Edgar Poe, murdered on election

October 3rd shenanigans

Poe’s life was short, unsettled, and more productive than the legend of the drunken wreck allows. The Baltimore episode is the last four days of it, and most of what people “know” about those days was written later, often by people with a story to sell.

Life

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809, the second child of travelling actors. His father, David Poe Jr., was from a Baltimore family and had already drifted away; his mother, the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, died of tuberculosis in Richmond on 8 December 1811. The children were split. The elder brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, went to the paternal grandparents in Baltimore and died young in 1831. The infant sister, Rosalie, was taken by the Mackenzie family in Richmond. Edgar, not quite three, was taken into the childless household of John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, and his wife Frances. He was never formally adopted. The middle name “Allan” was a claim, not a legal fact.

From 1815 to 1820 the Allans lived in Britain, and Edgar was schooled in London and Stoke Newington. Back in Richmond he was a capable student and a strong swimmer, already writing verse. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia, ran up gambling debts Allan refused to pay, and left after one term. He quarrelled with Allan, went to Boston, and in 1827 published Tamerlane and Other Poems anonymously, “by a Bostonian.” Poverty pushed him into the army under the name Edgar A. Perry. He rose to sergeant-major. Frances Allan’s death in 1829 brought a brief reconciliation; Allan bought his release and helped him into West Point in 1830. Allan remarried, the breach reopened, and Poe engineered his own court-martial in 1831 so he could leave.

He settled in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. A prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833 for “MS. Found in a Bottle” got him noticed. In 1835 he became assistant editor, then editor, of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where his slashing reviews raised the magazine’s circulation and made him enemies. On 16 May 1836, aged 27, he married Virginia Eliza Clemm, his first cousin, then 13. The ceremony was public and legal under Virginia law. Her mother kept house for them for the rest of his life. Biographers still disagree about how sexual the marriage was; the household was plainly devoted, and Poe’s letters treat Virginia as wife, companion, and the centre of the only stable home he ever had.

The pattern after that was editorial jobs, quarrels, and moves: New York in 1837, Philadelphia from 1838, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, then Graham’s Magazine, where circulation rose sharply under him. Virginia began coughing blood in January 1842. They moved to New York in 1844 and, from 1846, to a cottage at Fordham. She died of tuberculosis on 30 January 1847, aged 24. Poe’s collapse afterwards was real: illness, poverty, and drinking bouts between stretches of hard work. In 1848 he pursued the poet Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence; the engagement collapsed. In the summer of 1849 he was in Richmond, lecturing, trying to raise money for a magazine to be called The Stylus, and engaged again to his childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster Shelton, now a widow. He left Richmond on 27 September, apparently in good spirits, meaning to go via Baltimore and Philadelphia to New York, collect Maria Clemm, and return to marry.

What he actually did

The popular picture — opium fiend, perpetual drunk, failure — comes largely from Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the anthologist Poe had named as literary executor and who published a poisonous obituary and memoir. The working record is different.

He professionalised the American short story and the magazine review. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) fixed a model of tight, single-effect horror. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), followed by “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter,” invented the detective story: a closed puzzle, an amateur reasoner (C. Auguste Dupin), and a narrator who cannot quite keep up. “The Gold-Bug” was a prize-winning hit. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) is his only finished novel, a sea nightmare that later mattered to Melville and to French symbolists. Eureka (1848) is a cosmological prose-poem, half science, half metaphysics.

The poem that made him famous was “The Raven,” published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845. It did not make him rich — he was paid about nine dollars for the first printing — but it made him a name. “The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee” (written 1849, published after his death) belong to the same late lyric period. “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” are still read as craft arguments: a poem should be short enough to hold one effect, and beauty, not truth, is its province.

His influence outran his sales. Baudelaire’s translations made him a founder of French modernism. Doyle took Dupin as a starting point for Holmes. The locked-room story, the unreliable narrator, and the tale built to one shock are all partly his.

