Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

by John Evangelist Walsh

Overview

While traveling alone from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, Poe disappeared for nearly a week. When seen again he was terribly drunk and nearly dead in Baltimore. In the hospital, four days later, after periods of raving delirium, he died. The immediate cause of death given was "congestion of the brain." At first no one seriously doubted that Poe died from drunken debauchery. However, Poe adherents suggested many theories of a physical nature about precipitating causes but no one has seroiusly probed the mystery of the missing week . . . until now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312227326
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/05/2000
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	180
Sales rank:	536,724
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

John Evangelist Walsh is the author of more than a dozen books of history and biography, includingDarkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Enter Poe

    It's broad, many-windowed facade topped by a large, square cupola from which flew a huge American flag, the recently completed American Hotel loomed grandly over Richmond's busy Main Street. An eye cast up and down the extensive, gently sloping thoroughfare would judge the American to be easily the most prominent building in sight.

    On an oppressively hot morning in mid-July 1849 one of the city's regular horse-drawn omnibuses pulled to a stop before the American's front entrance, unexpectedly modest for so imposing a structure. As the compact little vehicle halted at the curb, its narrow rear door popped open and through it appeared a slightly built man, somber-faced and moving rather stiffly. Clutching a valise in one hand, he stepped down to the pavement, hurried up the stone steps, and entered the hotel lobby. At the desk he signed the register, then accepted a key and climbed wearily up the stairs to his room.

    Edgar Allan Poe, aged forty, and feeling a good deal under the weather, had arrived on stage for the final act of his often hectic personal drama. But of that sad fact he had no inkling. Despite a head still throbbing from a recent overindulgence, he had definite plans for the future.

    Earlier that morning, after a journey of some thirty hours by train and steamboat, he had reached Richmond from Philadelphia, where he stopped over on his way south from his home in New York. The latter part of the journey had not been pleasant, for he was still feeling the effects of another of his prolonged drinking bouts, this one in the Quaker City, and in fact the worst yet. So extreme had been his intoxication in Philadelphia, where he lingered for two weeks, that he'd experienced his first full-blown fit of delirium tremens, complete with visions.

    Taken briefly into police custody, he had escaped a formal charge, and jail time, through the accident of his being recognized by the judge. Only with the sympathetic help of some friends, including the gift of some cash to replace what he'd thrown away on liquor, had he been able to pull himself together sufficiently to continue his planned trip to the Virginia capital.

    Secure at last in the quiet of his room at the American, he gratefully passed the remainder of the day resting, while duly applying whatever remedies and restoratives he'd come to depend on in these emergencies. Before approaching any of his friends in the city or getting in touch with those who were expecting him, he'd need time to bounce back. Miserable as he was in mind and body, his clothes also needing repair, he knew from experience with his previous sprees that a full recovery would be slow, requiring two or three whole days. He was not a man who held his liquor well.

    Then, that same evening, real trouble showed up, posing a threat to his entire purpose in coming south. Taking his valise, he opened it and reached in for the manuscripts of two lectures he'd written especially for this trip. Rummaging through the folded clothes, collars, and personal items, he was alarmed to find that neither of the two manuscripts was in the bag. In Philadelphia the valise had reposed for days in storage at the railway station, and he now concluded that someone had opened the bag and stolen the lectures. Writing home later that evening in a mood of utter despair, he reported the shocking loss. "Think of the blow to me this evening," he lamented, "when on examining the valise, these lectures were gone. All my object here is over unless I can recover them or re-write one of them."

    The lecture tour, scheduled for several other cities after Richmond, was not in itself the object or purpose of his trip. It was only the means to an end, one of considerable importance to him. The lectures would, he hoped, be the means of introducing to literate audiences the news of his projected new magazine, The Stylus, long dreamed of as taking rank with the leading American journals. Before any of the work on the magazine could be set in motion, editorial or otherwise, a list of one thousand firmly committed subscribers must be on hand, ensuring at least the cost of paper and printing for the first issue. That was the agreement he'd made with his financial backer, and if everything went as expected the plan was to have that first issue in the hands of readers by year's end or at least by January. It was a target date, as all those concerned in the risky venture were well aware, leaving precious little margin for delay.

