The Gift (Book) That Keeps on Giving: Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Rereading, Reprinting, and Detective Fiction

The Gift (Book) That Keeps on Giving: Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Rereading, Reprinting, and Detective Fiction GILA ASHTOR O n 27 November 1844, the Philadelphia Inquirer included the following advertisement: Just published by Carey & Hart, and for sale by all booksellers. The Gift for 1845, with illustrations . . . and originally bound in calf extra . . . . We had reason, last year, to bestow high commendation on one of this class of American publications, and are glad to be [. . .] repeating it on the present volume. The Gift is still . . . so well printed, charmingly illustrated, as handsomely bound and as ably written as ever. This last is, after all, the feature which most attracts our regard . . . But [. . .] the story of “The Purloined Letter,” by Edgar A. Poe, we must regard [. . .] of literary merit.1 Lodged among real estate news, an auditor’s notice, and items about auctions, an upcoming zoological exhibition, concerts, and sales of furniture and clothes, along with pricelists of mutton, chocolate, and oyster pie, this advertisement for Poe’s tale participates in a moment when dailies’ “rectilinear columns of undifferentiated print” were constituting readers “variously as voters, advertisers , victims, and cheats, but always as consumers, spectators, and readers.”2 In this way, the commercial announcements that can seem, to an ideology of literature’s aura, both crude and incongruent are actually consistent with The Gift’s commercial agenda to attract—by being “so well printed,” “charmingly illustrated,” and “handsomely bound”—readers as buyers.3 Calling for a critical methodology that demonstrates the theoretical claim that texts have no meaning for readers separate from the material contexts in which they are read, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier suggest we consider “the ‘world of the text’ as a world of objects, forms and rituals whose conventions and devices bear meaning but also constrain its construction,” because “no text exists outside of the physical support that offers it for reading (or hearing) or outside of the circumstance in which it is read (or heard).” “Authors,” they provokingly argue, “do not write books: they write texts that become written C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 57 G I L A A S H T O R objects . . . . All these objects are handled, in various ways, by flesh and blood readers whose reading habits vary with time, place and milieu.”4 The November 1844 advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer appeared early in the publication and reception history of “The Purloined Letter,” which had also been “noticed” in the September 1844 issue of Democratic Review and reviewed on the first page of the 4 October 1844 New York Tribune. That the prospective circulation of “The Purloined Letter”—“just published” and now “for sale by booksellers”—occasioned its early public mention foregrounds the reciprocal relation between literature and the reading practices of literary annuals in a culture of reprinting. As Meredith McGill claims in her influential American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853, “the hallmark of the antebellum literary marketplace was its decentralization.” According to McGill, “in the multiplicity of their formats and points of origin, and in the staggering temporality of their production, reprinted texts call attention to the repeated acts of articulation by which culture and its audiences are constituted.”5 A historically and geographically specific genre that existed in the brief and explosive span of McGill’s study, the gift book offers a singular site for exploring the complex inextricability of textual content from material context. Building on technological determinist arguments about form’s relation to content ,6 McGill’s research on reprinting crucially expands “form” to include the social, and not strictly technical, processes of transmission. As McGill explains, “one cannot simply return the text to its context; one would have to read it in the context of the radical decontextualization that marked the gift book medium as a whole.”7 With plot developments that turn on the relationship between form and content, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” can be said to dramatize the very interplay between decontextualization and context central to the gift-book economy. Indeed, the story’s obsessive negotiation of form/content and context...