[page 77:]

In a 6 September 1845 article in the Broadway Journal, Edgar Allan Poe quoted a poetic jeu d’esprit that had made the rounds of the newspapers several months before. The lines, which originated in the Hartford Columbian, addressed attacks on a long religious poem entitled Saul, A Mystery, written by the Reverend Arthur Cleveland Coxe:

In his ample annotations to Poe’s Broadway [page 78:] Journal Prose, Burton R. Pollin unpacks many of the contextual details that stand behind these witty verses, clever enough to have been included as an example of light poetic fare in Sidney Lanier’s The Science of English Verse (1880). Saul, A Mystery had indeed been reviewed in the Broadway Journal, though not by Poe, and Pollin identifies the periodical in question as the New-York Saturday Emporium, one of the historically important mammoth weeklies of Poe’s time. In the absence of a file of the Saturday Emporium, however, Pollin acknowledges that the identity of Green must, of necessity, remain uncertain (P 4:193-194).

Although it would seem pedantic and fruitless to recontextualize the poetic squibs that spiced periodicals like the Hartford Columbian, a file of the Saturday Emporium, available at the American Antiquarian Society, clarifies several additional details in the lines quoted by Poe. The “verdant little fellow” who sponsored an attack on “Saul” was Edmund Brewster Green, editor of Hartford’s New England Weekly Review until he transferred editorial duties to the Emporium. On 24 May 1845 the Emporium did review Saul, A Mystery, calling its author Coxe “young, mediocre, and conceited.” The reviewer, probably associate editor Henry C. Deming, claimed that the most mysterious thing about the poem was that the reader must “become at once familiar with much of it.” The sole merit of the work, according to Deming, was that it was “harmless”; its single fault that “it is good for nothing.” Scoring its derivative “trashy blank verse,” Deming perhaps belabored the obvious in declaring that Coxe was no poet.(2) For his part in 1845, Poe disclaimed any knowledge of Saul, A Mystery, but he may have enjoyed the slashing attack in the Emporium, the tone of which found precedence in his own responses to that mammoth newspaper earlier in the year. His own set of retorts and rejoinders to the Saturday Emporium provide perspective on his attitudes toward the mammoth weeklies and their role in the publishing world of his day.

I

Poe’s ambition to found and edit his own literary magazine, an outlet that would have granted him financial security and artistic control in a contentious literary marketplace, has been well documented by literary historians. Believing with a mixture of idealism and self-interest that the “whole spirit of the age” was toward magazine literature,(3) Poe championed the cause of a periodical that would appeal to highbrow tastes. His plans for the Penn Magazine and the Stylus were based on the establishment of a coterie of the most learned, reputable, and refined authors of America. He sensed, however, that the real tendency of the age was towards cheaper, popular literature [page 79:] produced for the commercial market. In response to these supposed baneful forces in the marketplace, he elevated an independent criticism to counter the influence of “organized cliques, which . . . manufacture, at the nod of our principal booksellers, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale” (Essays and Reviews 1025). Identifying his goals with a literary elite, with persons of “caste” who had achieved high standing in both the arts and society, Poe adopted a posture that put him in opposition to much of the newspaper press. An apparent reflection of cheapness and commercialization in the newspaper world was the phenomenon of the mammoth weeklies, which flourished in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The physical properties that Poe proposed for his ideal magazine — fine topography, single or double columns carefully arranged to highlight poetry, the absence of cheap engravings in favor of superior woodcuts — contrasted sharply with the appearance of the mammoth weeklies, noted for their huge size, multiple columns, haphazard arrangement of diverse materials, and their notoriously low cost.

As emphatically as Poe glorified elitist standards in literary publication, his activities as a practicing magazinist brought him into direct contact with those features of marketplace he vigorously denounced, including the mammoth weeklies. Indeed contact with these papers, either intentionally or unintentional, was nearly inevitable for him. Brother Jonathan, the first of the mammoth papers when started by Park Benjamin and Rufus W. Griswold in July 1839, reprinted one of Poe’s tales. The New World, first appearing in its four foot length and eleven column width in June 1840 under the editorship of Benjamin and James Aldrich, reprinted poems, tales, and parodies of the author. The Boston Notion, begun by the Yankee businessman George Roberts, also offered reprints in addition to a biographical sketch of Poe.(4) Of the weeklies with which he came into contact, the New-York Saturday Emporium, which he reviewed when editing the Broadway Journal, has received scant attention from historians of publishing, though it evolved from Brother Jonathan and eventually merged with the New World.(5) Offering information that fills minor gaps in the bibliographical record of Poe’s editorships, the Saturday Emporium may be of even greater interest to students of the reemerging field of the history of the book. The Saturday Emporium began at a time when the more notorious mammoth weeklies had either suffered setbacks or passed into oblivion, victims of the same economic forces [page 80:] in the publishing world that had previously brought them to prominence. A close examination of Poe’s interactions with the Emporium, moreover, may show that his position, or posture, in the periodical milieu of the 1840s ironically approximates that of some of the publications he so easily stereotyped or castigated as cheap literature.