    At that moment in his room at the American, as the sounds of the darkening city drifted in with the suffocating heat through the open windows, the usually buoyant Poe had reached a very low ebb. "My clothes are so horrible," he added in a burst of remorse and yearning for sympathy as he concluded his letter, "and I am so ill."

    Not really ill. That was just the way he and his family had learned to disguise the truth about his periodic binging, and the terrible debility that followed. But this time it was as much plain fear, desperate fear of another failure, that made him ill and made his clothes, wrinkled and stained as they may have been from his Philadelphia binge, appear so disgusting.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Case Reopened * Enter Poe * Enter the Widow * "We Regret to Learn..." * Witness Time * Five Lost Days * The Sartain Interval * What Mrs. Smith Knew * Suddenly a Tapping * Epilogue: Exit the Widow * Appendix: The Letters of Elmira Shelton * Notes and Sources

Editorial Reviews

A ripping, gripping investigation...an utterly engaging and original work of detection.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An engrossing account of what remains a strange and puzzling episode in America's literary history.” —Parade

From the Publisher

The circumstances leading to Poe's death in Baltimore, in October 1849, remain a mystery befitting the father of the modern detective story. Walsh, the author of several literary biographies and winner of the 1969 Edgar Award for Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind the Mystery of Marie Roget, takes up the case with a zeal that his subject would have admired. Did Poe drink himself to death, as is widely believed? Or was he the naive victim of unknown--or known--thugs? Adopting a flavorful but unobtrusive 19th-century style ("In that situation, surely, there resides a macabre rightness"), Walsh begins the tale with Poe in Richmond that July, courting his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Shelton, by then a wealthy widow. Poe swore off alcohol, set a date for the wedding and went north to Philadelphia and New York, his future looking serene. But after a gap of five days, Poe was found drunk and in borrowed clothes in a Baltimore saloon, and he died in a hospital three days later. Walsh, a patient gumshoe, sifts through decades of acquaintances' contradictory explanations (including the "cooping" theory, which has Poe drugged by election-eve goons and forced to vote in eleven wards). Finally, with an eye to Poe's libertine reputation, Walsh presents his own solution to the puzzle in a romanticized but plausible re-creation of events. Will it settle the mystery once and for all? Probably not. But it will behoove future biographers to consider the hypotheses Walsh has laid over the curious blank of Poe's death. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A ripping, gripping investigation of the puzzling, much-debated circumstances surrounding the death of the great 19th-century writer, poet, and critic. It is all too fitting that Poe, the inventor of the detective story, should have met with an uncommon death. He was traveling from Richmond, Va., to New York when he disappeared for almost a week, turning up at last in Baltimore, blind drunk and near death. Taken to the hospital, he died a few days later, never revealing where he'd been or what had occurred. There are several commonly accepted explanations for what really happened. One holds that Poe reverted to tippling from and went on a mammoth bender. But as Edgar-winning literary detective Walsh (for Poe the Detective, not reviewed) notes, Poe had just signed a temperance pledge in order to please his new fiancée—-and was traveling north to earn much-needed money. While he might not have honored the letter of his pledge, he was unlikely to fall so extravagantly off the wagon. The other, more regarded—-though more incredible—-explanation, cited by most biographers and even poet Harte Crane in "The Bridge," is that Poe was press-ganged or "cooped" by villainous ward-heelers, drugged, and taken from polling booth to polling both to vote multiple times in a congressional election. Walsh handily demolishes this hypothesis as well. His own account of what transpired is a clever weaving together of many disparate strands. Unlike the solution to Poe's "The Purloined Letter," the evidence here is not hidden in the open. With the little he has to work with, Walsh has to make a few assumptions, suppositions, contradictions of the records, even leaps of faith, but he isstill able to build a case that is both persuasive and literarily elegant. An utterly engaging and original work of detection. (17 b&w illustrations) .

Kirkus Reviews