What really happened to poor old Edgar Allan Poe in the end? I dug out an old biography and nosed around the Net and developed a tour for Google Earth attempting to track his meanderings in his final four months. And, hoping to infuse a little humour into a morbid tale, I incorporated pictures of him and the places where he lived and visited into original graphics with a comic-book look to them. I hope that’s okay with Edgar’s kin.

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” Poe wondered. “Everything about him is controversial,” concedes the Poe Society of Baltimore, “literally from the place and date of his birth to the exact location and date of his burial.”

Poe himself toyed with the dates and places in his story and laid false claims to bolster his reputation and sell more of his writings, such as having joined the Greek fight for liberation in 1828. If Poe’s biography is a delicate house of cards, every card is ornately imprinted with intriguing clues left by him and others. The puzzle is as compelling as anything in his tales.

The bicentennial of his birth will be commemorated in 2009. There will be more research and perhaps more revelations about his life and, hopefully, his strange death, which has, to date, been blamed on too much booze alone, the resulting delirium tremens, opium, some sort of lesions on the brain, tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, rabies, heart disease, a rare enzyme disorder, dipsomania, hypoglycaemia, epilepsy, carbon monoxide poisoning, a savage revenge beating and the brutal practice of fixing elections through “cooping”. By one of these means or something else, to use John Pendleton Kennedy’s words, “A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched.”

In need of some cash

In June 1849 Edgar Allan Poe was living with his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Poe Clemm, in what is now the “Poe Cottage” but is referred to by scholars as the Fordham Cottage. He’d moved there in about May 1846 following the financial collapse of his newspaper, the Broadway Journal, where he’d been hired as an editor in February 1845, then became sole editor and then the owner.

The cottage, now maintained by the Bronx Historical Society, is where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado”, and there too his wife Virginia died on January 30, 1847, no doubt fuelling the intense morbidity of his writing. Poe had married his cousin in 1836, when she was 13. The bed in which she died is preserved here.

Virginia’s death may also have caused Poe to drink more, though his supposed “weakness” for alcohol is in permanent dispute among biographers. It’s been claimed that since his youth he could never drink much without becoming either obnoxious or unconscious, and that alcohol greatly hindered his newspaper career.

Poe’s ambition in the summer of 1849 was to finally launch his long-planned magazine, the Stylus, and to raise money for it he embarked on a lecture tour on June 29, travelling to Philadelphia, Richmond and Norfolk.

Below, a trypical scene in today’s Poe geography, the Fordham Cottage ensconced beneath the trees of an oasis in a sea of Bronx concrete. Given the surroundings, its protection is all the more appreciated.

Suicidal in Philly

On about July 1, 1849, Poe burst into the office of John Sartain on Philadelphia’s Sansom Street. He had worked with the owner of Sartain’s Union Magazine for Literature and Art on a different publication years earlier. “I have come to you for refuge,” Sartrain quoted Poe as saying.

Poe explained that he’d been on the train to New York when he heard conspiratorial whispering behind him. He heard them say they were going to kill him, so he got off the train and rushed back to Philadelphia. He wanted to disguise himself by shaving off his moustache and asked for a razor. Sartain, worried that Poe was contemplating suicide, instead removed his moustache for him, using scissors, and Poe calmed down.

Slammer time

Pictured here, Moyamensing jail, also known as Philadelphia County Prison, occupied the site of what is not a shopping mall in Philadelphia from the 1830s until the 1960s, complete with an Egyptian-themed “Debtors’ Apartment” intended to humble the “financially irresponsible”. Accounts that Poe was briefly incarcerated here in July 1849 are disputed. It may have been a hallucination, but not to John Sartain.

On the evening of Poe’s sudden arrival at Sartain’s office, he said he wanted to go to the Schuylkill River, and Sartain accompanied him there by bus. En route Poe asked him to make sure that, upon his death, his portrait by Osgood was given to his aunt. They sat on a bench overlooking the river and Poe “began to talk the wildest nonsense … He said he had been thrown into Moyamensing Prison for forging a check, and while there a white female form had appeared on the battlements and addressed him in whispers.”

Poe said another figure took him for a walk around the battlements to “a cauldron of liquid”, from which he was invited to drink. “I refused, for that was a trap. Do you know what would have happened if I had accepted? They would have lifted me over the cauldron, and placed me in the liquid up to my lips, like Tantalus, and gone away and left me there.”

Three days later, Sartain said, Poe returned from another excursion “in the same mood. ‘I lay on the earth with my nose in the grass,’ Poe said then, ‘and the smell revived me. I began at once to realise the falsity of my hallucinations.’”

By another account, Sartain claimed that he was present when Poe was released from jail and was brought before Philadelphia mayor Charles Gilpin, who recognised Edgar as the celebrated poet and dismissed the charge against him — public drunkenness or forgery, take your pick. Only then did Sartain take him home to begin 10 days of recovery. Meanwhile novelist and social reformer George Lippard, who also knew Poe, raised money for his needs, including his fare to Richmond.