The last days

The six days between Richmond and the tavern are blank. No reliable sighting places him in Baltimore before 3 October.

That day was a Baltimore election. Joseph W. Walker, a printer, found him at Ryan’s Tavern, also called Gunner’s Hall, on Lombard Street, a Fourth Ward polling place. Walker’s note to Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor Poe knew, is the only contemporary document of the discovery: a gentleman “rather the worse for wear,” going by the name Edgar A. Poe, “in great distress,” and in need of immediate help. Snodgrass later upgraded this to “beastly intoxication.” Snodgrass was a temperance man, and the upgrade matters.

What both Snodgrass and the attending doctor, John J. Moran, agree on is the appearance. Poe was in clothes that were not his and did not fit: a stained, faded old coat of bombazine, similar trousers, a dirty shirt, no waistcoat, down-at-heel shoes, an old straw hat. He was usually careful, almost dandyish, about dress. He was semi-conscious, haggard, and unable to say where he had been.

Snodgrass and Poe’s uncle by marriage, Henry Herring, took him to Washington College Hospital (also called the Baltimore City and Marine Hospital). He had no visitors who could get an account from him. Moran’s later retellings grew more theatrical with each decade, so the November 1849 letter to Maria Clemm is worth more than the 1885 memoir. The stable points are these: he was restless and sweating, lucid in short bursts, then delirious; he spoke to figures on the walls; in one interval he said the best thing a friend could do was to blow his brains out; through the last night he called repeatedly for “Reynolds,” a name never identified (a Baltimore judge, a polar explorer, and a newspaper editor have all been guessed). He died about five in the morning on Sunday 7 October. He was 40. The Reverend W. T. D. Clemm, a cousin of Virginia, read the funeral. He was buried in his grandfather David Poe’s lot at Westminster Burying Ground. The stone there now was paid for later; the body was moved to the front of the churchyard in 1875.

There was no autopsy. No death certificate survives. Newspapers said “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation,” phrases that covered everything from stroke to a death the paper did not want to call drunkenness. Moran at one time cited delirium tremens and later denied any smell of liquor.

What can be said about the cause

The theories are not equally good.

Alcohol is the least exotic and the best supported. Poe’s intolerance was notorious — a small amount could floor him — and the pattern of binge and collapse is documented across the 1840s. David Gaylin, of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, argues the hospital course fits delirium tremens, withdrawal after a prolonged bout, better than simple intoxication. That still does not explain the missing days or the clothes.

Cooping was real in Baltimore. Gangs seized men, held them in a “coop,” dosed them, changed their clothes, and walked them round the polls to vote repeatedly. The wrong clothes, the polling-place tavern, and the election are why the theory has lasted since the 1870s, when William Hand Browne told a biographer it was the local belief. It explains the wardrobe better than it explains the death. A man as recognisable as Poe was an awkward tool for a repeating-voter fraud, and cooping would be a circumstance, not a diagnosis.

Rabies was proposed in 1996 by the cardiologist R. Michael Benitez, from the alternating delirium, agitation, and apparent trouble drinking water. It is medically neat and historically thin: no bite, no known exposure, and the hydrophobia detail depends on Moran.

Other nominations — brain tumour, diabetes, heart failure, syphilis, cholera (he thought he had had it in Philadelphia earlier in 1849), murder arranged by Elmira Shelton’s brothers — each grab one symptom and ignore the rest. Suicide is sometimes inferred from the remark to Moran; it is not evidence of a plan, and he did not die by his own hand in the hospital.

The honest summary is two gaps, not one. Nobody knows where he was from 28 September to 3 October. Nobody knows the disease that killed him, because nobody examined the body and the witnesses disagreed. The Gothic biography wrote itself into that silence. The man who invented the detective story left a case with no reliable witness to the crime, if there was a crime at all.

