Edgar Allan Poe: Writer in Residence

Edgar Allan Poe was born in a trunk, meaning his parents acted on the stage. The place was Boston, and the year was 1809. His father David Poe, Jr. deserted the family soon after and disappeared. His mother Eliza, poor and ill, died in a boarding house in Richmond, Virginia in 1811. From the start, then, Poe lived briefly here and there. Many of his residences up and down the American east coast have disappeared. Some have been identified, restored, and furnished with historic memorabilia.

John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan of Richmond took in the orphan but did not formally adopt him. John Allan was a wealthy merchant in tobacco and other products, and his wife was from the plantation class. Childless, Frances Allan lavished affection on the boy. The merchant was sometimes generous, sometimes tight-fisted.

From 1815 to 1820, the Allans and their foster son lived in London, England with a visit to John Allan’s native Scotland. Omitted in short biographies, these years may have helped form Poe’s sense of the alien. As a boy, he attended school abroad and later in Richmond. He was a precocious student who picked up French, astronomy, and classical reading.

The Allans lived amid wealth and fashion. With the family, Poe traveled to the hot springs of Virginia, saw his foster-mother’s plantations, and met luminaries like John Marshall, Winfield Scott, and merchants and ship owners who dined with the Allans. In Richmond, the elegant 1812 Wickham House in Richmond, preserved today as the Valentine Museum, and the Virginia Executive Mansion, designed by Alexander Parris in 1811 and still the state governor’s residence, give an idea of Poe’s early domestic life. The Allan mansion named Moldavia was demolished in 1890. Photographs from that year remain, as well as a staircase that was moved to another house, and descriptions of the furniture and paintings. Echoes of this luxury recur throughout Poe’s stories.

Poe enrolled for one year at the University of Virginia, which opened in 1825. He lived in Room No. 13 in the West Range. Beginning in 1930, this room was restored several times and furnished with antiques. You can peer into it today through a glass panel. Pendleton Hogan in his 1987 book The Lawn: A Guide to Jefferson’s University writes:

Here he began to play cards and to experiment with “peach and honey,” as homemade peach brandy was called. His fellow students recalled that Poe “delighted and entertained” his friends by reading his own poems; students often filled his room and “scarcely breathed as they eagerly listened to some story” he had written. It is almost certain that he wrote his 400-line poem “Tamerlane” in Room 13, as well as other poems in his first volume, published in the spring of 1827. Two of his stories, “William Wilson” (1839) and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) reflect aspects of his life at the university.

Thomas Jefferson founded and designed the university. He lived nearby, and he invited students in rotation to dine, so Poe probably saw Monticello. The subterranean passages of the eccentric mountaintop villa may echo in the story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Somewhat later, Poe may have read about Lyndhurst, a Hudson Valley villa built in 1838 in Tarrytown, New York. The Gothic style and irregular layout of Lyndhurst prefigure Prospero’s house in “The Masque of the Red Death” of 1842.

John Allan quarreled with Poe and withdrew his financial support. Expelled from the Allan household, Poe enlisted in the army in 1827, and he served in Boston and Charleston. His foster mother Frances Allan died in 1829. In 1830-1831, Poe attended West Point, the United States Military Academy, where he wrote and published poetry. He was briefly in New York, then in Baltimore, where he lived from 1832 with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter. The house they rented at 203 North Amity Street was saved in the 1930s from demolition for a public housing project. Preserved but unfurnished, it is open to visitors today.

Poe left for Richmond in 1835 to be the assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He invited the Clemms to join him, and at age twenty-six Poe married his cousin Virginia, who was thirteen. They lived in a boarding house. Poe demonstrated skill as a writer and book reviewer. Circulation jumped, and he was promoted to editor. But he clashed with the publisher, Thomas White, partly over excessive drinking. White fired him at the end of 1836.

Poe, his child bride, and Mrs. Clemm lived in New York for two years. Little documentation survives from this period. In 1838, they moved to Philadelphia. The family rented several houses, including ones on Arch Street, Sixteenth Street near Locust Street, Coates Street near Twenty-fifth Street, and 532 North 7^th Street. It was a prolific period for the writer, maybe his happiest. Mrs. Clemm acted as housekeeper. Virginia Poe suffered from tuberculosis, though, and would die young.

The North 7^th Street house survives. In Travels in Philadelphia of 1920, Christopher Morley writes about his visit to the house where the Poes lived for about a year. Morley quotes a visitor in their day who described it as “a small house, in one of the pleasant and silent neighborhoods far from the center of the town, and though slightly and cheaply furnished everything in it was so tasteful and so fitly disposed that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius.”

