Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (60 page)

mandragora … yesterday
: Shakespeare,
Othello
, III. iii. 330–3.

Man-Fred … Bas-Bleus
: the excess of Byron’s romantic
Manfred
was both admired and parodied. A Man Friday is a devoted aide, after the native in Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe. Bas-Bleu
is French for ‘bluestocking’, a derogatory term for women interested in the arts.

man in the mask
: the Man in the Iron Mask was a political prisoner in the Bastille. With his identity hidden, his aristocratic origins were the subject of popular speculation, especially in the novel of Alexandre Dumas.

scratch
: a kind of wig. Although De L‘Orme is a fiction, many of those named in this section were real Philadelphia tradespeople.

First published in
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
, for September 1830, this famous tale was collected in both
Tules of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840) and
Tales
(1845).

Usher
: the source of the protagonist’s family name is uncertain. Poe’s mother acted with a couple named Usher, whose children were neurotic. Elsewhere, Poe alludes to Archbishop James Ussher, the respected though pedantic seventeenth-century biblical scholar, best remembered for dating Creation precisely in 4004
BC
.

Son cæur
…: ‘His heart is a suspended lute; it sounds as soon as it is touched’; adapted from the nineteenth-century lyricist Pierre-Jean de Béranger.

Von Weber
: the early nineteenth-century German composer Carl Maria von Weber was best known for his representations of the supernatural, as in the Wolf Glen scene of his gothic opera
Der Freischütz
. His so-called ‘last waltz’ was actually by his friend Karl Gottlieb Reissiger.

Fuseli
: the Swiss-born English painter John Henry Fuseli was best known for his depictions of the unconscious, as in
The Nightmare
(1785–90).

‘The Haunted Palace’
: published separate!) in April 1839, the poem was
included in all editions of the tale. According to Poe the central image is of ‘a mind haunted by phantoms—a disordered brain’.

n. 1 Watson… vol. v
: Poe’s ‘authenticating’ note draws on the collected works of Richard Watson, Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge in the eighteenth century. Watson cites the works of Dr Thomas Percival and Abbé Lazzaro Spallanzani, and is himself the Bishop of Llandaff.

We pored … Maguntinae
: all the books in Usher’s library, except the ‘Mad Trist’, are real, although many are so rare that Poe could have known them only second- or third-hand. Gresset, Machiavelli, Holberg, Tieck, and Campanella offer allegorical tales with optimistic and pessimistic views about contemporary society; Swedenborg’s vision of heaven and hell and Pomponius Mela’s geography are similarly Utopian, though both claim to be true. The palmistries of Robert Fludd, Joannes ab Indagine, and Marin Cureau de la Chambre involve Renaissance traditions of fortune-telling. The
Directorium
of Eymeric of Gironne instructs priests during the Spanish Inquisition, especially concerning forbidden books. The
Vigiliae
describes the vigils for the dead used in Mainz in 1500.

This tale first appeared in
The Gift: a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1840
, which was actually issued earlier, in 1830. It was collected in
Tules of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(1840).

Pharonnida
: the motto is not from the named work of William Chamberlayne, though the seventeenth-century play wright does speak of conscience in another of his plays.

Elah-Gabulus
: the homosexual Roman emperor Elagabalus or Heliogabalus was renowned for his cruelty.

Dr Bransby
: at Stoke Newington near London, Poe himself studied at Manor House School under the Reverend John Bransby. Here and elsewhere in the tale, the details of Wilson’s life parallel those ot Poe’s own.

peine forte et dure
: literally ‘strong and hard penally’, the legal term sentencing a person to be crushed to death.

Carthaginian medals
: the
exergue
is the lower part of the emblem on the reverse of a coin. Poe seems to believe, from his misreading of a French encyclopaedia, that this part of the design lasts longer.

Oh, le bon temps
…: ‘Oh, what a good time it was, that age of iron’; from Voltaire, ‘Le Mondain’.

the nineteenth… own nativity
: Poe’s birthday was 19 January; and although born in 1809, to make himself seem younger he sometimes gave 1813 (or 1811) as the year of his birth.

key
: here, tone or pitch of voice.