These are further 3 October entries. One of them, Bloomingdale’s opening, is usually dated April rather than October.

1835 — Staedtler founded in Nuremberg Johann Sebastian Staedtler opened a pencil factory in Nuremberg on 3 October 1835, after the city council licensed him to make black-lead, red-chalk and pastel pencils. The year before, he had worked out a wood-cased coloured pencil that could be sharpened to a point like graphite. The family trade was already old: Friedrich Staedtler is recorded as a pencil-maker in the city books in 1662. By 1866 the works employed 54 people and turned out about 2.16 million pencils a year. The Mars head logo came later, in 1908; Noris and Lumocolor followed in the twentieth century. The firm is still based in Nuremberg.

1849 — Edgar Allan Poe found in Baltimore On 3 October 1849, election day, printer Joseph W. Walker found Poe delirious outside Ryan’s Tavern (also called Gunner’s Hall) on Lombard Street, a tavern used as a Fourth Ward polling place. Poe was in shabby clothes that did not fit him — a stained old coat, worn shoes, a straw hat — and asked for magazine editor Joseph E. Snodgrass. The “gutter” detail is a later flourish; Walker’s note says only that he was “rather the worse for wear” and “in great distress.” Snodgrass and Poe’s uncle took him to Washington College Hospital. He drifted in and out of delirium, calling for someone named Reynolds, and died early on 7 October, aged 40. He had last been seen leaving Richmond on 27 September, apparently well, bound for Philadelphia and New York. Alcohol, cooping (election-day kidnapping of voters), rabies, and a brain lesion have all been proposed; none is settled.

1863 — Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation On 3 October 1863 Lincoln invited Americans “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next” as a day of thanksgiving — 26 November 1863. The text was drafted by Secretary of State William Seward, after years of lobbying by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Washington had proclaimed occasional days of thanksgiving; Lincoln’s was the first to fix a recurring national date. Later presidents kept the last Thursday through 1865 (30 November) and 1866 (29 November) and on until 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt shifted it earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. Congress settled the fourth Thursday in 1941.

1872 — Bloomingdale’s first store (date is disputed) Lyman and Joseph Bloomingdale did open “Bloomingdale’s Great East Side Bazaar” at 938 Third Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets. Company timelines and a later bronze plaque put the opening on 17 April 1872, not 3 October; first-day sales are said to have been $3.68. Lyman and his wife lived above the shop. The brothers had sold hoop skirts on the Lower East Side from 1861. The store moved a few doors south in 1877 and, in 1886, to the 59th Street and Third Avenue site that grew into the flagship. The 3 October date appears on some “on this day” lists and looks like a calendar error.

1873 — Captain Jack and three others hanged Kintpuash, known to settlers as Captain Jack, led a Modoc band that left the Klamath reservation and held the lava beds of northern California through the winter of 1872–73. On 11 April 1873, during a truce, he shot Brigadier General Edward Canby; others killed the Reverend Eleazer Thomas. Canby was the only regular U.S. general killed in the Indian wars. After the band split, Captain Jack surrendered on 1 June. On 3 October, at Fort Klamath, he was hanged with Schonchin John, Black Jim and Boston Charley. Nearly 2,000 people watched; the remaining Modoc were required to attend. President Grant commuted the sentences of Barncho and Slolux, who went to Alcatraz. Twelve days later, 163 Modoc were sent as prisoners to the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory.

These are the October 3 entries that usually sit together on “this day in history” lists: a Korean foundation myth, two Roman turning points, a late-imperial foedus, a grim English conquest, a Nasrid succession, a Dutch relief, and the Qing absorption of Taiwan.

