by Jim Bernhard
Raised by a prosperous foster family named Allan, who gave him his middle name, he lived in Richmond, Virginia, then briefly in Britain. After returning to Virginia with the Allans, he enrolled in the University of Virginia to study languages, but lasted there only one year, withdrawing to try his luck as a writer and odd-job worker in Boston. He enlisted in the Army, rose to the rank of sergeant major, and then secured an early discharge to enroll in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Meanwhile, he had published his first book of poetry, including the ill-received “Tamerlane.” Disinherited after quarrelling with his foster father, Poe purposely contrived his expulsion from West Point and published another volume of poetry.
He worked in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, in various writing and editorial jobs, and when he was twenty-seven, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Virginia developed tuberculosis, lingered with it for several years, and died of it when she was twenty-four.
Poe continued to publish gothic poems, literary criticism, and fiction replete with murder, mayhem, and supernatural happenings. “The Raven,” with its haunting line, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’”—a poem for which Poe was paid only ten dollars—made him famous as an erratic literary figure. While popular with the public, he was never well compensated for his work, and he never won the esteem of the literary establishment—Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the jingle man.” In addition to “The Raven,” his most famous poems include “Annabel Lee” (“It was many and many a year ago/In a kingdom by the sea”), “The Bells,” “The City in the Sea,” “Eldorado,” “To Helen” (“To the glory that was Greece/And the grandeur that was Rome”), and “Ulalume.” Among his macabre stories were “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
Although reputedly a drunkard and a drug addict (thanks to a malicious biography by a grudge-bearing rival named Rufus Griswold), there is little evidence that Poe used drugs, other than medicinal opiates that were common as pain-relievers, and his consumption of alcohol was fairly moderate, except for occasional binges.
Although depictions of death permeate his work, Poe apparently devoted little thought to an afterlife. Baptized and raised an Episcopalian and married by a Presbyterian minister, Poe was a knowledgeable student of the Bible and a card-playing crony of the Jesuit priests at St. John’s College in the Bronx (“they smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen and never mentioned religion”). His own religious views, however, were hard to pin down, although he provides some hints about them in Eureka, an abstruse prose-poem subtitled “Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe.” He enigmatically writes:
No thinking being exists who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing that anything exists greater than his own soul. . . . each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator . . . God—the material and spiritual God—now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and . . . the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the reconstitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God. . . . [M]yriads of individual Intelligences [will] become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One . . . the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—. . . Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.
Poe’s bizarre death is the subject of great controversy. On September 27, 1849, having proposed to Sarah Royster Shelton, his widowed childhood sweetheart, and having set an October wedding date, Poe boarded a steamer from Richmond to Baltimore, where he intended to take a train to New York to conduct some business. On Wednesday afternoon, October 3, he was found, dazed and delirious, with “lusterless and vacant eyes,” outside a polling place in Baltimore, wearing a rumpled, stained, ill-fitting bombazine suit, worn-down shoes, and an old straw hat—clearly not his own clothes.
He was taken to Washington Medical College Hospital, where he remained in a room with barred windows in an area reserved for drunkards. Semi-comatose for four days, under the care of Dr. John J. Moran, Poe was never lucid enough to account for his lost six days. Moran reported that Poe frequently called out the name “Reynolds,” but no one knew what he meant. At five o’clock on the morning of October 7, after murmuring, “It’s all over . . . write ‘Eddie is no more,’” and “Lord, help my poor soul,” Poe died at the age of forty.
The precise cause of death remains a mystery. No medical records exist. Obituaries mentioned “congestion of the brain” and “cerebral inflammation.” Subsequent speculation has pointed to delirium tremens, epilepsy, encephalitis, syphilis, cholera, influenza, diabetes, apoplexy, rabies, lead or mercury poisoning, hypoglycemia, drug overdose, and suicide. One theory is that Poe was fatally beaten by political thugs after being coerced into a vote-rigging scheme, in which he was drugged and forced to cast fraudulent votes at multiple polling places.
Poe’s funeral was at four o’clock in the afternoon on a cold and gloomy Monday, October 8, at Baltimore’s Westminster Hall and Burying Ground. In attendance were a handful of friends, including college classmate Zaccheus Collins Lee, first cousin Elizabeth Herring and her husband, and former schoolmaster Joseph Clarke. The officiant was the Reverend W. T. D. Clemm, a Methodist minister and cousin of Poe’s late wife, who did not bother with a sermon because there were so few people present. Poe’s uncle, Henry Herring, provided a cheaply made mahogany coffin that had no handles, no nameplate, no lining, and no cushion for his head. The graveside service lasted three minutes, and Poe was laid to rest beneath a marker that read simply “No. 80.”