II

Products of the economic depression of 1837-1843, the mammoth weeklies were noted primarily for their huge size: witness the case of the New World, which once boasted 48 columns and ran to proportions of 6 feet 7 inches x 4 feet 4 inches. In the eyes of their critics, these gigantic proportions offered opportunities for mirth and satire; their defenders or editors, however, transformed this apparent defect into a virtue. A writer in one of the larger sheets, Boston’s Yankee Blade, used physical size to introduce a discussion of the characteristic features of the mammoths, their popularity, and the revolutionary but short-lived changes they brought to newspaper publishing and editing:

The mammoths emphasized volume in more ways than one. One obvious point made by Blade writer is that many of the mammoth [page 82:] papers carried titles or subtitles as extensive as their bulk. The Saturday Emporium, for example, covered much of its masthead with the following subtitle: A Family Gazette of Literature, Art, Science, Agriculture, General Intelligence and Amusement. Its size and scope may have offered a greater volume of reading matter than other periodicals, but the proprietors of such papers discovered that narrow profit margins per issue placed a premium on volume of sales. The absence of binding and stitching reduced production costs, and before the advent of postal reform, the mammoths were sent by cheap newspaper rates rather than higher magazine rates. The products of village or urban interests, as the Blade writer notes, the mammoths aspired nevertheless for more than a local appeal. Agents in cities from different regions were engaged to sell subscriptions. With traditional booksellers still suffering from economic hard times in the late 1830s and having temporarily turned away from the selling of expensively produced novels and romances, the cheap newspapers and magazines asserted themselves by reprinting foreign works in their pages; in the particular case of the mammoth weeklies, they offered special extras or novelistic supplements to current and potential subscribers. Offering a quick ascendancy to “little” men who, in the words of the Blade writer, swelled with pride and profit at production of their gigantic sheets, those market conditions proved unstable at best. For as the Blade writer also notes with his suggestive wordplay, the publishing market could be transformed into a “rag market” that suffered from “constant depression” or “violent and excessive fluctuations.”

A mammoth may have been contained as “much reading as in an ordinary library,” an image of traditional readership, but these papers brought changes in the ways materials in periodicals was edited, disseminated, and consumed. The mammoths paid no particular attention to seasonal publishing or other traditional considerations of the book trade. Their somewhat slapdash appearance, their oceans of ink, and their challenge to traditional authorship brought intense criticism. In the American Whig Review, in an issue reviewed by both the Saturday Emporium and Poe’s Broadway Journal, Evert A. Duyckinck struck at the era of cheap literature as follows: “Nothing has been too mean for that system to produce. It was pregnant with nauseous puffs, unworthy of a mountebank, petty innuendos, and all the corruptions of false literature from an oblique, unworthy insinuations to a gross libel. Native authors were neglected, despised, insulted; foreign authors were mutilated, pillaged and insulted, besides.”(7) [page 83:]

Duyckinck made this charge in hopes that the advent of an International Copyright law might end the era of cheap literature, but by the time of his 1845 tirade, the mammoth weeklies were already on the wane. Traditional publishers had reentered the competition for reprinting foreign literature, a move that contributed to the demise of Brother Jonathan in 1843. The postal service imposed higher rates, particularly on the mailing of fictional supplements, thus reducing one advantage of the mammoths in securing and sustaining subscribers. As other smaller newspapers rose to compete with the original set of weeklies, the same marketplace that had been so hospitable to the making of the Jonathan and its brethren proved their undoing. Improvements in the national economy in the middle of the decade contributed to a preference for more expensive reading fare, and the mammoths were unable to sustain their market advantage. Among the casualties of these economic dislocations in the publishing world were the former beneficiaries of the meteoric rise of the New World. Park Benjamin had withdrawn as editor in 1844, and the journal’s publisher Jonas Winchester was forced to declare bankruptcy shortly thereafter. Serving briefly in Benjamin’s role as editor was Henry C. Deming, a lawyer who displayed a facility for French translation. With Winchester’s financial difficulties, however, the periodical was soon sold to Ward & Co., owner of the Saturday Emporium. The history of that publication — and Poe’s brief comments on it — thus provide a kind of epilogue on the dramatic emergence and speedy decline of the mammoth weeklies in the 1840s.

