Edgar Allan Poe (12 page)

While serving as assistant editor at
Burton’s
, Poe began planning his own monthly magazine. He was not trying to compete with Burton directly. Poe did not circulate a prospectus announcing his own journal until after Burton announced the sale of his magazine. Assuming that Poe’s venture would diminish the market value of
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
and adversely affect the profit that could be realized on its sale, Burton angrily dismissed Poe in the last week of May 1840.

The dismissal meant the end of ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’, a fictional narrative relating the story of a journey across North America that supposedly antedated the Lewis and Clark expedition. Poe had been serializing the narrative in
Burton’s
, but he now abandoned it. He did not mind the loss of ‘Julius Rodman’ much. His heart had never been in the project. He had begun it mainly as a way to fill up space in
Burton’s
; he had borrowed big chunks of text from previous works of Western travel without acknowledgement. The problems with the lengthy ‘Journal of Julius Rodman’ reinforced the aesthetic of short fiction Poe was evolving.
³⁰

The dismissal put Poe in desperate financial straits, but it gave him time to pursue his own magazine more aggressively. He planned to call it the
Penn Magazine
. In the prospectus, he reminded readers of his critical notices in the
Southern Literary Messenger
. He emphasized the importance of a rigorous review department. For those readers who formerly found Poe’s critical voice too harsh, he explained: ‘One or two years, since elapsed, may have mellowed down the petulance, without interfering with the rigor of the critic.’ The creative department in the magazine would exemplify Poe’s aesthetic. Imaginative literature would delight, not instruct: ‘It will leave the task of instruction in better hands. Its aim, chiefly, shall be
to please
; and this through means of versatility, originality and pungency.’ Poe emphasized the importance of a strong magazine editor. Unlike Blackwood, however, he would not determine the style of the tales and verse he published. Poe’s critical terms – ‘versatility’, ‘originality’ – emphasize that contributors would be free to develop their own unique voices.

Poe told a correspondent he hoped his new magazine would ‘produce some lasting effect upon the growing literature of the country’, but also that it would establish a name for himself that the nation ‘will not willingly let die’.
³¹
Though hoping the magazine would make his name, the title Poe chose for it reinforces his decision to let his contributors cultivate their individual abilities. Unlike
Alexander’s
or
Blackwood’s
or
Burton’s
, Poe would not name his magazine after himself. In other words, he would not use his own name to brand the literature that appeared in his magazine. Calling his planned magazine after the state where he lived (and punning on the word ‘pen’), Poe would let the writers who contributed to it make names for themselves.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
was not published outside the
USA
, but a few copies circulated in other English-speaking parts of the world soon after its publication. Poe presented one to Charles Dickens. Australian bookman Nicol D. Stenhouse somehow managed to obtain a copy. So did British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. Having taken over editorship of
Bentley’s Miscellany
from Dickens, Ainsworth was on the prowl for good stories he could reprint in it. He chose several from Poe’s collection, starting with ‘Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling’, which he published in the July 1840 issue. This reprint scarcely helped Poe’s reputation. Ainsworth obfuscated his American source, publishing the story anonymously and retitling it ‘The Irish Gentleman and the Little Frenchman’.
¹

The London setting and Poe’s humorous use of Irish brogue to spoof British gentry made the tale appeal to English readers, but Americans also enjoyed it. After its appearance in
Bentley’s
, William T. Porter reprinted the story in
Spirit of the Times
, the New York sporting paper where some of the finest nineteenth-century American literary humour appeared.
²
Though memorable for its humour, ‘Little Frenchman’ is not without serious implications. It bears similarities to other tales and sketches Poe wrote as the 1830s gave way to the following decade: ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. All concern the theme of urban spectatorship in the modern world, and each introduces a different type of spectator.

‘The Man of the Crowd’ prompted both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to discuss the figure of the
flâneur
, the pedestrian who strolled the streets and arcades, observing the city and attempting to understand what he saw. By definition the
flâneur
takes the urban public space as both the location and the subject of his activities. Though the act of walking is typically associated with the
flâneur
, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ presents a paradoxical variant, the stationary
flâneur
.
³
This sketch takes the
flâneur
from the streets, puts him in the parlour, and has him take a good look around to see what he can and discern what it means.

The
badaud
or gawker emerged as an unsophisticated foil to the
flâneur
. In ‘Enigmatical and Conundrum-ical’, Poe had used this term in the following conundrum:

‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ introduces a
badaud
-like figure as a contrast to the narrator’s
flâneur
-like observations. Arguing that the American fondness for decorative mirrors creates much interior ugliness, the narrator imagines how a
badaud
would react to a mirror-filled home: ‘The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bedizzened, would be instantly aware of something wrong, although he might be altogether unable to assign a cause for his dissatisfaction.’
⁵

Sir Patrick O’Grandison, the narrator of ‘Little Frenchman’, is also a bumpkin, as his rustic language clearly indicates.
⁶
Understood in terms of his visual sensibilities, he represents a more intrusive form of urban spectator. Whereas the narrator of ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ restricts his gaze to the space of the private interior, Sir Patrick stares from his apartment into the private space of others’ apartments. He is a voyeur, not a
flâneur
. As of 1840, the term ‘voyeur’ had yet to enter English usage, so a synonym must suffice: Sir Patrick is a Peeping Tom. In Poe’s
oeuvre
, the self-indulgent gaze of the
flâneur
and the Peeping Tom would ultimately achieve greater purpose with the inquisitive gaze of the detective in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.

