Meanderings Here and There in Poe's "Balloon Hoax"

Although it is probably not one of the great historical pranks, Poe's "Balloon Hoax" still has the power to mislead and confound readers up to the current day. T. O. Mabbott, in his edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849 (3:1063–88), gives the full text of the hoax, with annotations and a variorum of the 1844 and 1850 printings. Although Mabbott retains a number of changes that he considers to have been authorial in the Griswold text, which serves as his copy text, he dismisses one potentially significant change of "British Channel" in the 1850 printing back to the 1844 "Bristol Channel." (There are references to both bodies of water elsewhere in the story.) This change to "British Channel" has become somewhat canonical as it was carried forward by several future editors, including J. H. Ingram (1874–75), E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (1894–95), and J. A. Harrison (1902), perhaps because none of these scholars had access to the earlier text in the New York Sun of April 13, 1844 (which today survives in a single copy at the American Antiquarian Society) and necessarily relied on Griswold as the only available source.

In his text, Mabbott also accepts without comment Griswold's almost certain typographical error of "Weal-Vor" for "Wheal-Vor," and states in note 15, "Weal-Vor House, like its owner, is mythical." In so doing, he neglects several points. First, the name of Wheal-Vor House appears twice in the story, and Griswold and Mabbott only change the spelling for the first occurrence. Second, "Wheal Vor," while not exactly a house, is an actual place, a mine in Cornwall ("Wheal" being the name typically given to mines in that region, although apparently not usually with hyphenation). There is also a "Wheal Osborne," which might be the origin of Poe's mythical owner of the house. (Both uses of "Wheal" in the 1844 text use the spelling with the "h.")

Furthermore, Penstruthal is not in Wales, as Poe states, but is actually another series of mines in Cornwall, near the village of Gwennap. (Once famous, these mining operations were mostly inactive by 1844, although several attempts were made to reopen them in the decades after Poe's death.) Poe may intentionally be making a geographical hash out of these names, with the idea that they would give a clue about the nature of the hoax, although one might be hard-pressed to find anyone living in New York at the time who might be expected to have a thorough understanding of relatively obscure British place names. Instead, it may be an indication that Poe altered his original intentions in composing the hoax.

Wheal Vor is near the furthest point of Cornwall, making it the most western and southern location in England, farther south and nearly as far west as the most western parts of Ireland. As such, it would have served as a reasonable launching place for an intentional attempt to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. It may be that Poe felt that such a voyage, if planned in advance, would have generated attention and therefore publicity that was strangely lacking. By moving the place of origin north into Wales with the originally intended place of destination in Paris, and having the trip across the Atlantic occurring only as a matter of circumstance, Poe grants a dry scientific expedition an extra dimension of excitement as an unexpected adventure.

Poe's sources for information about M. Mason's balloon have also generated some confusion. Following earlier research by Walter B. Norris (1910), J. E. Hodgson (1924), Harold H. Scudder (1949) and Ronald Sterne Wilkinson (1960), Mabbott argues that the ultimate sources are "Monck Mason's Account of the Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg, accomplished by Robert Hollond, Esq., Monck Mason, Esq., and Charles Green, Aeronaut, published in London in 1836 and in New York in 1837," and at least indirectly a second pamphlet by Mason, "Remarks on the Ellipsoidal Balloon propelled by the Archimedean Screw...