III

Born out of the ashes of Brother Jonathan and soon to merge with the New World, the New-York Saturday Emporium began publication on 29 June 1844. As Frank Luther Mott has claimed, the charge of laxity in aesthetic or moral standards is not one to be levelled at the entire class of mammoth newspapers. In fact, Edmund Brewster Green, the “verdant little fellow” who assumed editorship of the Emporium after leaving Hartford’s New England Weekly Review, struck a high moral tone in his “Salutatory” notice of 29 June 1844. Promising to contribute to the “formation of correct habits of thinking,” Green claimed that nothing would be served by “breaking down a correct standard of moral culture or vitiating moral taste.” By the middle of the next month, Green’s folio size paper of 36 columns boasted an increase [page 84:] in subscriptions of over 2000, a figure not including the number of subscribers inherited from Brother Jonathan. Selling for just 2 dollars per year, his “full, comprehensive, miscellaneous newspaper” featured a series of metropolitan sketches that inveighed against the evils of fashionable life and licentiousness of all classes. Such statements reflected the conservative notions of editor Green, who sought to apply Whig principles to journalistic practices in both Hartford and New York.(8)

In light of Duyckinck’s previously quoted claim that puffery was one of the hallmarks of the era of cheap literature, it is ironic that the first significant mention of Poe in the Emporium applied that charge to him. In a brief article entitled “Reciprocity” appearing in the Emporium on 25 January 1845, Poe and James Russell Lowell were scored for a mutual exchange of uncritically favorable reviews: “Poe writes a highly favorable review of Lowell’s Poems, and publishes it in Graham’s Magazine. Lowell writes a eulogy on Poe, pronouncing him the wisest critic living, and publishes it in the same periodical. Poe is now one of the editors of the Evening Mirror, and modestly copies Lowell’s article, calling attention to it in a an editorial paragraph.”(9) The two authors were subjected to similar critical scrutiny in the Emporium on 1 February 1845 in an early installment of a literary series called “The Club,” a satire on literary pretensions and libels like Poe’s Folio Club. Fictitious critics, named Sherry, Domine, and Dunnegan, surveyed the literary scene with the particular attention to Poe and Lowell:

The Whig principles of the Emporium editors may have disposed them more positively to Poe’s works when he began to contribute to George Colton’s American Whig Review in 1845. In “Our Book-Table,” the paper’s regular column of literary notices on 8 February 1845, the American Review received general praise, but Poe’s contribution was singled out for special commendation: “The article called ‘Patent Property’ is a good one; and Poe’s or ‘Quarles’ ‘Raven’ is perfectly magnificent; the versification is the most exquisite we have seen any American poem; and the poetry is of the highest order.” This encomium did not, however, come from Green. The Emporium announced on 21 December 1844 that Green had taken a temporary leave of absence from editorial duties while he contributed a series of travel sketches to the paper. This suspension of editorial supervision continued until 19 April 1845 when both he and associate editor Henry C. Deming announced his return to full duties.

Thus, Deming, rather than Green, became embroiled in the Emporium’s most prolonged skirmish with Poe in the spring of 1845. The bone of contention was the appearance of an edition of Bulwer’s Minor Poems, compiled by a contributing editor of the Emporium, C. Donald McLeod. It is not surprising that Bulwer’s work became the [page 86:] object of debate since, along with reprints of Dickens, the British author’s work was among the most widely pirated by the mammoth weeklies. The absence of an international copyright law provided license to American periodicals to reprint, without permission and without providing remuneration to the author, the works of British novelists and poets. The mammoth weeklies were especially notorious for such activities, and even offered the works of Bulwer and Dickens in supplements or extras offered as premiums to potential subscribers. Bulwer’s novels, of course, became popular in these forms, but in an era of cheap reprints, such promotional ventures extended to the publication of his poems. One edition of Bulwer’s poems, for example, sold over 16,000 copies for Brother Jonathan, its low price certainly a prime reason for brisk sales. Another edition of Bulwer’s Eva and Other Poems, in fact sold for as little as six pence.(11)

The problem of cheap British reprints, however, was an issue to which the editors of the Emporium were sensitive. In an early installment of “The Club,” published on 16 November 1844, E. L. Bulwer entered along with a group of rotund American publishers who thanked the British author for their wealth. Bulwer announced that his “novel days” were over, since all his novels had fallen into the “coffers” of American publishers. One overweight publisher announced: “Sir Lytton, we have called you here to state our many obligations to you. I and my brethren have lived and grown fat upon your brain. . . . But you had a copyright in England; and that’s enough for an author. Yet Sir Lytton, we feel indebted to you for most of our substance; and we wish to repay you for all we have taken.” The fat publishers then gave Bulwer a silver toothpick as a toke of thanks.