As Sir Patrick tells his tale, he looks from his window, sees the sling-wearing Frenchman in a neighbouring window, and explains the injury. Both men are suitors of the widow Mrs Treacle. They can see out of their respective windows into hers, and she can see out of hers into theirs. Sir Patrick’s description of the Frenchman’s behaviour – ‘a oggling and a goggling the houl day’ – also applies to his own behaviour. Convinced that the Frenchman’s affections are misplaced, Sir Patrick is confident that he understands how Mrs Treacle feels. Reading her physical appearance and her gestures, he concludes that she loves him. Much of the humour of ‘Little Frenchman’ stems from the disparity between how the widow really feels about Sir Patrick and how he interprets her behaviour on the basis of what he sees.

‘Little Frenchman’ manifests its author’s fascination with the possibility or, in Sir Patrick’s case, impossibility of reading others on the basis of appearance. Poe had started exploring the legibility of external signs several years earlier. In ‘Autography’, for instance, he had reproduced autograph facsimiles from famous authors and attempted to discern their personalities on the basis of their handwriting. He further indulged the reading public’s fascination with handwriting in a follow-up work, ‘A Chapter on Autography’, which drops the fictional pose of ‘Autography’ and bluntly explains how handwriting reflects individual personality. ‘A Chapter on Autography’ gave Poe a way to express subjective opinions while masking them in a guise of objectivity and letting him settle some personal scores in the process. The section on his previous employer, for example, reflects Poe’s ongoing animosity toward his former boss. William Burton’s ‘scratchy and petite’ handwriting reflects his ‘indecision and care or caution’. Alternatively, Poe’s positive remarks seem designed to curry favour. Louis Godey, whose magazine remained an important outlet for Poe, had ‘remarkably distinct and graceful’ handwriting: ‘The man who invariably writes so well as Mr G. invariably does, gives evidence of a fine taste, combined with an indefatigability which will ensure his permanent success in the world’s affairs.’
⁷

The contemporary public’s interest in handwriting reflects a general fascination with the way external signs could indicate personality. By the middle third of the nineteenth century, the whole world was becoming more legible – or so it seemed. Poe was writing in the era of phrenology, a time when self-proclaimed phrenologists travelled the country, charging people to feel the contours of their skulls and tell them who they were. Franz-Joseph Gall, a leading founder of phrenology, had mapped the skull, dividing it into different regions or organs, each representing a personal characteristic. Creativity and aesthetic appreciation, for example, were represented by the organ of ideality, located on the upper left forehead. George Combe, another founder of phrenology, observed:

Poe concurred. The term ‘ideality’ entered his critical vocabulary through the medium of phrenology, and the ideas it represented significantly influenced Poe’s aesthetic theory. For instance, he called poet and travel writer Charles Fenno Hoffman ‘a true idealist, in the proper phrenological sense’ because he was ‘sensitively alive to beauty in every development’.
⁹
According to the basic tenets of phrenology, great poets, being attuned to the beautiful, should naturally have giant foreheads.

The Symbolical Head: Illustrating All the Phrenological Developments of the Human Head
, 1842.

Poe initially accepted phrenology as a valid science – mainly because it told him what he already knew. When F. W. Thomas asked him if he had ever had his head read, Poe replied, ‘Speaking of heads – my own
has been
examined by several phrenologists – all of whom spoke of me in a species of extravaganza which I should be ashamed to repeat.’
¹⁰
Poe does not name his phrenologists, but one of them was Nelson Sizer, who criss-crossed the nation examining heads for forty years. Sizer came to Philadelphia when Poe lived there and gave him a phrenological reading. His enthusiastic interpretation confirms the extravagance Poe attributes to his phrenologists. Sizer exclaimed: ‘How massive in the upper part of the forehead, in the region of Reasoning! How broad in the region of the temples, where Ideality, Constructiveness and Sublimity are located!’
¹¹
Thomas Dunn English, who wrote his medical thesis on the relationship between phrenology and medicine, said of Poe: ‘Ideality, with the power of analysis, is shown in his very broad, high and massive forehead – a forehead which would have delighted Gall beyond measure.’
¹²

Roughly coeval with phrenology, photography contributed to the general feeling that the world was becoming more legible. Photographic portraits and engravings based on photographic images gave people the chance to phrenologize by proxy. They could pore over portraiture and understand the nature of those depicted by the shape of their heads. Poe clearly recognized the interrelationship of phrenology and photography. As a result, he was greatly disappointed with his first daguerreotype portrait: it did not properly display his prominent forehead. For subsequent daguerreotypes, Poe deliberately posed himself to show off his organ of ideality.
¹³
The strategy works. One phrenologist who judged him solely from his picture called his organ of ideality ‘so large as to be almost a deformity in his personal appearance’.
¹⁴
Phrenology passed from vogue, but Poe’s carefully crafted photographic image remains impressive. Indeed, his portraits have made his the most recognizable face in the history of American literature.