Poe's "Diddling" and the Depression: Notes on the Sources of Swindling
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Notes
1. John E. Reilly, "Poe's 'Diddling': Still Another Possible Source and Date of Composition," Poe Studies 25 (June/December 1992), 6-9.
2. Professor Hinkspiller and Monsieur Moquetoi [Timothy O. Porter and N. P. Willis], Corsair 1, no. 1 (March 16, 1839), 1.
3. Reilly, p. 8.
4. For an account of the widespread anxieties about the antebellum city, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in American, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
5. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 400-401. This volume will be cited in the text as PT.
6. The pamphlet was printed in Philadelphia (1838; no publisher). All references are to the original version, Democratic Review 2 (May 1838), 167-86. For a similar satire on speculation and unsound banking practices, complete with allusions to Newcraft, see "Extracts form the Private Diary of a Certain Bank Director," Democratic Review 2 (July 1838), 418-32. Not incidentally, the name "snap" also serves to link "Specie Humbug," the final version of "Diddling," and the never-completed collection "Tales of the Folio Club." Aside from denoting a thief or swindler, "Snap" is the name of the President of the Folio Club, and as Alexander Hammond and others have argued, Poe may have intended Mr. Snap to be the narrator of "Diddling." See Alexander Hammond, "A Reconstruction of Poe's 1833 Tales of the Folio Club," Poe Studies 5 (December 1972), 26-27. Whether or not he actually composed a version of the tale in the early 1830s, it is likely that Poe revised it in the period preceding its publication in 1843 (see Reilly, p. 9).
7. Poe, notice of Sketches of London, Burton's 5 (August 1839), 115.
8. Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G.R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 869. This volume will be cited in the text as ER.
9. For a discussion of Poe, information, and literature, see my "Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy," AQ 44 (1992), 381-417.
10. ER, p. 15. In all likelihood, Poe's account of the composition of "The Raven" is itself a hoax.
11. In a review of Hawthorne, Poe makes the sympathy between author and reader the basis for the most sublime literary pleasure: "The true originality—true in respect of its purposes—is that which, in bringing out the half formed, the reluctant, or the unexpressed fancies of mankind, or in exciting the more delicate pulses of the heart's passion . . . thus combines with the pleasurable effect of apparent novelty, a real egotistic delight. . . . [The reader] feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer—and himself. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, together, created this thing. Henceforth there is a bond of sympathy between them, a sympathy which irradiates every subsequent page of the book" (ER, p. 581).
