply to Poe much more plausibly than he could have possibly done if the text of Poe's original sketch had been generally known. Both Ingram and Woodberry — the latter, in his first life of Poe — stressed the scurrility of English's attack.(248) In each instance, however, English defended himself by arguing that Poe had used scurrilous language first. His answer to Ingram follows:

In answering Woodberry somewhat less belligerently ten years later, English repeated most of the examples of Poe's scurrilous language which he had pointed out to Ingram. Then, after remarking that the reader could determine for himself the relative decency of the two articles, he concluded: “l may remark, however, that whatever I wrote, which was literally true, if not quiet in tone and temper, gained its character from Poe's own attack, which is a striking illustration of the old proverb that ‘evil communications corrupt good manners.’ I was angry at the time, and engaged in an asperity of language which I regret now even under provocation.”(250) It is important to note, however, that most of the examples which English cited in his letter to Ingram to prove that Poe had provoked him to the use of scurrilous language cannot be found in Poe's original sketch. Therefore, even though [page 669:] the original sketch was far from being merely a dissection of English's literary shortcomings, it can hardly be said to have set the tone of English's reply. That the original sketch was even more cuttingly sarcastic than the later one is beside the point.

Because of the many years which had elapsed since his controversy with Poe, it may well be that English was not Intentionally misrepresenting matters when he sought to prove that he had been provoked to a scurrilous attack on Poe by the tone of a sketch which was nonexistent when the attack first appeared in print. When English wrote his first open letter to Ingram, Poe's original sketch had lain buried in the pages of Godey's Lady's Book for nearly forty years. Inasmuch as English did not have an accurate memory for facts and since he may never have known that Poe revised the original sketch, it is quite possible that he really believed in his later years that Poe had originally attacked him as “Thomas Dunn Brown.” If he had been less intent upon proving his point, however, and more concerned about keeping the record straight, he might have noted that in his own libelous attack, reproduced in part by Ingram, were two quotations from Poe's sketch of him which could not have come from the article entitled “Thomas Dunn Brown.” In his attack on Poe, English remarked: “Mr. Poe states in his article ‘I do not personally know Mr. English.’”(251) Nowhere in the body of the revised [page 670:] sketch did Poe refer to English by his real name. The other quotation comes near the end of English's attack. Speaking of Poe, English said: “He is a complete evidence of his own assertion that ‘no spectacle can be more pitiable than that of a man without the commonest school education, busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind on topics of polite literature.’”(252) When Poe revised his sketch, he substituted ludicrous for pitiable in the passage quoted by English.

To accuse English of wilfully distorting the facts in this instance would hardly be fair. But one may fairly accuse him of an irresponsible carelessness in dealing with those facts which does not speak well for his dependability as a source of trustworthy information about Poe's life. If he erred so grievously on this particular occasion, how can one depend upon other testimony of his later years which does not permit the truth to be so easily traced? Undoubtedly, the answer is that his uncorroborated assertions must be regarded with suspicion. One cannot lightly discount the all-too-frequent occasions when his later recollections of Poe mark him as a biased witness whose judgments were hastily, impulsively, and uncharitably formed. Rarely at any period of his life did he manifest the calm of mind or the capacity for sympathetic understanding that might have enabled him to see Poe plain.

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