Within this context the Emporium announced the forthcoming publication of Bulwer’s Minor Poems, edited by McLeod, on 7 December 1844: “We see that J. W. Judd & Co., have in press and will shortly publish a volume with this title. Those who are acquainted with Bulwer . . . as a poet, only through his ‘Rebels,’ or ‘Siamese Twins,’ have a rich treat in store for them. His shorter poems, are for the most part of exquisite beauty; they abound in his peculiar imagery, epigrammatic turn of thought, or elevated philosophy. ‘When stars are in the quiet skies,’ ‘Patience and Hope,’ and ‘Mazarin’ are poems rarely equalled. The forthcoming volume embraces nearly all, that he has written, except such as his own expressed taste has already [page 87:] condemned. We fully recommend the book to all lovers of true and beautiful poetry.”(12)

Such an enthusiastic disposition toward Bulwer put the Emporium on a potential collision course with Poe, who reviewed the volume in the Broadway Journal on 8 February 1845. As Pollin notes (P 4:18), the review contained an odd mixture of respect for McLeod’s “fame” and disdain for his immaturity. McLeod (1821-1865) was indeed young, but by the mid-1840s, he had contributed to a range of periodicals, including the Emporium. In praising Bulwer for his epigrammatism and “peculiarities,” that paper apparently drew directly from its young editor’s preface. That short introductory essay then drew Poe’s ire as he directed criticism toward both Bulwer as well as his compiler. Poe scored McLeod for his capricious, immature judgment in selecting verses for the collection and for his uncritical faith in Bulwer’s versatile genius. Poe then proceeded to distinguish Bulwer’s admitted talent from authentic genius, a contradistinction that would be repeated in other Poe essays. It followed as a corollary, Poe argued, that Bulwer could not be a true poet, since genius without true poetic distinction was a contradiction in terms. Adopting the role of cultural arbiter, Poe displayed disdain for the youthful McLeod, referred to as Bulwer’s “acolyte,” who aspired to notoriety by compiling a cheap abridgment of a popular author’s work. Poe’s own sensitivity about editors or compilers deriving notoriety from bringing together an author’s scattered pieces may have sharpened the tone of the review.(13) His penchant for developing such hierarchies, his sharp contrast between authors of genius and popular writers like Bulwer, also colored his caustic comments in the review.

Poe’s posture of superiority before the commercial marketplace was further reflected in his tone of amused disdain directed at the world of the mammoth weeklies in an 8 March 1845 column in the Broadway Journal.(14) Like the writer in the Yankee Blade, who jocularly noted that a mammoth sheet could serve as a bed blanket as well as for providing reading matter, Poe struck directly at the Saturday Emporium:

In proposing that the Emporium could serve as a coverlid for a bed, Poe obviously played on his audience’s awareness of the mammoth size of the paper. In suggesting that the Emporium, moreover, could serve the practical uses of the “poor,” he offered an evaluation of cheap literature, its readers, and the “class” of periodicals to which the paper belonged. In punning on the Emporium’s possible inclusion of “light” rather than “heavy” articles, Poe commented on the cheapening of standards in the periodical milieu, a pandering to superficial, ephemeral subject matter rather than issues of intelligent weight. Overall, the facetious and equivocal review — offering ritualistic flattery in the guise of a tongue in cheek “panegyric” — seemed to bewilder the editors of the Emporium. [page 89:]

On 15 March 1845 the interim editor Henry C. Deming’s response displayed his clear knowledge that Poe was the individual who had attacked McLeod:

On 22 March 1845, Poe, sustaining his verbal play, responded with another brief article on the Emporium:

Implying that faint and dubious praise was the only “compliment” he could offer to the Emporium, Poe assigned multiple uses to the paper, and thus called attention to his own “double purpose.” [page 91:] Mentioning that a newspaper functioned as a “library” for its readers, he acknowledged how the traditional notion of the attentive reader had been cheapened through the physical medium out of which newspapers were printed. Relegating this mammoth paper to the class of “poor” readers, he maintained his posture of superior tactician in literary battles. By suggesting that the Emporium had pilfered from the Broadway Journal, Poe invoked the traditional notion of credit for authorship. He may have recalled a 15 February 1845 article in the Emporium, “Authors and Publishers.” That article, with its lament for an absence of international copyright, recalled Poe’s “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison House” that had just appeared in the Broadway Journal (Essays and Reviews). Both articles described the low status of “poor-devil authors,” whose teeming brains and empty stomachs signified the plight of American magazinists.