2457 BC — Gaecheonjeol (“the day Heaven opened”)
The name means the day the sky opened. In the Dangun founding myth, Hwanung, son of the heavenly lord Hwanin, came down to Mount Taebaek with three thousand followers to live among humans and “widely benefit mankind.” A bear and a tiger asked to become human; only the bear endured the cave ordeal of mugwort and garlic and became a woman, later the mother of Dangun. Dangun is then said to have founded Gojoseon in 2333 BC. Modern South Korea keeps 3 October as National Foundation Day, a public holiday that commemorates the myth rather than a datable state. The year 2457 BC is traditional, not archaeological.

52 BC — Vercingetorix surrenders at Alesia
After uniting much of Gaul against Julius Caesar, Vercingetorix was bottled up in the hill-fort of Alesia. Caesar built a double ring of siege works: one facing inward to starve the garrison, one facing outward against a huge Gallic relief army. When the relief force broke, Vercingetorix offered himself so his people might live. Ancient lists put the surrender on 3 October; most modern accounts place the last fighting in late September. He was paraded in Caesar’s triumph in 46 BC and then executed. The campaign ended effective Gallic independence.

42 BC — First Battle of Philippi
Two years after Caesar’s murder, the Second Triumvirate (Mark Antony and Octavian) met the “Liberators” Brutus and Cassius near Philippi in Macedonia. On 3 October Antony smashed Cassius’s camp; Cassius, thinking the whole battle lost, killed himself. On the other wing Brutus overran Octavian’s camp. The day was a bloody draw. Three weeks later, on 23 October, Brutus was beaten and also took his own life. The Republic’s last serious army was gone.

382 — Theodosius I’s treaty with the Goths
After the disaster at Adrianople (378) and years of raiding in the Balkans, Emperor Theodosius settled the Goths inside the empire, mainly in Thrace and Moesia, as farmers who owed military service. The foedus of 3 October 382 ended the Gothic War of 376–382. It bought quiet in Theodosius’s lifetime and Gothic troops for his later civil wars; after his death in 395 it became the framework Alaric would break.

1283 — Dafydd ap Gruffydd executed at Shrewsbury
Younger brother of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Dafydd was the last native Prince of Wales to hold out against Edward I. Captured in June 1283, he was condemned for high treason and on 3 October became the first prominent noble known to have been hanged, drawn and quartered: dragged through Shrewsbury, hanged, revived, disembowelled, then quartered. His head went to London; the limbs were sent to English cities. Independent Gwynedd ended with him.

1392 — Muhammad VII becomes sultan of Granada
On 3 October 1392 Yusuf II of the Nasrid Emirate of Granada died. His younger son Muhammad VII, about fifteen, took the throne and locked his elder brother Yusuf (later Yusuf III) in Salobreña. He ruled until 1408, mixing truces with Castile and opportunistic raids, until war flared again under Ferdinand of Antequera. Granada would last another century, but the pattern of succession crisis and frontier war was already set.

1574 — Relief of Leiden
In the Dutch Revolt, Spanish troops had starved Leiden through a second siege. William of Orange ordered the dykes cut. A storm on the night of 2 October flooded the Spanish camps; the Watergeuzen (“Sea Beggars”) sailed in on 3 October with herring and white bread. Leiden still marks 3 October as a civic holiday: hutspot, herring, and a parade. The university was founded the next year as the city’s reward.

1683 — Shi Lang receives Taiwan’s surrender
After crushing the Zheng fleet at Penghu in July, Qing admiral Shi Lang reached Taiwan on 3 October and took the formal surrender of Zheng Keshuang, teenage king of the Ming-loyal Kingdom of Tungning, and admiral Liu Guoxuan. The Zhengs shaved their heads in the Manchu style. Taiwan became a prefecture of Fujian in 1684. Shi Lang, once a Zheng officer whose family the Zhengs had killed, had waited decades for that landing.

Taken together, the day runs from a founding story to the closing of two islands’ independence, with Rome’s last republican army and Gaul’s last general in between.

TV, after a powerful century, is fading. 

