Poe Read online

  Eliza was at the same time slipping into the final stages of her tubercular illness. The infant Edgar must have been acutely aware of the loss of his father and of the fading of his mother. He may not have been able to understand these things, but in these earliest years he was enveloped in an air of menace and fatality. Anxiety was his childhood bedfellow. He would have seen, too, the gradual wasting of her form with the painful spasmodic coughs and the effusion of blood. These images never left him. He resurrects the consumptive form of the beloved female in many of his tales.

  Throughout July and October 1811, Eliza Poe still appeared on the stage at a theatre in Richmond. Then, in November, she retreated to her bed for ever. At the beginning of the month it was reported by one citizen of Richmond that she was “sick” and “destitute.” By the end of November the Richmond Enquirer announced that “Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks for your assistance; and asks it perhaps for the last time.” Nine days later she was dead. The two small children were held up for a last view of the waxen corpse of their mother. Rosalie was given an empty jewel box, one of Mrs. Poe's few remaining possessions, and Edgar was given a miniature of his mother together with two locks of his parent's hair sealed in a pocketbook. On the back of the miniature she had painted a view of Boston Harbor, with the admonition to her infant son to “love Boston, the place of his birth.” He never did obey that injunction. She was carried to St. John's churchyard, with her son and daughter in attendance.

  In a letter written some twenty-four years later, Poe said of his mother, “I myself never knew her—and never knew the affection of a father. Both died … within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with Adversity, but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.” It seems unlikely that the father died so soon after the mother. Poe was keen upon theatrical effect, even concerning those matters closest to him. But the other claim may be genuine. It is possible, even plausible, that he did not remember knowing his mother. Overwhelming grief may lead to the blessing of amnesia. Those early years may have remained quite obscure to him.

  But they were understood by him in another sense. He hardly knew what the death of his mother meant at the time but, as the years passed, the sense of grief and of loss grew larger and more oppressive. There was something missing. Something precious had gone. He was a perpetual orphan in the world. All the evidence of his career, and of his writing, suggests that he was bound by ropes of fire to the first experiences of abandonment and of loneliness. The image of the dead or dying woman, young and beautiful and good, fills his fictions. We may recall here the lines of Exeter in King Henry V:

  And all my mother came into mine eyes,

  And gave me up to tears.

  And what of these unfortunate children, deserted first by a father and then unwillingly abandoned by a mother? In her last days, lying upon a straw mattress in a rented room, Eliza Poe had been visited and comforted by what were known in the newspapers as “ladies of the most respectable families.” Among these was the wife of a merchant and businessman, John Allan, who had migrated from Scotland to the land of financial promise. Frances, or “Fanny,” Allan had formed an attachment to the young Poe. She was then twenty-five years old but had no children of her own, and the sight of the forlorn infant had awakened strong sensations within her. She persuaded her husband that little Edgar should be given a home, while Rosalie was taken into the care of another Scottish mercantile family, the Mackenzies. So Edgar, then a small child, was removed to a house of strangers on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Main Street, above the business premises of Ellis and Allan. At his christening on 7 January 1812 he was given the name of his surrogate parents: he became Edgar Allan Poe.

  • • •

  The descriptions of the young boy, during these early years in the Allan household, are uniformly favourable. Neighbours in Richmond recalled him as “a lovely little fellow, with dark curls and brilliant eyes, dressed like a young prince;” he was characterised by charm and cleverness, blessed with an affectionate and generous temperament, noted for a frank and vivacious disposition. It sounds almost too good to be true. Little Lord Fauntleroy was nothing compared to him. He danced on the table, to the delight of Fanny Allan's female companions, and recited The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He toasted “the ladies” with a glass of sweet wine and water. He was petted, and dressed up, by Mrs. Allan. He seems also to have gained the affection of her husband. John Allan was thirty-one when Edgar joined the family. He was a man of business, but neither dour nor hard; on the contrary he seems to have been keen to the delights and pleasures of life. He already had two illegitimate children, living in Richmond. He must also have had some fellow feeling with the young Poe, since he himself was an orphan.

  Other figures in the Allan family remain anonymous and elusive: they comprise the household of slaves who lived in partitioned quarters. Among them was the “mammy” deputed to care for the young Poe whenever Fanny Allan was elsewhere. We know that in the household lived a young slave called Scipio, and an older slave called Thomas. There were no doubt others. Poe always defended the institution of slavery, for which he seems to have harboured affectionate memories. He owed a larger debt, too, to the small black community in which his imagination was awakened by stories of graves and charnel houses.

  Poe's maternal grandmother, Eliza Poe, described him as “the Child of fortune” in being fostered by such a kindly couple. But there is of course no record of his feelings on the matter. He must have been aware, however, that he was living on the charity and kindness of those who had no true relationship to him; this instilled in him a sense of uncertainty, or of defensiveness. It made him fearful. There is a childhood story of his being driven past a log cabin surrounded by graves, at the sight of which he screamed out, “They will run after us and drag me down!”