A childhood long ago

On what turned out to be his last trip to Richmond, beginning in mid-July 1849, did Poe take the time to revisit his old haunts? If so, he would likely have seen Moldavia, the best-known of the Allan family home, which until about 1890 stood at the southeast corner of Fifth and Main Streets.

Purchased by John Allan in 1825, that was where Edgar lived before entering the University of Virginia the following year.

Edgar, born in Boston on January 19, 1809, had early on lost his parents, both actors, and been taken in by John Allan, a tobacco merchant who had inherited a considerable sum.

The glory that was Greece

Poe wrote of his Richmond boyhood in one of his finest poems, “To Helen”, which was inspired by Jane Stith Craig Stanard, the mother of a schoolmate who praised his first efforts as a writer. Long before she was immortalised in the line “To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”, Mrs Stanard had grown up in a house that still stands at the corner of 19th and East Grace Streets.

Let me call you sweeheart

Sometime in July 1849, romance nudged its way into Poe’e fund-raising for the Stylus. He paid a visit to his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster, who lived at 2407 East Grace Street, and Edgar proposed. They’d already been engaged, secretly, once before — 24 years earlier.

In late 1826 Poe had returned to Richmond from the University of Virginia to find that Elmira had become engaged to a wealthy businessman, Alexander B Shelton, at the prodding of her parents, who didn’t care for Edgar. Then, about 1834, Elmira’s friend Mary Winfree visited him in Baltimore and told him that Elmira’s marriage was not a happy one. In gratitude, Poe wrote the poem “To Mary” for his messenger.

Relucant at first, Elmira, now also widowed, accepted Poe’s proposal when they were reunited in 1849. Had they married, however, she would have ceded her inheritance from her husband, as stipulated in his will. If it was any consolation, for his part Edgar joined the Sons of Temperance the following month. To his Aunt Maria he wrote, “I think she loves me more devotedly than anyone I ever knew and I cannot help loving her in return.”

The Elmira Shelton House, dating from 1844, is marked by a plaque but is privately owned.

Picture an enchanted garden

Back in the 1820s Poe brought his young sweetheart, Elmira Royster, to a garden that occupied the corner of Second and Franklin Streets. There among the flowers and the mumbling of a fountain, he forgot about his quarrels with his foster father at their new home at Fifth and Main, and composed the poem “Tamerlane” in Elmira’s honour.

The childhood “plantation”

The original Allan mansion, where the family lived from 1822 to mid-1825, was on Tobacco Alley, a lane that used to link 13th and 14th Streets, not to be confused with Richmond’s booming Tobacco Row. Edgar was first taken there as a two-year-old orphan.

The poet enshrined

It’s likely that, while on his final visit to Richmond, Poe would at least have glimpsed the building that housed his old newspaper, the Southern Literary Messenger, where he’d been an editor for just over a year, beginning in December 1835. He was fresh out of West Point, and that had been his first job.

Materials salvaged from the Messenger building at Fifteenth and Main Streets when it was demolished in 1915 were used to construct the Poe Shrine at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. The shrine is an open brick shelter from which Poe’s bust gazes out onto a lawn with a two-tiered fountain.

The other parts of the museum:

The Old Stone House, Richmond’s oldest house, built in 1737, is full of Poe memorabilia, including his sister Rosalie’s pianoforte, on which sit silver candlesticks given to Edgar by Mary Louise Shew, who comforted him following Virginia’s death. Poe supposedly composed “The Bells” by the light from the candles.

The Elizabeth Poe Memorial Building, dating from 1927, displays manuscripts and first editions between the staircase from the Allan house on 14th Street and Richard Park’s sculpture of Poe and his actor parents. Also there are Poe’s small chair from the Messenger office, his embroidered silk vest and a lock of his hair clipped on his deathbed.

Below, another city, another oasis. The Poe Museum in Richmond. Visit the museum website.



A wedding at home

While Poe worked at the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835 and ‘36, he lived at Mrs Yarrington’s boarding house at the corner of Bank and Eleventh Streets, along with Virginia and her mother.

This was where Edgar married his cousin on May 16, 1836, and where he wrote his only novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”, the first part of which was published in the Messenger, and the play “Politician in Richmond”. These and the reviews he wrote for the newspaper were the foundation for his literary career.

Schooled in Jefferson’s shadow

Did Poe pass by the University of Virginia, his old alma mater, while travelling to and from Richmond for the final time in 1849? Today you can view the dorm room that Poe was believed to have used, complete with his bed, moved from one of the Allan homes in Richmond. The room has been maintained by the students’ Raven Society since about 1907.

Having received his initial education in England and Richmond, Edgar entered the then-new university on February 14, 1826, and lived in Room 13 in the West Range. A member of the Jefferson Literary Society, he earned good grades, but he also piled up gambling debts that his foster father balked at covering. John Allan refused to let him return for the next session and they had a row that drove Poe from home.