Morley toured the house with Mrs. William Owens, who owned it, lived in it, and let rooms to boarders. He says, “Until very recent years an old lady was living, a neighbor of Mrs. Owens, who remembered how Virginia Poe used to sit at the window and play her harp.” He says the house is “well and solidly built,” with the original door and bolt lock, “which Poe’s hand must have fastened many and many a time.” He goes briefly through the dining room, bedrooms, and cellar. He says, “Some of Poe’s finest work was done in this house, among other tales probably ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Gold Bug’ and ‘The Black Cat.’” Morley paints a domestic scene with “a big tortoise-shell puss called Catterina,” but “it was in this house that Virginia Poe broke a blood vessel while singing.” She probably had a lung hemorrhage.

Richard Gimbel, son of the founder of Gimbel’s Department Store, bought the North 7^th Street house in 1933. A fan of Poe, Gimbel refurbished it and opened it as a museum. About the same time, he saved the Baltimore house. The National Park Service now operates both sites.

Poe returned to New York, where he worked at the Evening Mirror and then the Broadway Journal. In January 1845, he published his poem “The Raven,” which brought him overnight fame but very little money. The Poes moved to a cottage in the Bronx, where Virginia died in 1847. Possibly built in 1797 or 1812, the house was moved a short distance in 1913. It was restored from 1922, vandalized several times in the 1970s, and protected by a live-in caretaker in the 1990s. Surrounded by a fence at a major intersection, it is open to the public today as a historic house museum.

The widower traveled to Lowell, Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island, and Richmond in search of a second wife. Jane Locke and Sarah Helen Whitman were New England poets. Elmira Royster in Richmond was an early love interest and well-to-do widow. Poe was a famous author but still poor. He stayed with his sister Rosalie in Richmond, gave lectures and readings, and planned to start a magazine called The Stylus. He died in Baltimore in 1849 under mysterious circumstances.

In 1909, the centennial of his birth, some Richmond fans resolved to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe. At this time the Old Stone House, built about 1740 and thought to be the oldest in the city, was vacant and threatened with demolition. Located in Shockoe Bottom, the house is near sites associated with Poe, but he never lived in it. The Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities bought it in 1911. Restored, it opened in 1922 as the Poe Shrine.

Known today as the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, the house is filled with furniture and objects used by Poe and his relatives, daguerreotypes and old photographs, manuscripts and early editions of his books, his walking stick, and a lock of his hair. Also displayed is a site model made in 1927 of Richmond in the early 1800s.

The American writer lives in a cabin in the woods, a picturesque manse, a farmhouse, or a seaside cottage. She may inherit a substantial house in town, as Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty do. The writer who has money may spend it on a residence worthy of their talent, as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Edith Warton do. The writer may live in a boardinghouse or be homeless, as Edgar Allan Poe often is. The house is a potent marker of wealth, social status, and personal taste. Who knows this fact better than a writer?

Prominent in town or hidden in the country, the writer’s house stands for the act of writing, the mystery of artistic achievement. Some writers have a gift for describing places and scenes. Some create memorable characters, some wring tears from a dry text, and some shine a light on social injustice. The ability to construct is different, yet beautiful in its way, and essential for a piece of literature to endure. The work of arranging sentences and paragraphs, marshalling characters, tracking a timeline of events, and creating a narrative shape: all this is the process of design. In his 1847 essay “Tale Writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Poe uses this word:

A skillful artist … having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events … In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.

The writer’s house is a cultural landmark, a shrine to his or her memory, a pilgrimage site, and a tourist destination. The Ideals Guide to Literary Places in the U. S., by Michelle Prater Burke, published in 1998, lists fifty-four houses of beloved American writers, grouped by region. In addition to the writers mentioned above, you will find Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Each house has a page or two of text, color photographs, a map of the area, days when the house is open, and so forth. Can a literary tourist ask for more?

Family or devout readers create a shrine after the writer dies. Behind a velvet rope, set apart from the profane, a desk or writing table is carefully preserved or recreated, with a lamp, a chair, and if possible, an authentic page of manuscript, as though the writer had just stepped away. The window through which the writer gazed from time to time is often a feature, like the stained glass of a religious shrine. A portrait of the writer – a photograph, painting, or carved bust – hovers nearby like the image of a saint.

Visitors observe a reverent silence. They invite us to compare the religion of literature to a religion of the book, such as Judaism. The comparison would please the departed writer.