Poe’s Taking of Pelham One Two Three Four Five Six

Poe’s Taking of Pelham One Two Three Four Five Six RICHARD KOPLEY I t’s not that Poe hijacked a subway train. Rather, he transformed a narrative train—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1828 novel Pelham. This essay will focus on six of his transformations from Pelham for six of his greatest tales.1 Scholars have long acknowledged some of Poe’s obligations to Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman. Fred Lewis Pattee wrote in 1923 that “whatever debt [Poe’s short story ‘The Visionary’] owes is to the Bulwer of the Pelham period.” In the 1960s, G. R. Thompson observed Poe’s indebtedness to Bulwer’s novel for elements of “Lionizing,” “Marginalia,” “Ulalume,” and “The Bells.” In the 1970s, Stuart and Susan Levine noted Poe’s borrowing such features as Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloı̈se, Crébillon, and Faubourg St. Germain from Bulwer’s Pelham for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Stephen Rachman, in 1995, stated that the epigraph from a chapter in Pelham became the epigraph for “The Man of the Crowd.” The Burton R. Pollin edition, Collected Writings (1981–97), has a number of references to Pelham (see 2:110, 112–13, 181, 214– 15, 409, 495, 501; 4:95, 112; 5:80, 132), to which the Levines’ 2004 edition of Eureka adds another reference.2 Yet there is more. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was a highly successful British novelist whom Poe in February 1836 considered to be “unsurpassed by any writer living or dead” (Writings, 5:121). Although his opinion of Bulwer did diminish over time—perhaps in part because of Horace Binney Wallace’s disparagement of him in the 1838 novel Stanley3 —Poe continued to transform passages from Bulwer’s work. And we should not be deterred in our investigation of Bulwer by his modest reputation in our own time—owing, in part, to Snoopy’s use of the now-clichéd first line of Bulwer’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (honoring extravagantly bad writing). Bulwer was an important literary figure in Poe’s time; further attention to his Pelham, a “silver fork” novel of urban mystery and intrigue, reveals important additional source material for Poe’s tales. The search that led to my study of Bulwer’s Pelham began in 1982 when I visited Poe scholar Palmer C. Holt at his home in Englewood, Florida; it continued in 2005 when I visited the Palmer C. Holt Collection of the Holland/New Library of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. C
2008 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 41, 2008 109 R I C H A R D K O P L E Y Holt had built a collection of books that Poe might have read, and he had noted their parallels to Poe’s writings. Holt’s family generously gave the core of the collection to WSU, with the able intermediation of Burton Pollin (who, incidentally, mentions Pelham in “Bulwer-Lytton’s Influence on Poe’s Works and Ideas”).4 My research in the Holt Collection was thoughtfully facilitated by Alexander Hammond of WSU, coeditor of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism with Jana Argersinger. (For permission to quote from the Holt Collection, I am grateful to Cheryl Gunselman, Manuscripts Librarian at Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections [MASC] of Washington State University Libraries.) The critical volume that I found in the Holt Collection was a heavily annotated Routledge reprint that binds ten short Bulwer novels together.5 The reference in Pelham’s chapter 10 to “au troisième” prompted Holt’s comment “Poe Murders Rue Morgue” (8; see McGann, 32, 84). And he then underlined “Faubourg St. Germaine” in chapter 13 (10; see McGann, 41; also cited by the Levines) and checked and underlined “Jardin des Plantes” in chapter 21 (19; see McGann, 72, 86, 97, 117). He wrote “Poe” next to the latter phrase a bit later (22), and he also circled a reference to “the ruggedness of the pavé” (that is, the pavement) (22; see McGann, 86). Readers of “Rue Morgue” will remember Monsieur Dupin’s...