The Raven Illustrations of James Carling: Poe’s Classic in Vivid View by Christopher P. Semtner (review)

The full-page color reproduction of forty-three seldom-seen and extraordinary illustrations based on “The Raven” is reason enough to purchase this book. In fact, because of James Carling’s drawings alone, The Raven Illustrations of James Carling would be the proverbial “bargain at twice the price.” The accompanying text is disappointing, however, because it attempts too much and achieves too little. In fewer than seventy pages, Christopher Semtner provides an overview of Poe’s life (with emphasis on the composition of “The Raven”), an introduction to the life and artistic career of James Carling, a history of the acquisition and exhibition of Carling’s drawings in Richmond, an analysis of Poe’s taste and preferences in literary illustrations, and comparisons of a number of Carling’s drawings with the corresponding lines in Poe’s poem.

Each of these chapters will likely leave readers wishing for more depth and breadth, and the initial chapter on Poe’s life is problematic for a different reason: Semtner draws heavily on early Poe biographers whose reliability is highly questionable. Referencing Susan Talley as “Poe’s friend,” Semtner most often cites her 1907 biography (The Home Life of Poe, published under the name of Susan Archer Wiess). Of the many biographies on which to rely in a brief sketch of Poe’s life, this is an especially unfortunate choice. (In The Poe Log Thomas and Jackson refer to Weiss’s work as “fraught with errors, fabrications, and unverifiable statements,” and Richard Kopley, in his chapter on Poe in Oxford Bibliographies, cautions that the book is “not always reliable.”) In Semtner’s accounts of the composition of “The Raven” and Poe’s opinions of the poem, he is not always careful to question or qualify Weiss’s assertions; as a result, readers may be left with the impression that Poe disliked “The Raven,” that he left it unfinished, and that he began writing the poem ten years before it was published. Readers familiar with the verifiable facts of Poe’s life, as well as the unreliability of some early biographers who often cite those-who-knew-those-who-knew-Poe, will take such passages in The Raven Illustrations of James Carling for what they are; but it seems entirely possible that some who are drawn to Semtner’s book because of an affinity for “The Raven” may be misled in a number of particulars regarding the author and the composition of his famous poem.

It is somewhat symbolic (or symptomatic) of the problematic nature of Semtner’s biographical sketch that he includes the 1845 Graham’s Magazine engraving of Poe and mentions that it “shows Poe as he would have appeared while writing ‘The Raven’” (34). To anyone who has viewed a photograph of Poe, it seems highly unlikely that he would have appeared as he does in this engraving during the composition of “The Raven” or at any other time in his life. In fact, this engraving of Poe has become notorious for its unlikeness to the author—beginning with Charles Briggs’s comment that in Graham’s Magazine there is “a something which is called a portrait of Edgar A. Poe” and that it bears little resemblance to the author.

In Semtner’s brief chapter titled “Poe on Illustration,” he offers convincing evidence that Poe “thought that illustrations should contribute to the mood of the literary work they accompany and that it was less important for the illustrations to perfectly follow the text than it was for them to be great works of art” (73). This seems a justifiable conclusion to reach on Poe’s opinions regarding literary illustrations based on his 1842 review of the illustrated Vicar of Wakefield, which Semtner cites in some detail. Semtner’s relying solely on this view of illustrations to conclude that Poe would have approved of Carling’s drawings, however, is complicated by the fact...