  The Schoolboy

  In the late spring of 1815 John Allan decided to remove himself and his family to E ngland. There had been a slump in the fortunes of his business in Richmond, and the mercantile climate of London seemed more propitious. He wanted, in particular, to renew trading relationships with the tobacco importers of the capital. So at the end of June the Allans set sail on the Lothair for Liverpool, a journey that would take almost five weeks. The party consisted of John Allan, Frances Allan, Anne Moore Valentine in her capacity as sister and companion of Frances, and the black slave known only as Thomas. They took their small charge with them.

  Poe was on the ocean for the first time. On the pilot boat, riding out to sea, John Allan reported that “Ned [Edgar] cared but little about it, poor fellow.” But the sight of the waves and of the rolling horizon impressed itself upon the imagination of the boy who was to return to it in his future writing. When they arrived on the other shore Allan reported the six-year-old as asking “Pa say something for me: say I was not afraid coming across the Sea.” This suggests that he was trying to conceal his fear.

  They docked in Liverpool on 29 July, but did not travel directly to London. Instead John Allan decided to visit his relations in Scotland; there were sisters at Irvine and Kilmarnock, and other relatives in Greenock, from where they travelled on to Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scottish grand tour lasted for some two months, and at the beginning of October the Allans took a carriage to London. They rented lodgings in Southampton Row, just south of Russell Square, where they all soon caught cold from the damp and heavy London air. There is a picture of the household, given by John Allan in a letter, where he describes “Edgar reading a little Story Book.” It may be the book that Poe mentioned in an essay some years later, when he remarked on “how fondly do we recur in memory to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe!”

  There was, however, more exacting reading. In early April 1816, Poe was enrolled at a boarding school in Sloane Street superintended by two sisters known as the “Misses Dubourg.” An extant bill from this establishm
ent includes such items as a “Separate Bed,” a “Seat in Church,” “Mavor's Spelling” and “Fresnoy's Geography.” The rest of the curriculum is unknown, but Poe prospered under its regimen. In June 1818, John Allan told a correspondent that “Edgar is a fine Boy and reads Latin pretty sharply.”

  His progress was such that, a month later, “Edgar Allan” was enrolled for tuition in another school. He became a pupil of the Manor House School, in Stoke Newington, under the aegis of the Reverend John Bransby. It was located in what was then a country village, with an ancient church and a number of fine old houses; Daniel Defoe had once lived in the same street as the school. Here Poe studied Latin, among other orthodox subjects, and took dancing lessons. At a later date Bransby recalled his erstwhile pupil as “a quick and clever boy and would have been a very good boy if he had not been spoilt by his parents; but they spoilt him, and allowed him an extravagant amount of pocket money, which enabled him to get into all manner of mischief…” On another occasion he described the boy as “intelligent, wayward and wilful.” These were all characteristics that would also be applied to Poe in later life. It was no doubt Fanny, rather than John, who pampered the child; the pocket money may have been “extravagant,” however, by English rather than American standards.

  Poe left his own account of the school, in heightened form, in “William Wilson,” where he describes it as a ponderous and roomy establishment with innumerable floors and chambers and “no end to its windings.” Poe was always acutely sensitive to buildings, and this “quaint” and “Gothic” structure gave him cause for much imaginative contemplation. He recalled the “dusky atmosphere” of this “misty-looking village,” too, so Stoke Newington helped to inspire his first reveries. They were not, however, necessarily pleasant ones. He told a friend, in later years, that his school days in England had been “sad, lonely and unhappy.”

  His unhappiness was fully shared by Frances Allan. She was never able to reconcile herself to life in London, and as a consequence suffered from a number of unspecified ailments in the five years of residence. John Allan described “Frances complaining as usual” and, at later date, “complaining a good deal;” a female relative wrote that she is “very Weak—and is afraid she will feel much too fatigued to write.” She went down to Cheltenham to sample the waters, but nothing could alleviate her distress. Her husband was of more sanguine temperament. In the autumn of 1818 John Allan reported that “Edgar is growing wonderfully and enjoys a reputation as both able and willing to receive instruction.” A year later he remarks that Poe “is a very fine Boy and a good scholar.”

  His optimism did not perhaps extend to his own affairs, since in 1819 a sudden collapse in the price of tobacco on the London market threatened his business with ruin. His debts grew ever larger, and he determined to give up the mercantile life in order to become a farmer or planter. He prepared to leave England, and to return with his family to his adopted country. So, on 16 June 1820, they set sail from Liverpool on the Martha. They docked in New York almost six weeks later, and then took the steamboat to Richmond.

  • • •

  In this period Richmond was a slow-moving, sleepy, sultry place with a population of 10,000. It was in large part an industrial city, but half of its population were slaves. The American South was then a land of servitude, with all the torpor and casual violence associated with that condition. The city was built on eight green hills overlooking the James River, the houses clustered on the sides of the hills; the river was a consolation in what was often an oppressive climate, making its way past small islands and over broken boulders. The landscape at the height of summer, when the Poes returned, was decorated with the peach tree and the magnolia. There were many fine and well-built houses along the main streets of the town, with large gardens filled with roses and linden trees, myrtle and honeysuckle. There was a legislature, and a splendid public library; there were assembly rooms and white wooden churches. But, close to them, were the crumbling tenements and sheds where some of the black population lived.