Apparently adopting Poe’s call to exchange the “tomahawk of war” for the “calumet of peace,” the Emporium gave positive notices to both Poe’s Tales and The Raven and Other Poems later in the year. In “Our Book-Table,” appearing in the Emporium on 5 July 1845, the editors had these words of praise for the second number in Wiley & Putnam’s Library of American Books. “Mr. Poe’s style is one which possesses a great many striking peculiarities. The volume before us contains a number of the most characteristic and best of his tales, among which are the Gold Bug, Marie Roget, and the Murders in the Rue Morgue. The first mentioned of these tales, strikes us as being the most ingenious and highly artistical; and evinces most conspicuously the spirit of analysis so peculiar to all of Mr. Poe’s writings.” If Poe saw the notice, he must have been pleased with the agreeable tone of a newspaper with which he had done battle only a few months before. Ever mindful of the literary politics he was practicing, however, he may have also noticed that the key words of praise in the review — calling attention to “peculiarity” in style, his methods of “ingenious” analysis, the “characteristic” nature of the tales in the volume — were lifted from a longer discussion of his tales by George Colton in the American Whig Review.(16) On one hand, the Emporium took a cue from its fellow Whig publication. On the other hand, the Emporium, given to the terse notice rather than a sustained review, gave an implicit not to the more respectable world of magazine literature.

On 22 November 1845 the Emporium reviewed volume no. VIII in Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, The Raven and Other Poems. Without repeating the lavish praise they had given the title [page 92:] poem, the editors acknowledged a feature of the volume that Poe emphasized in his own preface — his rationale in collecting the pieces was to reassert authorial control over poems that had been scattered among miscellaneous newspapers. Perhaps recalling another collection of fugitive verses that had won Poe’s ire because of its miscellaneous nature and its prefatory essay (i.e., Donald McLeod’s edition of Bulwer’s Minor Poems), the editors went out of their way to praise the preface of Poe’s volume: “our readers, of course, know most of these poems, which have already gone the rounds of many periodicals and newspapers in the country. We admire them, and always have admired Mr. Poe’s writings, but we are particularly pleased with the author’s pert and independent preface to the present volume.”(17) It was no accident that in that preface Poe had mentioned the “paltry compensations” offered authors for their verses.

IV

Of the slightly over a dozen items on Poe appearing in the Emporium, some are brief notices; others are more lengthy in describing Poe’s editorial activities. None of them analyzes his work in any great depth.(18) Nevertheless, Poe’s interactions demonstrate his responses to the phenomenon of the mammoth weeklies as he adopted the posture of the superior magazine editor who comments on developments in the cheap press. Ironically Poe’s position in the commercial marketplace came closer to that of the mammoth weeklies than he was inclined to admit. Despite his immersion in the fast-paced world of periodicals, Poe maintained a traditional reverence for the world of book culture. His reviews in the magazines he edited, whether of Bulwer, Dickens, or American authors, followed the traditional notion that a book, rather than short fugitive pieces or assembled miscellanies, was the proper reflection of an author’s mind and imagination; it provided the only medium through which to take full account of an author’s achievement. Thus we see his impatience with collections of fugitive pieces, miscellaneous publications that would not allow a reviewer to take stock of an author’s development, output, and distinctiveness. But as he himself acknowledged elsewhere, the whole tendency of the periodical world was toward the short, terse, and ephemeral as opposed to the more sturdy and substantial productions of the book world, full length works that required time to digest, assimilate, and evaluate. The irony of Poe’s [page 93:] literary career was that he spent so much time and effort in the world of periodicals, toiling in a marketplace of short, ephemeral pieces, ever mindful that authors would eventually be judged by their more substantial achievements in the world of books.(19) Or as Lewis P. Simpson articulates Poe’s dilemma, despite his aspirations for “a coherent literary culture, he participated constantly in the life of America’s Grub Street. He lived more intimately in the America where literature was product and commodity than any other major writer of the nineteenth century.”(20)

