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  • Poe's Doings of Gotham:A Note on Charles Sealsfield
  • Roger Forclaz (bio)

When Poe moved to New York in April 1844 in order to start a new life with his wife and his mother-in-law, he came with only four and a half dollars, and he had to borrow three dollars in order to survive in this big city. Fortunately, his financial situation soon grew better, at first because of the publication of "The Balloon-Hoax" but soon afterward on account of his collaboration with the Columbia Spy, a journal published in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He had agreed to write a weekly contribution. He wrote seven in all; the sketches, primarily chronicling current events in New York between May 17 and June 25, 1844, were later published as Doings of Gotham: Poe's Contributions to the Columbia Spy, collected by Jacob E. Spannuth and edited by T. O. Mabbott (Jacob E. Spannuth: Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 1929).

One of the most interesting items of the Doings of Gotham (and perhaps the most puzzling) is the passage in which Poe speaks about a contemporary writer:

The uproar which is made about Seatsfield—"the great Seatsfield" [the name was misspelled in British and American journals]—is merely one other laughable, or disgusting instance of our subserviency to foreign opinion. His sketches are undoubtedly clever; but there are now in America some dozen of my own personal acquaintances who daily put forth, unnoticed, as good compositions, if not, indeed, far better. Seatsfield might have written and printed here ad infinitum, without getting his head above the mob of authors, even were his works what the toadies of everything foreign tell us they are, but what they positively are not.

(Doings of Gotham, 51)

Poe's dogmatic tone gives the impression that he knows Sealsfield's work; Poe certainly did not share the view that was prevailing in the United States at the time, and he did not take seriously the question "Where is Seatsfield the greatest American author?" (cf. Edward Castle, Der grosse Unbekannte: Das Leben von Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl) [Vienna/Munich: Manutius Press, 1952], 479, 682). Poe's declaration was rather severe, as he probably did not know Sealsfield's works; in his whole career, Poe never dared to express a critical judgment about a writer who was unknown to him. He was wrong, however, in expressing such a negative judgment, as we shall see. [End Page 107]

Who was the mysterious Charles Sealsfield (1793–1864)? In his notes to the edition of the Doings of Gotham, Mabbott writes, "Seatsfield was a German author who wrote of the American scene after living in this country. The papers in 1844 were full of him—and he was accused of plagiarism, widely. As he was after all merely a popularizer, these accusations were probably well founded but absurd" (56). However, Sealsfield was a writer in his own right, and he was at the time a well-known figure in American literature. He spent about ten years in the United States from 1823 to 1858 and during this time became an American citizen.

An Austrian by birth, his real name was Karl Postl; he had been a Catholic priest, but after a few years he left the religious order of which he was the secretary. After changing his name, he decided to flee to the United States in 1823. Attracted by the atmosphere of freedom and by the pioneer spirit, he decided to settle there. For him, democracy, such as it existed in the United States, was the most perfect state form; he wanted to be the chronicler of this development and the Walter Scott of his time. After being a planter in Louisiana for a short time, he became active in counterintelligence; he returned to Europe in 1826, but went back to the United States the following year. He then started his literary career as a journalist writing for various journals (among others, the New York Mirror, where he knew George P. Morris and Mordecai Noah, both well-known to Poe scholars). He soon began writing novels; his first, Tokeah or the White Rose (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey), was published in 1829, and others...

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