2 October 1925 is the private breakthrough, not the public unveiling. In an attic workshop at 22 Frith Street, Soho, John Logie Baird got a moving picture with real light and shade — not a silhouette — of a ventriloquist’s dummy, then of a living face. That is what “first test of a working television system” usually means.

Baird was 37, Scottish, chronically ill, and already known as a slightly alarming inventor. After a workshop explosion in Hastings he had been evicted and moved to London. His machine was mechanical: a spinning Nipkow disc with a spiral of holes or lenses scanned the subject line by line; a photocell turned the light into an electrical signal; a second disc and a neon lamp rebuilt the picture at the other end. Early cells were so insensitive that a human face was a pale blob. He therefore used a dummy with a painted, high-contrast face. He called it Stooky Bill (Scots stookie: plaster). The lamps were so hot they scorched Bill’s hair and cracked the paint. No person could have sat in that heat for long.

On Friday 2 October the dummy’s face suddenly appeared with greyscale — “proper tones and detail,” not black-and-white outlines. Sources give a 30-line (sometimes 32-line) vertically scanned image at about five pictures a second. Baird ran downstairs, grabbed the office boy from the floor below, William Edward Taynton, aged 20, paid him half a crown, and put him in front of the scanner. Taynton later said the heat was unbearable and that Baird shouted to hang on a few seconds more. Then Baird came round from the receiver: he had seen him. Taynton looked down a viewing tunnel at a picture a couple of inches across — crude, lined, moving. He was the first person televised in a full tonal range.

What this was not: the first public show. In March 1925 at Selfridges Baird had already shown moving silhouettes — letters, a waving hand — which he himself did not count as “true television.” The demonstration that made the papers was 26 January 1926, when members of the Royal Institution and a Times reporter saw Stooky Bill and a living speaker on a receiver in the same room and then in another. By then the frame rate was about 12.5 pictures a second. The Times called the image faint and often blurred, but granted the claim: movement and expression could be sent and seen at once.

Baird went to a newspaper the day of the October test. The editor treated him as a possible lunatic with a razor. Credibility had to wait for the Royal Institution visit. After that the firsts stacked up: colour transmission (1928), a transatlantic picture the same year, experimental BBC 30-line broadcasts from 1929. Electronic scanning (Zworykin, Farnsworth, EMI–Marconi) soon outran the spinning disc. Baird kept working on colour and large-screen systems until his death in 1946. The attic is now remembered as the site of Bar Italia.

The sequence that matters is simple. Spring 1925: shadows in a shop window. 2 October 1925: greyscale of a dummy, then of Taynton, across a room. 26 January 1926: the same principle shown to people who could not be dismissed as office boys. Television as a public fact begins in January. Television as a working machine begins with Stooky Bill on a Friday in October.

These ten items sit on the same hinge of the year: 2 October (with Edward IV’s flight spilling across 29 September–2 October). Taken together they are a map of succession, rebellion, holy cities, translation, and paper constitutions.

829 — Theophilos succeeds Michael II. Michael II the Stammerer, founder of the Amorian dynasty, died of kidney failure on 2 October. His son Theophilos, already co-emperor since 821, became sole ruler at about seventeen. He was the last emperor to prosecute official iconoclasm with real energy, rebuilt palaces and walls in Constantinople, and personally led campaigns against the Abbasids. The great disaster of his reign was the sack of his hometown Amorion in 838. He died of dysentery in 842; his widow Theodora ended iconoclasm as regent for Michael III.

939 — Battle of Andernach. Otto I was still a young king when Duke Eberhard of Franconia and Duke Giselbert of Lotharingia rose against him, with Otto’s own brother Henry in the plot. After Otto’s earlier stand at Birten, a smaller royal force under the Conradines Udo and Konrad Kurzbold caught the rebel dukes crossing the Rhine at Andernach. Eberhard was cut down; Giselbert drowned trying to swim. The rebellion collapsed. Otto kept Franconia under the crown and later bound the duchies more tightly to the king — a step on the road from East Francia toward a German kingdom.