  The streets were filled with goats, and pigs, and horses. There were still cows grazing in Capitol Square as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. There were stage coaches, and carriages, with their black footmen and coachmen. The larger plantation houses were very spacious, with cool verandahs and rooms shielded from the glare of the sun by linen blinds. The men sat in rocking chairs, smoked their cigars and chewed on the local crop of tobacco. Elsewhere there were cabins for the slaves, where black children sprawled and played in the dust. There would always be a sense of settled dejection in such a place, lifted only by the constant supply of sherry cobblers and mint juleps. Drying tobacco poisoned the air.

  The Allan family stayed at first in the house of John Allan's partner, Charles Ellis, and perhaps at his urging and instigation it was determined that Allan would remain at his mercantile post in order to steer the business to success. At the beginning of the autumn Poe was sent to a local school, Richmond Academy, where his master remembered him as “ambitious to excel, and although not conspicuously studious, he always acquitted himself well in his classes. He was remarkable for self-respect, without haughtiness;” he also described him as of “a very excitable temperament” with “a great deal of self-esteem.” So he was sometimes a difficult and wilful child.

  From this age, too, he was writing poetry. His schoolteacher described him as “born poet” who wrote verses “con amore and not as mere tasks.” John Allan shared the master's high opinion, and showed him a manuscript of young Poe's poems with a view to eventual publication. This was deemed inadvisable, since it might lead to excessive flattery for an already over-excitable young boy. Allan's enquiry, however, emphasises the fact that he took his young charge's literary ambitions very seriously. He was not the authoritarian and distant figure of some biographers’ invention.

  At school Poe studied the standard classical authors, among them Ovid and Virgil and Cicero. But he also excelled in less scholastic pursuits. He was a good swimmer, and once swam six miles against the tide of the James River watched by masters and pupils alike. He was athletic, wiry and strong; he boxed, and excelled in field sports such as running. This is in marked contrast to the debility and almost continual ill health of his adult years. He was reported to be of “a very sweet disposition … always cheerful, brimful of mirth and a very great favourite with his schoolmates.” He won prizes for elocution, and excelled at the declamation of the Latin poets and the Elizabethan dramatists.

  But, as is invariably the case in the accounts of anyone's life, there were conflicting reports. One fellow pupil described him as “self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and though of generous impulses, not steadily kind, or even amiable.” So the young Poe harboured a grudge against the world. His schoolfellows had learned, by some means or other, that he was the orphaned child of travelling players and that he had been “adopted” by the Allan family. For this reason the other boys “declined his leadership.” The rejection encouraged a “fierceness” in him, taking the form of pride, or hauteur, but also rendered him sensitive and vulnerable to every slight. These were also the characteristics of the older Poe. Another contemporary recalled that the young Poe was “retiring in disposition and singularly unsociable in manner.” It was remarked, in particular, that he never took any of his friends to his home after school. When he left the school grounds, his departure marked “the end of his sociability” for that day.

  The schoolboy Poe went on long and sometimes solitary “tramps” through the woods above Richmond; with his friends he organised raids on the local orchards and turnip patches; he planned “fish-fries” by the banks of the James River. One schoolfellow recalls that “he taught me how to shoot, to swim, and to skate, to play bandy etcetera,” bandy being a game much like ice hockey. He had one other interest. With two or three companions he joined the local Thespian Society, held in a neighbourhood hall, where for a small charge they entertained the audience with plays or sketches
or declamations. Reportedly John Allan did not approve of his theatrical activities; it may have been too disconcerting a reminder of Poe's dead parents.

  Throughout these years, too, Poe continued to write poetry. He claimed to have written some of the poems published in his first book at the age of fourteen; despite his native tendency for exaggeration, there is no reason to question the assertion. His earliest known lines, scrawled on a sheet of John Allan's financial calculations in a neat hand, were composed at the age of fifteen:

  Last night with many cares and toils oppress'd

  Weary … I laid me on a couch to rest.

  The wistful tone of the couplet is interesting, as is the fact that it was written above Allan's sums of compound interest.

  The boy soon found a subject for his romantic melancholia. One of his schoolfellows, Robert Stanard, invited him to his house, where he met Jane Stanard, the thirty-year-old mother, who “took his hand and spoke some gen-tle and gracious words of welcome.” He became smitten, and “returned home in a dream.” She might have been his own mother revived.

  Jane Stanard has the distinction of being the first motherly young woman to whom Poe became devoted. He had an abiding need for female sympathy and protection. It may be the characteristic of the orphan. In one of his journalistic “marginalia” he wrote later that “the boyish poet-love is indisputably that one of the human sentiments which most nearly realises our dreams of the chastened voluptuousness of heaven.”

  The pleasure was indeed chastened. Poe possessed an unerring ability to choose frail, or in some way damaged, women, thus revisiting the experience of his fading mother. In the spring of 1824, a year after they had first met, Jane Stanard died insane.