His old nemesis, Griswold, wrote a mean-spirited obituary in the New-York Daily Tribune, averring that Poe’s death “will startle many, but few will be grieved by it” inasmuch as he had “few or no friends.”
Poe was given a new burial and monument in 1875, in a ceremony attended by Walt Whitman, with a poetic tribute sent by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which read:
Fate that once denied him,
And envy that once decried him,
And malice that belied him,
Now cenotaph his fame.
Every year from the 1930s until 2009, in the early morning hours of January 19, Poe’s birthday, a mysterious figure dressed in black was observed at the original site of Poe’s grave. Known as the “Poe Toaster,” the figure would drink a glass of cognac and leave three red roses and the unfinished Martell cognac bottle on the stone marker.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
England’s Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death in 1892—the longest term ever served—Alfred Tennyson achieved fame, wealth, and even a peerage with his poetry. Born August 6, 1809, in Somersby, Lincolnshire, to an Anglican vicar who suffered from depression and alcoholism, and his wife, whose father was also a vicar, Alfred was the fourth of twelve children. He was taught classics by his father, then attended King Edward VI Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His father’s death forced him to leave the university without a degree, and he returned to live with his mother, two brothers, and a sister, who stayed on in the Lincolnshire vicarage as guests of his father’s successor. After six years, to their great distress, the Tennysons were turned out of the vicarage and went to live in High Beach, a tiny hamlet in Epping Forest.
During this period, Tennyson published several volumes of verse, including The Lady of Shalott. He became engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Emily Sellwood, but they were unable to marry until Tennyson’s financial fortunes improved ten years later. Tennyson was deeply grieved by the death of his close friend (and his sister’s fiancé), Arthur Hallam, an event that inspired Tennyson’s most profound statement about life and death, In Memoriam A. H. H.
As Poet Laureate, Tenn
yson enjoyed such success that by the 1850s, he was earning the equivalent of more than a million dollars a year—enabling him to buy a country home in Surrey and a retreat on the Isle of Wight. He maintained friendships with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, and Prime Minister William Gladstone, who conferred a baronetcy on him.
Tennyson’s most famous works include “Locksley Hall,” “The Idylls of the King,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Maud,” “Tiresias,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Enoch Arden,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” His poems are the source of many phrases in common use today, such as, “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure,” and “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Although his poetry often seems to embody orthodox Christian theology, Tennyson himself was harder to pin down in his beliefs. Toward the end of his life, he categorized himself variously as an agnostic, a pantheist, and a follower of the free-thinking philosophies of both Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza. In In Memoriam A. H. H., Tennyson wants to believe in a life hereafter:
Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace
Believing where we cannot prove;
Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.
But Tennyson was bothered by doubts, which he tried to transform into belief:
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
No matter how much he struggled with faith, he kept his hope that life would continue after death, as expressed in the famous lines from “Crossing the Bar”:
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
In September of 1892, at Aldworth, his country home in Surrey, Tennyson came down with severe bronchitis that developed into influenza. He became pale and weak, and though his condition worsened, his mind remained lucid until the end. On the night of October 6, a few hours before his death, he was reading Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. With the volume clasped in his hands, and with the moonlight bathing his face in what an attendant described as “an unearthly majestic beauty,” Lord Tennyson crossed the bar at the age of eighty-three.
He was buried with much pomp six days later in Westminster Abbey, in a funeral attended by thousands of mourners and bedecked with flowers, including a wreath from Queen Victoria. Music included a choral version of “Crossing the Bar,” set to music by the Abbey organist, and “The Silent Voices,” Tennyson’s last poem, which had been set to music by his wife. Other musical offerings were the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” and Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul. The officiant was Tennyson’s friend, the Reverend George Granville Bradley, the dean of the Abbey. Tennyson was laid to rest between John Dryden and Robert Browning.
MARGARET FULLER
Margaret Fuller’s life was filled with feminist firsts. The Betty Friedan of her day, she was the first American to write a book about women’s equality, the first editor of the Transcendental journal The Dial, the first woman journalist on Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, the first fulltime female book reviewer, and the first woman war correspondent.
She was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, to Timothy Fuller, a lawyer who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and his wife, Margaret. Her father began a rigorous education for her, and by age eight she was reading Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, and by age ten she was translating Cicero’s works. Short and plump, with a spinal curvature, acne scars, and a myopic squint, Margaret attended several schools in the Boston area and made plans for a literary career. Her father’s death when she was twenty-five forced her to take up teaching to help support the family.
