Material Poe

Edgar Allan Poe in 20 Objects is a rare treat for scholars and Poe enthusiasts alike, an outgrowth of the exhibition mounted at Johns Hopkins’s George Peabody Library, 4 October 2016 to 5 February 2017, from Susan Jaffe Tane’s famed collection of Poe materials and manuscripts. Happily conceived and deftly executed by editors Gabrielle Dean and Richard Kopley, the book pairs photographs of twenty objects from the exhibit with short (five- to six-page) but notably rich essays penned by a refreshing combination of literary scholars and art historians/curators connected with the show. Thus, while it holds and communicates something of the magic of an exhibit (one can dwell as long as one wishes on the pictured object), it also delivers good, sound scholarship in highly digestible portions; indeed, several essays can easily be read at a single sitting, a quality that Poe himself admired. The editors’ decision that the featured essays should encompass both “a catalog’s attention to an individual item and an article’s attention to an aspect of a writer’s life” [xiii] contributes to the book’s distinctive quality and to much of its allure, for this reader. One feels, upon completing it, that one has simultaneously made a trip to the museum and taken in the erudition of a scholarly tome. Edgar Allan Poe in 20 Objects is thus a book to take with you to the beach and a book that will live, equally comfortably, in your office. It is a book that delights and instructs.

A foreword by Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins University, a preface by Susan Tane, and an introduction by Richard Kopley announce the volume’s intent to “tell Poe’s story through twenty objects” [xiii], which include, as the reader soon sees, a golden engagement ring with the inscription “Edgar”; a crystal decanter set; the so-called Players Club daguerreotype of Poe, one of the best-known images of the author; an 1808 newspaper notice from the Boston Theatre, which features Mr. and Mrs. Poe, and an intriguing Mr. and Mrs. Usher, as actors; a manuscript letter by and photograph of Poe’s little-known sister, Rosalie (darkened, and almost obscured, like her life); magazines and first editions of book-length collections in which Poe was published; and, of course, the newspaper death notice of E. A. Poe. Many of these objects exert their own particular and mysterious power even at one further remove (photographic representation) from the reader; such is the ability of the material object to conjure the presence of its possessor, its subject, or its time. Others cast their spells as we take in their import (the first page of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in the 1841 Graham’s Magazine) or learn what they have to disclose (a detail from “MS. Found in a Bottle,” published in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, with an evocative epigraph deleted in subsequent printings of the tale: “A wet sheet and a flowing sea”).

The volume’s editors effectively group these twenty objects and articles into three sections; authors of the essays include both highly distinguished scholars and newcomers on the scene. Part 1, “People in Poe’s Life,” contains seven essays and will be of high interest to those with a historical or biographical bent. Part 2 comprises nine articles on “themes in Poe’s work”: ambition, mystery, terror, ratiocination, memory, beauty, cosmology, judgment, and love. Part 3, titled “Mortality and Immortality,” usefully takes us to the end of Poe’s life (the New-York Daily Tribune obituary) and beyond, with a consideration of the writer’s “world-wide fame” and of the French writer Baudelaire’s role in that fame, through his translations of Poe.

Absorbing material appears throughout. This reader, for instance, was particularly captivated by information in Harry Lee Poe’s essay on Edgar’s parents Eliza and David Poe (and Eliza...