Edgar moved to Boston, his birthplace, published “Tamerlane and Other Poems” and, in May 1827, enlisted in the Army under the name Edgar A Perry. He was discharged as a sergeant-major two years later and went to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Maria Poe Clemm, on money sent by John Allan, until he received an appointment to West Point. He was at the military academy for about a year and a half, ultimately being court-martialled and expelled for refusing to attend classes, a deliberate bid for dismissal. Soon after, his third volume of poetry was published and he began writing prose tales, several appearing in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier.

See Scott D Peterson’s detailed article about Poe’s time at the university at LiteraryTraveler.com.

Below, the West Range, designed by Thomas Jefferson, complete with a rotunda that was under construction in Poe’s day.

Woman idealised — and dead

St John’s Episcopal Church, the oldest church in Richmond, was not only the scene of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, it is the resting place of Poe’s mother Elizabeth Arnold Poe. Her interment was at the easternmost edge of the grounds, well away from the church because she was an actress. It was unmarked for more than a century after her death in 1811. In 1927 the University of Virginia’s Raven Society, Actor’s Equity of New York and the Poe Shrine placed a stone there.

Poe never really got over the death of his mother at age 24 (from some unknown illness, though not tuberculosis). He sought in his writing a Romantic ideal in the death of a beautiful woman, whom he referred to as the “mother-wife”. No such empathy was expressed for his father, David Poe, Jr, who died within a few days of his estranged wife, probably in Norfolk while on the road with a theatre company.

The parents’ death resulted in their three children being split up. Elder brother Henry remained in Baltimore with his grandparents; younger sister Rosalie was taken in by William Mackenzie and his wife in Richmond; Edgar went to John and Frances Allan of Richmond, though he was never adopted. He was baptised as Edgar Allan Poe at age three and from 1815 to 1820 lived with his new parents in London and Stoke-Newington, England.

Prayers for the deceased

Monumental Episcopal Church rests on the site of the Richmond Theatre, on whose stage Poe’s mother, Elizabeth, had become a popular actress. The theatre was razed in an 1811 fire that claimed 72 lives, including that of the state governor. The young Edgar was brought to worship at the church that was built to commemorate their deaths, sitting with his foster parents in the Allan pew, No 80.

Swan’s Tavern

By most accounts, while he was in Richmond, Poe stayed at Swan’s Tavern, which was on Broad Street. The photo of it in the montage is from about 1903, five years before the building was torn down. Patrick Henry, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were also among the clientele in its heyday.

Early Poe biographer Susan Weiss recalled Poe appearing “so pale, so tremulous and apparently subdued as to convince me that he had been seriously ill. On this occasion he had been at his rooms at the ‘Old Swan’ … but on a second and more serious relapse he was taken by Dr Mackenzie and Dr Gibbon Carter to Duncan’s Lodge, where during some days his life was in imminent danger. Assiduous attention saved him, but it was the opinion of the physicians that another such attack would prove fatal. This they told him, warning him seriously of the danger. His reply was that if people would not tempt him, he would not fall.”

In 1848 Poe had shared a “bachelor’s hall” near the corner of Clay and Eighth Streets that had been the Swan’s stable yard.

The lecturer resumes

The Old Norfolk Academy on Bank Street in the port city was a boys’ school when Poe gave his lecture on “The Poetic Principle” on September 16, 1849, though it probably wasn’t his final lecture, as claimed. This was a hospital for Federal troops during the Civil War, but the students returned afterward and stayed until 1915.

Wrong-way Edgar

Some people think Poe hopped on a train on about September 20, 1849 (maybe it was here at Richmond’s old Union Station, now the Science Museum of Virginia) and went to Philadelphia, possibly to pick up a quick $100 editing the work of an aspiring poetess, and was thinking of going on to New York from there. Others, perhaps including his relatives, think that somewhere down the track he was so drunk that he got on a train going the wrong way and, “in a state bordering on delirium”, had to be escorted to Baltimore by the conductor.

One person came up with four different versions of the story all by himself, including that Poe went to Philadelphia to see friends but “was found ill” there, and that he intended to go on to New York but got the train to Baltimore by mistake. And yet another person thinks this was what happened too, but the year previous, and that it was bad weather, not booze, that wrecked his plans.

Have a drink and think about it.

Backtracking

John Sartain of Philadelphia was among those who believed Poe was heading to Richmond “to meet his bride” when a storm blocked the train at Havre de Grace — see the vintage map below — and he returned to Baltimore. Again, Poe supposedly told him, there were “a number of suspicious-looking persons” sitting behind him and they followed him when he disembarked.

But this, said Sartain, was the day before Poe was “found in a vacant lot, nearly dead”, a claim that doesn’t align with other accounts. Sartain amended his own story later, saying Poe was found “upon a broad plank across some barrels on the sidewalk”. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. On to Baltimore and the final weeks in Part 2.