The Rise and Fall of Public Opinion: Poe to James

Edgar Allan Poe’s depiction of gossip as a source of information in “The Man That Was Used Up”(1839) is not, as many critics have suggested, an indictment of popular culture and the worship of celebrity. Rather, Poe uses gossip as a way of analyzing the ephemerality of public opinion, which served as both an extension of and a counter to print culture. When Henry James rewrites this tale in The Papers (1903), he charts the erosion of this particular version of collective power and, in the process, transforms the celebrity into a model for the modern work of art.