A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak

Author:Mark Dawidziak [Dawidziak, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“RATHER THE WORSE FOR WEAR”

SEPTEMBER 27–OCTOBER 3, 1849

The days after Poe left Richmond on September 27, 1849, are completely shielded from our view. We have no reliable testimony establishing his whereabouts until the afternoon of Wednesday, October 3. If, indeed, he left Richmond on a steam packet, as it is generally assumed, he would have arrived in Baltimore on September 28. No one who made the trip with him came forward to describe his physical condition and emotional state on board. Not one person stepped forward after Poe’s death to recall a conversation or brief encounter at the steamer’s railing. Did he fall to drinking, reaching Baltimore in a dangerously weakened and inebriated state? The steamers had saloons by then, so alcohol would have been available during the trip.

“Even a very small amount of alcohol had a terrible impact on him, but there’s no evidence that he was drinking at that point,” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore secretary and treasurer Jeffrey A. Savoye said. “And it’s somewhat simplistic to jump to, well, he started drinking on the boat and he drank himself to death.”

He would have disembarked at Spear’s Wharf in Baltimore. Did he then walk about eight blocks or so to the station at President Street and catch a train to Philadelphia? He had planned to go there and edit the poems of Mrs. Marguerite St. Leon Loud. If he did make the trip, he didn’t make contact with the Louds, nor did he make any attempt to collect a badly needed one hundred dollars for his editorial assistance. Was he sick and feverish, as Elmira Royster Shelton had seen him the night before his departure? Was he already dying when he left Richmond? Or was Dr. Gibbon Carter’s dire warning a couple of months earlier all too accurate and another bout of drinking did prove fatal? It’s not that there’s too little evidence to support conjecture. It’s that there’s almost no evidence. Or as Poe scholar Steve Medeiros summarizes it, “The only thing we’re certain of is our uncertainty.”

Any eastern city with a seaport area would have had its rowdy and dangerous areas. Even allowing for that, Baltimore had picked up a particularly rough reputation in the 1830s and ’40s. It also had picked up a nickname—Mobtown.

“They would riot at the drop of a hat,” said Baltimore Poe scholar Jeff Jerome, and indeed, in addition to the 1835 riot, Baltimore erupted into violence in 1777, 1812, 1839, 1856, 1861, and 1877. “We took our riots very seriously back then, making the police hide, chasing the mayor out of town, burning down houses.”

He’s not exaggerating. Right before Poe left the Amity Street house for Richmond in 1835, the August 6–9 Baltimore bank riot claimed the homes of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. The unrest was sparked by the failure of the Bank of Maryland, which resulted in the loss of savings for thousands of depositors. Whipped into a fighting mood after months of accusations of fraud

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