Eton
: as Poe had no first-hand experience of this famous English public school, Wilson’s years there are less fully described than his earlier schooling.

Hemdes Alliais
: Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes was a second-century rhetorician who, like his friend the emperor Hadrian, spent his wealth liberally on public buildings.

The tale appeared in both
The Casket
and
[Burton’s] Gentleman’s Magazine
tor December 183g. It was collected in
Tales
(1845).

Ce grand malheur
…: ‘That great misfortune, not to be able to be alone’; from
Les Caractères
, by the seventeenth-century moralist Jean de la Bruyère.

αχλος
…: ‘the mist that previously was upon them’; adapted from Homer,
Iliad
, v. 127.

Leibnitz… Gorgias
: Poe’s opinion elsewhere varied on Leibniz, the seventeenth-century rationalist and co-inventor of calculus. The sophist Gorgias represents faulty rhetoric in the Socratic dialogue bearing his name.

Eupatrids
: well-born, after hereditary nobles of Athens.

Retzsch
: Friedrich Retzsch, nineteenth-century German artist, famous for his illustrations of Goethe’s
Faust
.

n. 1 Hortulus Animæ
…: the rare sixteenth-century
Ortulus anime cum oratiunculis
of Johanna Grüningcr, whose illustrations Isaac D‘Israeli judged indecent.

Arguably the first detective story, this tale was published in
Graham’s Magazine
for April 1841. It was collected in
Tales
(1845).

Browne
: from chapter V of
Urn Burial
by the seventeenth-century doctor and polymath. The first version of this extensively revised tale omitted the motto, but opened with a learned paragraph on the phrenological organ of ‘analysis’, similar to the discussion of phrenology at the beginning of ‘The Imp of the Perverse’.

Hoyle
: in the eighteenth century, Edmund Hoyle published widely on the rules of card-playing. In revised forms, his books remain in print.

Bi-Purt Soul
: since as early as Plato’s
Symposium
, philosophers have argued for the duality of the soul. One variation accounts for the
Doppelgänger
motive, common in Poe.

et id genus omne
: ‘and all of that kind’. The whole discussion of the fictitious effeminate Chantilly suggests the narrator’s fears about the sexual ambiguity of his relation to Dupin; see David Van Leer, ‘Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales’, in Silverman (ed.),
New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales
, 69–79.

Epicurus … nebular cosmogony
: in
Eureka
, his late essay on the universe, Poe associated the atomic theory of the ancient Greek philosopher with William Herschel’s eighteenth-century explanation of the universe in terms of the Orion nebula.

Perdidit
…: ‘the first letter has lost its original sound’; from Ovid,
Fasti
, v.

métal d‘Alger
: an inexpensive alloy used in place of silver. Napoleons are 20-franc gold pieces.

the head felt off
: earlier versions continue ‘and rolled to some distance’. Most other of Poe’s many revisions to the description of the crime are less gruesome and concern only minor details.

Monsieur Jourdain
: in Act 1, scene ii of Molière’s
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
, the middle-class hero affects gentlemanly airs by calling for his dressing-gown (
robe de chambre
), ‘better to hear the |chamber| music’.

Vidoeq
: in the nineteenth century, the reformed criminal François-Eugène Vidoeq headed the intelligence service under Napoleon, and later founded the first private detective agency. His 1828
Memoires
whetted readers’ appetite for crime novels, and Vidoeq’s own moral ambiguity made him the model for the tortured avenger of subsequent detective fiction.

Je les ménageais
: ‘I dealt with them tactfully ‘.

Cuvier
: Georges Cuviei, nineteenth-century French natural historian.

Neufehatelish
: countrified, after a remote French province.

Jardin des Piaules
: the great Parisian Botanical Garden whose zoological displays anticipated evolutionary theory.

n. 1 “de nier
…”: ‘to deny what is, and to explain what is not’; from Part VI, letter xi of Rousseau’s
Julie, or The New Héloïse
, an eighteenth-century novel exploring the témale inner conscience. The phallic implications of the paragraph’s ‘stamens’ and ‘codfish’ emasculate the Prefect.

