Poe’s Moon Shot: “Hans Phaall” and the Art and Science of Antebellum Print Culture

MarcyJ. Dinius Poe’s Moon Shot: “HansPhaall”and the Art and Science of Antebellum Print Culture Haveyou seen the accounts of SirJohn Herschel’swonderful discoveries?Have you read the Sun? Have you heard the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story. -Anonymous review of Lock among the Moonlings, by William N. Gregg, S o u t h QuanblyReuim,October 1853 Have you seen the “Discoveriesin the Moon”?Do you not think it altogether suggestedby HansPhaal [sic]?It is very singular,-but when I first purposed writing a Tale concerning the Moon, the idea of Telesccoplcdiscoveriessuggested itself to me-but I afterwardsabandonedit . I had howeverspokeno fitfreely,&from many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those Discoveries1am convincedthat the idea was stolen from myself. -Poe toJohn P. Kennedy, 11September 1835 To suppose that fewer instances of moral delinquency have been perpetrated in the particular departmentof letters, than in any other,would be, to the say the least of it, very unphilosophical, since the riskof purloining the fruits of other men’s brains with impunity, is unquestionably less than in that of most other depredations . -“Literary Larcenies,”United States Magazine, and Democraticlhieu, September 1846 On 25August1835,a threecolumn storyappeared on the frontpage of the NewYork Sunwith a bold and elaborateheadline announcing: GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES, LATELYMADE BY SIRJOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &C. A t the Cape of Good Hope Such dramatic headlines and noticesof scientific discoveries were familiar features of the “penny dailies,” cheap rivals to the elite weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines of the antebellum period. Yet as the threecolumn format (typicallyreserved for major stories), the distinguishednameof SirJohn Herschel,and hisprominently asserted credentials all announced, these “greatastronomicaldiscoveries”were meant to be takenasnews of unprecedented importance.Both the general public and the scientific community tookimmediatenotice.As the firstepigraphabove recalls, news of Herschel’s close-up views of the moon and consequent“discoveries”of plant, animal , and humanlike life there riveted the attention of notjust New York but the nation and the world, and the Sun’s exclusive was rapidly reprinted and disseminated.A s interestin the story grew, the Sun dramaticallyincreased its publication to supply eager readers with subsequentinstallmentsdetailing Herschel’sdiscoveries. In Richmond,EdgarAllan Poe read the story with particular interest. Just before Herschel’s moon findings were trumpeted in the Sun, Poe had published “HansPhaall-A Tale”in theJune 1835S o u t h Litermy M e s s e n g e r . WhilePoe’s“Hans Phaall”was presented as a fanciful “tale”for a literary readership, the Sun’s moon story was pub t 2 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism lished as scientificfact, supposedlyreprinted verbatim from a supplement to the EdinburghJournal o f Science.YetasHerschel’sdiscoveriesof “man-bats” and miniaturebison on the moon becameincreasingly incredible, and as callsfor the Sun’seditors to produce the Edinburghjournal for closer scientific inspection went unanswered, the biggest news story of the nineteenth centurywas eventually revealed to be, in fact,just a story.Poe, never one to be fooled (or at least to admit it), would remember in 1846 his original surprise at the story’s popular credibilitywhen he had immediatelyrecognizedit asa hoax: ”nosoonerhad Iseen the paper than I understood thejest.”l Poe’s “Hans Phaall” and what came to be known as the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (perpetrated by Richard Adams Locke) share complicated compositional,publication, and reception histories. By examining them, this essay investigates the often uneasy relationship of literature and sciencein antebellumAmerican culture-or more specifically,how thisrelationshipdeveloped in, and accordinglywas documented by,mid-nineteenthcentury American print culture. And inevitably ,as the second and third epigraphs above suggest and any study of these two moon stories demands, this essayis about intellectualproperty, both imaginativeand scientific, and cultural negotiations of its value. Traditionally,analyses of “Hans Phaall” and the Great Moon Hoax, both in literary criticism and histories of nineteenth-century American journalism, have focused on the resemblance of the two, not only in their subject matter and extensive pseudo-scientificdetail, but also in their designationas hoaxesand their comparativesuccess in fooling readers.* These concerns...