Ironically, that tension was felt as well by the editor of the Emporium, whose “Thoughts on Newspapers” on 27 June 1844 made the traditional distinction between world of newspapers and the world of books. Acknowledging that practically every village in the nation boasted a “sheet of ample dimensions,” Edmund Brewster Green pointed to newspapers as “universal and necessary commodity” that fulfilled a reading appetite that books could not satisfy. Newspapers, presenting brief articles that could be read quickly, reflected the stir and bustle of the past-paced times. They thus seemed more “congenial to the tastes and character of the present age.” Despite such praise of the world of the press, a traditional reverence for book culture surfaced strongly in Green’s essay, for he reluctantly acknowledged that newspapers “bid fair to supersede even books.” A penchant for the casual, spontaneous world of the newspaper threatened to debase and unsettle taste. Books, Green concluded, transmitted the “mind and genius of the age” while newspapers ultimately had no distinctive character except for their possible encouragement of superficiality. A similar impatience with the corruption and shallowness of popular taste surfaced as well as two articles on “International Copyright” published in the Emporium on 3 and 10 August 1844.(21) Precisely those characteristics Green found defects in newspapers — lightness, superficiality, ephemerality — he associated with the plight of American letters. Only an international copyright law, which provided sufficient emolument to native authors, could further the cause of American literature. So much of American talent and genius, those characteristics Poe never conjoined, was wasted, Green lamented, on hack work for newspapers that appealed to the low tastes of the multitude.

On a range of issues, perhaps extending to the specific arguments for an international copyright law, Poe, however, would have been likely to agree. When he claimed, in reviewing the Emporium on 22 [page 94:] March 1845, that he had seen no “more than three numbers of it,” he may have adopted a rhetorical posture of critical detachment from the world of the cheap newspaper press. Or he may have missed the true character of the Emporium, subtitled “A Family Newspaper” that offered nothing to offend sensitivities or to challenge existing standards of taste. Poe’s place in the periodical world of 1845 was not that different from Green’s, an irony accented by a 31 January 1846 article in the Emporium that promoted the publication as a newspaper in the magazine class, precisely the class to which Poe aspired. That article on “Magazines and Newspapers,” in fact, compared the Emporium to the Columbian Magazine to which Poe had just contributed.

Additional ironies are suggested by the final two Poe items appearing in the Saturday Emporium. In preparing his sketches on the “The Literati” of New York City for Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1846, Poe adopted the posture of a member of polite society taking the measure of the reputable authors in America’s cultural metropolis. He fell short of his target and objective, for the sketches amounted to a series of hasty portraits. Rather than thoughtful estimations of the mind and achievement of each author, the series aroused a furor over their personal attacks; they seemed to fortify the furor biographicus in American periodicals, a feature of cheap literature denounced by Evert Duyckinck since it encouraged a cult of personality or a superficial nationalism rather than careful examination of individual genius. Thus, in “Edgar A. Poe,” on 9 May 1846, the Emporium criticized Poe for debasing public taste rather than enhancing it:

What had been initially cheered as a journalistic hit quickly deteriorated into literary warfare in which offended parties expressed outrage at Poe’s comments in the “Literati.” Perhaps the ultimate irony, from the perspective of Poe’s financial interests, is that the series of sketches that formed the foundation of a contemplated book on American literature, a project that might have granted fame and fortune, cost him much of his livelihood. “The Literati” led to the libel suit of Thomas Dunn English,(22) whose attacks on Poe were recorded in “A Literary Warfare,” published in the Emporium on 27 June 1846. “The Literati” and the libel suit formed a chain of circumstances that rendered Poe an object of public charity by the end of the year. [page 96:] Finally, the Emporium commented on the way in which his sallies against his contemporaries left him a mere skeleton of his former self:

It is sadly ironic that the newspaper, which Poe characterized as worthy only to be a coverlid for a bed, proclaimed him a victim of the same literary warfare he fomented. Using magazine parlance to comment on his reversal of fortune, The Emporium labelled Poe a “used up” author, “dissected” and “finished” by his detractors. It used, moreover, a variant of the language of “A Reversal”: “Mister Poe, you can’t come it!” A premature epitaph, the article in the Emporium is nevertheless an appropriate epilogue to Poe’s battles with the mammoth weeklies, also weakened and nearly “finished” by the same market forces that brought them to prominence. Products of the reading revolution of the early nineteenth century, the mammoths became objects of ridicule to critics who saw them as unworthy competitors to books and magazines. Poe’s contradistinction of “genius” and “talent,” his opposition of the true poet and the popular writer, his hierarchy of the relative merits of books, magazine, and newspapers — all these categories reflected his attachment to a literary order that transcended the values of Grub Street. As evidenced by his unstable position in the magazine publishing world, his claim of status was often more rhetorical posture or proclamation than an accurate reflection of the accelerating changes in the literary marketplace of which he was a critic and victim.

