James Aldrich

(Born: July 14, 1810 - Died: September 9, 1856)

Merchant, editor and a very minor writer and poet. Aldrich was born in Mattituck, NY. (Griswold gives his date of birth as July 10.) He married Matilda Lyon of Newport, RI in 1836. He briefly established the New York Literary Gazette, for which the first issue appeared on February 2, 1839, and ceased a mere six months later on July 13. (A nearly complete run of this journal is in the New York Public Library. Reece gives the title as the Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles-Lettres, and the initial date as September 1834, both apparently in error.) Under Park Benjamin, Aldrich was an assistant editor of the New World (New York) beginning in 1842, and after some travel abroad, again in 1843, leaving that position in March 1844. He died in New York City. Duyckinck notes that no collection of Mr. Aldrich’s poetry was published during his lifetime, but apparently his daughter, Mrs. Ely, did print a volume distributed to family and friends in 1884. (The book, of 74 pages, was printed in New York by Styles & Cash. A copy is in the Oliver Wendell Holmes collection at the Library of Congress.) His best known poem is almost certainly “A Death Bed,” first published in the New World (May 29, 1841) and often reprinted.

In an article called “Plagiarism” (Evening Mirror, February 17, 1845), Poe claims to identify a plagiarism by Aldrich from Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed.” He repeats the charge, accusing Aldrich of having “a penchant for imitation,” in “Marginalia” (Democratic Review, April 1846). Mabbott notes that Aldrich was “much given to imitation of Shelley and Tennyson.”

No portrait has been identified.