The last of Poe’s ‘women’ tales, ‘Eleonora’ appeared in
The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1842
, available in autumn 1841.

Lully
: “Under the protection of a specific form, the soul is safe.’ The reference, quoted in Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris
, is to the trials of the biblical Job, as explicated by the thirteenth-century Spanish mystic Ramon Llull.

‘agressi… exploraturi
’: ‘they were come into the sea of shades [Atlantic Ocean], to find out what is in it’. From
Geographia Nubiensis
, the Latin translation of the twelfth-century travel narrative of Arab scientist Al-Idrisi.

Oedipus
: on arriving at Thebes, the Greek hero Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx, which refers to the stages of human maturation.

bard of Schiraz
: the fourteenth-century Persian poet Shams ud-din Muhammad, known as Hafiz.

Helusion
: variant for Elysium.

Hesper
: Hesperia, the western region dominated by Hesperus, the evening star.

This brief masterpiece first appeared in
Graham’s Magazine
for May 1842.

Red Death
: although its name recalls the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, the
Red Death is imaginary. Cholera, however, was a pressing reality in the nineteenth century, and the United States suffered two serious outbreaks during Poe’s lifetime.

‘Hernani’
: Victor Hugo’s 1830 play of political and romantic intrigue in the reign of Charles V of Spain.

a thief in the night
: Christ in His second coming will reappear like a thief in the night: 1 Thessalonians 5: 2.

This tale first appeared in
The Gift. A Christinas and New Year’s Present, MDCCCXLIII
, available earlier in 1842.

Impia … at Paris
: the motto reads: ‘Here the wicked mob, unappeased, long cherished a hatred of blood. Now that the fatherland is saved, and the cave of death demolished, where grim death has been, life and health appear.’ In the French Revolution, the Jacobins were extreme radicals responsible for the excesses of the Reign of Terror. Their liberal politics were the opposite of those of the reactionary Spanish Inquisition.

inquisitorial voices
: Poe draws on American anti-Catholic paranoia in the nineteenth century, especially about the long-standing ‘inquisitions’ by which the Church searched out heresy. Although not historically precise, the tale correctly suggests that the Inquisition was particularly harsh in Spain, where it was centred in Toledo, and was halted temporarily in 1808 by Napoleonic troops under General Colbert, Comte de Lasalle.

This second of the Dupin tales appeared in William Snowden’s
Ladies’ Companion
in three instalments—November and December 1842, and February 1843. It was collected in his 1845
Tales
. Poe’s use of a fictional character to solve a real-life murder affords the tale its special interest, and led Dorothy Savers to declare it his finest work. The facts were essentially as Poe indicated. In July 1841 the shop-girl Mary Rogers was found floating dead in the Hudson River. Sensationalizing journalists converted this commonplace incident into a media event by emphasizing its mysterious elements, implying that Rogers was the victim of gang violence. When Poe began his account, the death remained unexplained. His early instalments reprinted various newspaper articles in an edited but fairly accurate form to expose their faulty logic and implicit xenophobia. While he was preparing his final instalment—in which Dupin exposed the complicity of Rogers’s secret lover—the innkeeper Mrs Loss (called Madame Deluc by Poc) confessed on her death-bed to having assisted in the abortion during which Rogers died. Faced with this new evidence, Poe quickly altered his final instalment and revised the whole tale more extensively for its republication in book form. As a result, the tale offers fundamentally two explanations: the favoured is Poe’s original solution involving the secret lover; the second, barely sketched in, transforms the lover into the abortionist of Mrs Loss’s account, without ever actually mentioning her confession or what it implied about Rogers’s death. For a detailed account of Poe’s use of his sources, see John Walsh,
Poe the Detective: The
Curium Circumstances behind ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
’ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1008).

Novalis
: the late eighteenth-century German romantic writer, Friedrich von Hardenberg.