The Man of the Crowd by Michelle Van Parys

Author:Michelle Van Parys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the stability and renown that came from his work at Graham’s, Poe left the magazine in the spring of 1842, perhaps a few weeks after his meeting with Dickens. He had held the job for just over a year, approximately the same duration as his employment with the Messenger and Burton’s. But this separation seems to have been far more amicable than his breaks with White and Burton, and the evidence suggests that Poe, not Graham, instigated it.52 Poe had certainly contributed to the magazine’s impressive growth—having started with a circulation of 5,500 less than two years earlier, Graham boasted of printing 40,000 copies in March 1842, just months before Poe’s departure—but it was Graham who was getting rich from the enterprise, while Poe’s dream of his own magazine was repeatedly deferred.53 He told Frederick Thomas in May 1842, “My reason for resigning was disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine—a character which it was impossible to eradicate—I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales. The salary, moreover, did not pay me for the labor which I was forced to bestow. With Graham who is really a very gentlemanly, although an exceedingly weak man, I had no misunderstanding” (L 1:333).

Though he did continue to sell stories, to Graham and others, at a steady pace, Poe could not replace even the modest income he derived from editing Graham’s. His earnings for the remainder of his time in Philadelphia would place him below the poverty line. Meanwhile, his successor at the magazine, Rufus W. Griswold, would receive a thousand-dollar salary, two hundred dollars more than Poe’s. Griswold, a twenty-seven-year-old editor who had recently worked for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, would soon become known as a leading anthologist of American writing. The year before joining Graham’s, Griswold had edited The Poets and Poetry of America, which included three poems by Poe—a rather slight representation. According to Poe, Griswold bribed him to write a positive review of the book; perhaps as revenge for his underrepresentation, Poe delivered a less-than-bribe-worthy product, complimenting but also insulting the volume’s editor. It marked the beginning of a rivalry, sometimes masked in friendship, that would continue, infamously, even after Poe’s death.

Poe’s decision to leave Graham’s followed closely upon a harrowing development in his personal life: Virginia had contracted tuberculosis. One evening in early 1842, while singing at home, she began coughing up blood. Virginia was only nineteen years old; with this incident, she went from a prolonged childhood, petted and protected by Edgar and Muddy, to a condition in which she would again be treated much like a child. The best evidence that she and Edgar enjoyed some brief period of mature romantic love between those phases comes from a story he wrote in 1841, when Virginia still appeared healthy. “Eleonora” presents a fairy-tale version of Poe’s household: the narrator, named Pyrros in the first version, his cousin Eleonora, and her mother form a world unto themselves in a “Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.

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