[page 98:]

NOTES

1.  P 3:244 Pollin’s notes to the Broadway Journal and to Poe’s Brevities (P 2:367-369) contain background information on the poetic squib and Sidney Lanier’s partial quotation of it. In the Saturday Emporium on 9 August 1845, the editors, in addition to reprinting “A Reversal,” included the following four line “Rejoinder”: “Dear Retorter, your verses are prime; / And came to our hand in good season; / ‘Tis well you defend our dear Arthur in rhyme! / For you know you can’t do it in reason!” Charles Briggs reviewed Saul in the Broadway Journal 1 (1845) 296-297. No file of the Hartford Columbian has survived, but “A Reversal” must have appeared there sometime between late May, when Saul was reviewed, and early August 1845.

2.  The puns on “mystery” in the Emporium review of “Saul” were likely the work of Henry Champion Deming (1805-1852), who translated Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (cited in the review) in 1840. Deming joined the Emporium in November 1844 after serving with Park Benjamin on the New World. He served as mayor of Hartford (1854-58, 1860-62) and eventually in the U.S. Congress. Edmund B. Green (1814-1852) was heavily involved in Whig politics as a journalist and eventually as private secretary to Henry Clay. For an overview of his career, see John Spencer Clark, The Life and Letters of John Fiske (Boston and New York, 1917), 1:1-8. Green was the father of the popular historian John Fiske, born Edmund Fisk Green in 1842. Milton Berman, in John Fiske, Evolution of a Popularizer (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 7-8, incorrectly identifies Edmund Brewster Green’s New York newspaper as the Saturday Review. Coxe (1818-1896) was an Episcopalian churchman and an author of Christian ballads before he wrote such works as “Saul.” Poe later consulted Saul, as his reprinting of “A Rejoinder” in an 1849 “Marginalia” indicates (P 2:367-369).

3.  See Poe’s 2 November 1844 letter to Charles Anthon, O 266-272. Other relevant documents include, of course, his prospectuses for the Penn Magazine and the Stylus, reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. Richard Thompson (New York, 1984), pp. 1024-26, 1033-35, and his comments in the “Marginalia” on the tendency toward the curt and condensed in periodicals (P 2:248, 308). An insightful overview of Poe’s relationship to the literary marketplace, to which I am indebted throughout this essay, is Bruce I. Weiner, The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship (Baltimore, 1987).

4.  “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” was reprinted in 1841 in Brother Jonathan. The New World reprinted Poe’s “Autography” and “Ligeia.” See also Burton R. Pollin, “Poe in the Boston Notion,” NEQ [page 99:] 42 (1969) 585-589 and “Poe and the Boston Notion,” ELN 8 (1970) 23-28.

5.  Frank Luther Mott, whose treatment of “The Mammoth Papers” remains standard, notes how the New World merged into the Saturday Emporium, A History of American Magazines (New York, 1930) 1:361-362. James J. Barnes surveys the mammoth weeklies in the light of the economic depression of 1837-43 in Authors, Publishers, Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement 1815-1854 (Columbus, Oh., 1974) pp. 1-28. See also Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York, 1945) pp. 24-26.

6.  “Mammoth Newspapers,” Yankee Blade, 14 August 1847. Published in Waterville and Gardiner, Maine before moving to Boston in 1847, the Yankee Blade, like the more famous mammoth weeklies, reprinted Poe’s works: “The Haunted Palace” on 12 February 1845 and “Mesmeric Revelation” on 26 March 1845. These reprints supplement those listed in M.

7.  Duyckinck, “Literary Prospects for 1845,” American Whig Review 1 (1845) 148-149.

8.  For Poe’s temporary and uneasy relationship with Whig publications, see David A. Long, “Poe’s Political Identity: The Mummy Unswathed,” PoeS 23 (1990) 1-22.

9.  Poe, who used Lowell’s good offices in arranging his appearance before the Boston Lyceum in 1845, reviewed him favorably in the March 1844 Graham’s Magazine (Essays and Reviews pp. 809-814). The New England author returned the favor, praising Poe in the February 1845 Graham’s. Lowell’s essay is conveniently reprinted in I. M. Walker, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (London, 1986) pp. 156-168.

