Fake News!!!: Poe’s Balloon Story and the Penny Papers!

On 13 April 1844, a penny paper called the New York Sun published a broadside extra with an exclusive, shocking, and false account of a transatlantic crossing via balloon ship, a large inflated ovoid carrying a wicker passenger basket underneath. According to the paper, eight men had intended to fly from northern Wales to Paris before their airship, the Victoria, was swept west by powerful winds. Finding themselves over the Atlantic, the aeronauts decided to embrace the unexpected adventure, and after seventy-two hours of breakneck travel, the eight men landed safely in South Carolina to the onlookers’ amazement. While the author claimed that readers ate up this exciting story, it was quickly revealed that the trip never happened. Rather, the writer, one Edgar Allan Poe, had invented everything.

We now understand Poe’s so-called “Balloon Hoax” as part of what Terence Whalen has called the antebellum “jamboree of ballyhoo, exaggeration, chicanery, shame, and flim-flam.”¹ A number of scholars have described how information fraud and humbug proliferated during the nineteenth century’s middle decades; they fit Poe into this climate as a literary hoax master.² Biographers such as Peter Ackroyd have singled out this balloon story as “one of Poe’s most successful ‘spoofs’ or ‘hoaxes,’ a game in which he delighted.”³ Biographer Jeffrey Meyers agrees that Poe “enjoyed perpetrating a hoax in order to show how easy it was to deceive the public.”⁴ Those critics who develop hoax theories typically see this enjoyment not as perverse, but as friendly, funny, and even edifying. David Ketterer approves of Poe’s “predilection for the literary hoax, a form of satire and a constituent element in American folk humor” because it allows Poe to suggest “the experience of that reality which is camouflaged by the illusive phenomenal universe.”⁵ Similarly, John Bryant considers many of Poe’s stories, from more expected tales such as “Hans Pfaall” (1835) to the less expected “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), as hoaxes in comic tradition with the tall tale. Bryant acknowledges that Poe was wide of the laugh-out-loud mark, yet still sees a playful desire to encode information that the reader will then discover—a way of “coexisting with the conflicts inherent in democracy.”⁶

Engraving of the Balloon-ship (Inset). The Extra Sun, 13 April 1844. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

For these critics, the literary hoax becomes a didactic tool: “In testing our analytical skills, the hoax performs an additional ethical function in exercising and thereby ritualistically reinforcing what Poe calls ‘that moral activity which disentangles.’”⁷ Lynda Walsh, Dennis W. Eddings, Mark Canada, Julie Hedgepeth Williams, Andie Tucher, and Karen Roggenkamp are other scholars who see Poe’s hoaxes as “something of a game, in which the newspaper story might attempt to trick readers into thinking a fictionalized story was true” so as “to pose a sort of challenge to the reader.”⁸ Charles May, the noted short story theorist, concludes, “Poe believes if we do not allow ourselves to be tricked, we will not learn.” ⁹ Clearly, while critics have not always praised Poe as a democratic icon, the critical history of Poe’s hoaxes embraces the idea that Poe’s trickery invites learning, a social good for society.

Yet scholars offer no firm evidence that readers actually do become more skilled through such encounters with hoaxes. I challenge this belief in the hoax’s purported benevolence; those that masquerade as breaking news seem especially problematic. By properly highlighting the significance of the newspaper context in which Poe’s story first appeared, this essay posits that it exhibits all the hallmarks of so-called fake news—a deliberate attempt to mislead readers by layering falsehoods on top of a truthful kernel and exploiting news delivery system protocols to make the result credible.¹⁰ Attending to this minor Poe story and its critical history reveals not just how fake news works but also exposes our own belated and growing understanding of fake news...