1187 — Saladin takes Jerusalem. After Hattin in July, the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was gone. Saladin arrived before the walls on 20 September. Balian of Ibelin, who had entered the city to rescue his family and then stayed to command, knighted burgesses and bargained hard. On 2 October the city surrendered. Unlike the Crusader massacre of 1099, the handover was negotiated: ransoms for those who could pay, thousands more released, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre left standing. Saladin entered on a Friday that also marked the Islamic anniversary of the Night Journey. The shock in the West produced the Third Crusade.

1263 — Battle of Largs. Haakon IV of Norway brought a great fleet into the Clyde to hold the Hebrides against Alexander III of Scotland. A storm on the night of 1–2 October drove ships onto the Ayrshire shore near Largs. While the Norwegians tried to salvage them, a Scottish force under Alexander Stewart of Dundonald attacked. The fighting was messy and indecisive on the day, but Haakon withdrew, sickened, and died in Orkney that December. Within three years the Treaty of Perth transferred the Western Isles to Scotland. The last serious Viking claim on the Scottish mainland ended in weather and a beach fight.

1470 — Warwick restores Henry VI. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick — the Kingmaker — had broken with Edward IV and allied with Margaret of Anjou. Landing in the West Country in September, he flipped enough of the realm that Edward, abandoned even by John Neville, rode for King’s Lynn. He sailed for the Low Countries around 2 October with a few hundred men, including Richard of Gloucester and Anthony Woodville, and fetched up under the protection of Louis de Gruuthuse and Charles the Bold. Henry VI was brought out of the Tower for the brief “Readeption.” Edward would return in March 1471 and win Barnet and Tewkesbury.

1528 — Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man. Printed in Antwerp on 2 October by Merten de Keyser (colophon: “Marlborow… seconde daye of October”). Tyndale argued that the king, not the pope, was head of the national church and that Scripture in the vernacular was the ordinary Christian’s right. Anne Boleyn is said to have put a copy in Henry VIII’s hands; the king liked the parts that exalted royal authority. Tyndale later opposed the divorce and was executed in 1536. The book remains one of the founding political texts of the English Reformation.

1535 — Cartier at Hochelaga. On his second voyage Cartier left the winter base near Stadacona (Québec) and, on 2 October, reached the palisaded Iroquoian town of Hochelaga on the island now called Montreal. He named the mountain Mont Royal. The visit lasted hours; rapids blocked any further west. The encounter fed French claims on the St. Lawrence and the later myth of a passage to Asia. The town itself was gone by Champlain’s day.

1552 — Fall of Kazan. Ivan IV’s third campaign closed a month-long siege. Mines and artillery breached the walls; the assault on 2 October (Julian) ended the Khanate of Kazan. The middle Volga passed to Muscovy, opening the road toward the Urals and Siberia. Contemporary Russian sources treat the day as a national turning point; Tatar memory treats it as catastrophe. Both are right.

1780 — John André hanged. Benedict Arnold’s British contact, Major John André, was caught in civilian clothes with the West Point papers in his boot. A board of Continental officers sentenced him as a spy. He asked to be shot; Washington ordered hanging. On 2 October at Tappan he placed the noose himself. Even his enemies admired his composure. Arnold escaped; André became the martyr of a plot that nearly gave the Hudson to Clinton.

1789 — Washington transmits the amendments. Congress had agreed twelve articles on 25 September. On 2 October Washington sent them to the state legislatures. Ten became the Bill of Rights in December 1791; one waited until 1992 (the 27th Amendment); one on House size never passed. The covering letter is the quiet administrative act that put the first amendments into the ratification machinery.

The pattern is not coincidence of a calendar page. It is the same problem repeating: who may succeed, who may rebel, who may hold a holy city, who may speak Scripture in the common tongue, who may bind a king on paper. October 2 keeps answering it in different languages.