She met Ralph Waldo Emerson and was accepted into the Transcendentalist circle. Her acquaintances included Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She began a series of “Conversations” for women intellectuals that established her as a leader in the Transcendental movement. She wrote books, contributed literary criticism and translations to various journals, and became known as “the best read person in New England.”
Fuller was indirectly involved in a messy scandal involving Edgar Allan Poe, who was romantically linked to a married woman, also a poet and a friend of Fuller’s. She asked Fuller to visit Poe to retrieve some letters she had written to him. A furious Poe dismissed Fuller as a “busybody.”
The New-York Daily Tribune sent Fuller to Europe as a foreign correspondent in 1846. During her travels, she met George Sand, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, William Wordsworth, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. She also met and ultimately married the Italian Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a revolutionary supporter, with whom she had a son, named Angelo. As the Tribune’s war correspondent, she covered the Italian revolution of 1848–1849 from the battlefronts and began to write a book-length history of Italy.
After the revolutionaries were defeated, she decided to return to the United States, hoping to secure publication of her book. With Ossoli and two-year-old Angelo, she set sail for New York on May 17, 1850, on the American merchant freighter Elizabeth. While at sea, the captain died of smallpox, and the ship’s command was taken over by the inexperienced first mate. On July 19, at 3:30 a.m., less than a hundred yards from Fire Island, New York, the ship slammed into a sandbar. Badly damaged, it took twelve hours to sink, as onlookers waded out to scavenge the cargo that floated ashore, but neglected to render aid to the stranded passengers. Some survived by swimming to shore—but not Margaret and her family. Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” gives this account of Fuller’s final hours in her 1883 biography:
The commanding officer made one last appeal to Margaret before leaving his post. To stay, he told her, was certain and speedy death, as the ship must soon break up. He promised to take her child with him. . . . Margaret still refused to be parted from child or husband. The crew were then told to “save themselves,” and all but four jumped overboard. The commander and several of the seamen reached the shore in safety, though not without wounds and bruises.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the breaking-up was well in progress. Cabin and stern disappeared beneath the waves, and the forecastle filled with water. The little group now took refuge on the deck, and stood about the foremast. The deck now parted from the hull, and rose and fell with the sweep of the waves. The final crash must come in a few minutes. The steward now took Angelo in his arms, promising to save him or die. At this very moment the foremast fell, and with it disappeared the deck and those who stood on it. The steward and the child were washed ashore soon after, dead, though not yet cold. . . . Margaret, last seen at the foot of the mast, in her white nightdress, with her long hair hanging about her shoulders, is thought to have sunk at once. Two others, cook and carpenter, were able to save themselves by swimming, and might, alas! have saved her, had she been minded to make the attempt.
What strain of the heroic in her mind overcame the natural instinct to do and dare all upon the chance of saving her own life, and those so dear to her, we shall never know. No doubt the separation involved in any such attempt appeared to her an
abandonment of her husband and child.
Resting in this idea, she could more easily nerve herself to perish with them than to part from them. She and the babe were feeble creatures to be thrown upon the mercy of the waves, even with the promised aid. Her husband, young and strong, was faithful unto death, and would not leave her. Both of them, with fervent belief, regarded death as the entrance to another life, and surely, upon its very threshold, sought to do their best.
Although her body was never recovered, Fuller undoubtedly perished in the sea, at the age of forty. The manuscript of her Italian history was also lost. Through Howe’s efforts, a memorial to Fuller was erected on the beach at Fire Island in 1901. In Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a cenotaph, under which Angelo is buried, with an inscription in tribute to Fuller:
By birth a child of New England
By adoption a citizen of Rome
By genius belonging to the world.
CHARLES DICKENS
A literary star in both England and America, wealthy from his writings and his lectures, Charles Dickens began life in bleak poverty, as poor as Little Dorrit. He was born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children, to John Dickens, a Cratchit-esque clerk and his wife, Elizabeth. When Charles was ten, the family moved to Camden Town, then an impoverished section of London, and two years later, Charles’s father was in debtors’ prison. Forced to leave school, Charles worked as a bootblack in a rat-infested factory. An inheritance gave the family a brief respite from poverty, and Charles started school again—only to be forced to quit once more and go to work as an office boy when he was fifteen.
He began to freelance as a reporter in the law courts and to submit sketches to various papers under the pen name “Boz,” a nonsensical childhood nickname for his brother. He married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of a music critic and newspaper editor, and they had ten children before separating permanently after twenty-two years of marriage. Their separation followed Dickens’s infatuation with an eighteen-year-old actress named Ellen Ternan, with whom he began a lifelong affair.