10.  The satire by Poe, in all likelihood, was “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade,” published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in February 1845. In “The Club” on 15 February 1845, the Emporium asked: Will Willis and his opponents cease squabbling and “Lick one another like Lowell and Poe?”

11.  My discussion derives from Barnes’s authoritative discussion of copyright (pp. 52-60).

12.  As Pollin’s notes to the Broadway Journal Prose (P 4:17-18) indicate, this review of Bulwer’s “Minor Poems,” as the Emporium called the book published by J. W. Judd, was omitted from the Harrison edition. Pollin’s edition helpfully restores it, but notes that there was no [page 100:] publisher named Farmer and Daggers. That label, however, applied to a published outlet or “A New Publishing House,” assisted by Park Benjamin, which had taken over the holdings of Jonas Winchester. See the Saturday Emporium, 18 January 1845; and “Mr. Daggers’ Cheap Publications,” Emporium, 22 March 1845. Bulwer’s volume of poems sold for a mere 50 cents.

13.  Weiner, The Most Noble of Professions pp. 12-13. McLeod had more extensive experience than Poe’s comments reflect. By the mid-1840s he had contributed to the following periodicals: New World, Rover, Brother Jonathan, Iris, New York Illustrated Magazine, Metropolitan Magazine, and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. A column in the 17 May 1845 Emporium noted how the paper had doubled the subscriptions of the New World and described McLeod’s responsibility for the essay and review department along with James Mackay. On 3 October 1846, the editors asked the following rhetorical question: “Where is C. Donald McLeod? in a cloud flying?” McLeod took orders in the Episcopal Church before embarking for Europe in 1850.

14.  The Emporium responded immediately to Poe’s attack on McLeod, but no files of the paper are available for 22 February, 1 March, and 8 March 1845. A defense of McLeod during these weeks, nevertheless, can be inferred from Poe’s columns in the Broadway Journal and subsequent columns in the Emporium.

15.  In “Authors’ Pay in America,” a 10 October 1844 column in the New York Evening Mirror, Nathaniel Parker Willis had announced Poe’s role on the periodical as follows: “We solemnly summon Edgar Poe to do the devoir of Coeur de Lion — no man’s weapon half so trenchant!” — Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1987) pp. 473-474.

16.  American Whig Review, 2 (1845) 306-309.

17.  These two notices supplement those in Pollin, “Poe ‘Viewed and Reviewed’: An Annotated Checklist of Contemporaneous Notices,” PoeS 13 (1980) 17-28.

18.  See the Emporium for the following dates: 9 November 1844, reviewing Godey’s, and including Poe among “writers of acknowledged ability”; 30 November 1844, commenting on “Byron and Miss Chaworth”; 25 January 1845, noting “a capital article” by Poe from Godey’s; 1 February 1845, noting Poe’s portrait in Graham’s; 26 April 1845, commenting on plagiarism charges against Longfellow; 9 August 1845, reviewing the American Whig Review’s “capital number” with Poe’s article on American Drama. On 13 December 1845, the Emporium reviewed the American Whig Review: “Mr. Poe, in an article [page 101:] entitled ‘Facts of M. Valdemar’s Case,’ seems to have attained what he is generally striving after — the incomprehensible.” The 7 March 1846 Emporium reviewed Graham’s and its “uncommonly good number, full of choice articles” (Poe among them). On 14 November 1846, the Emporium reprinted “Epitaph on a Modern Critic. P’Oh Pudor!” from the Knickerbocker.

19.  See his “Marginalia” in which he noted that the “curt, the condensed, the well-digested in place of the voluminous” was a hallmark of an emerging periodical literature, calling for a “light artillery rather than the peace-makers of the intellect” (Essays and Reviews p. 1377).

20.  The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge, 1973) p. 147. See also William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus, Oh., 1968) pp. 84-98 and Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy (New York, 1981) p. 75.

21.  Green took his articles verbatim from issues of Hartford’s New England Weekly Review, 19 February 1842 and 23 April 1842. Green defended Charles Dickens when the British novelist spoke in favor of international copyright during his first visit to America in 1842. See Sidney P. Moss, Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America (Troy, N.Y., 1984). Green was a member of the committee that welcomed Dickens to Hartford. See Dickens’s letters to Green, The Letters of Charles Dickens, eds. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1974) pp. 23-24, 61.

22.  For a fully documented history of the libel suit, see Moss, Poe’s Major Crisis: His Libel Suit and New York’s Literary World (Durham, N.C., 1980).