Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (62 page)

Claude
: seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain.

‘There are properly… human interest’
: the paragraph is quoted from an anonymous review of a book on
American Landscape Gardening
in a contemporary New York magazine.

capabilities
: a reference to Launcelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the eighteenth-century landscape gardener who popularized the term to describe an uncultivated setting’s potential for development.

Addison… ‘Inferno’
:
Cato
is by the eighteenth-century playwright Joseph Addison, who is more famous for his
Spectator
essays. By comparing Addison’s play to the first part of Dante’s masterly
Commedia
and to the sublime symmetry of the ancient Greek temple, the narrator differentiates skilful fabrication from true inspiration, which transcends all learning.

De Staël
: the eighteenth-century German writer Anne Louise Germaine Necker, better known as Madame de Staël, introduced German Romanticism to England and America.

Timon
: in Shakespeare’s
Timon of Athens
, the misanthropic hero rejects society and lives in a cave.

Ætna
: Mt. Etna in Sicily was celebrated by Romantics for its vistas.

Fonthill
: the picturesque home of the extravagant eighteenth-century writer William Beckford, author of the oriental Gothic novel
Vathek
.

This story, Poe’s last full-length narrative, was published in Boston’s
The Flag of Our Union
on 17 March 1849. It derives from an anecdote in Froissart’s
Chronicles
.

rara avis in terris
: ‘a rare bird in the world’; Juvenal,
Satires
, vi. 165.

Rabelais … Voltaire
: Poe contrasts the effusive, bawdy sixteenth-century humour of Rabelais with the more restrained eighteenth-century satire of Voltaire.

This late satiric essay was published in Boston’s
The Flag of Our Union
on 14 April 1849.

‘Diary of Sir Humphrey Davy’
: although Davy and many others named in the story are real, the publications are all fictitious. The ‘editorial’ brackets throughout are Poe’s own.

protoxide of azote
: laughing-gas.

Presburg
: for the association of Pressburg, Hungary with magic, see note to p. 21 above. The ironic tone of the essay suggests that Von Kempelen’s birthplace may also be a pun, and indicate his origin in the hyperbole of the media or ‘press’.

Mäelzel
: the automated chess-player of Wolfgang von Kempelen, exhibited in the United States by J. N. Mäelzel, is the subject of Poe’s ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ (1836). On the importance of Mäelzel in Poe’s detective fiction, see John T. Irwin,
The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Story
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 104–14.

late developments in California
: the ‘Rush’ to California after John Sutter’s discovery of gold in 1848.

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¹
Walt Whitman,
Specimen Days
(1882); repr. in Eric W. Carlson (ed.),
The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1892
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 75.

²
Richard Wilbur,
Responses: Prose Pieces 1953
–
1976
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 50–1.

³
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in
Illuminations
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 155–200.

¹
For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twiee seven days of warmth, men have called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon—
Simonides
.

¹
Watson, Dr Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of Landaff.—See ‘Chemical Essays’, vol. v.
^*

¹
The ‘
Hortulus Aniœ cum Oratiunculis Aliquibus Superadditis
’ of Grüninger.
^*

¹
Rousseau,
Nmivelle Héloise
^*

¹
On the original publication of ‘Mane Rogêt,’ the foot-notes now appended were considered unnecessary; but the lapse of several years since the tragedy upon which the tale is based, renders it expedient to give them, and also to say a few words in explanation of the general design. A young girl,
Mary Cecilia Rogers
, was murdered in the vicinity of New York; and, although her death occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published (November, 1842). Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian
grisette
^*
the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object.
    The ‘Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been on the spot, and visited the localities. It may not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of
two
persons, (one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely
all
the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained.

¹
Nassau Street.
^*

²
Anderson.

¹
The Hudson.

²
Weehawken.

¹
Payne.

²
Crommelin.

¹
The ‘N. Y. Mercury.’

¹
The ‘N. Y. Brother Jonathan,’ edited by H. Hastings Weld, Esq.

¹
N. Y. ‘Journal of Commerce.’

¹
Phil. ‘Sat. Evening Post,’ edited by C. J. Peterson, Esq.

¹
Adam.

¹
See ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’

¹
The ‘N. Y. Commercial Advertiser,’ edited by Col. Stone.

¹
‘A theory based on the qualities of an object, will prevent its being unfolded according to its objects; and he who arranges topics in reference to their causes, will cease to value them according to their results. Thus the jurisprudence of every nation will show that, when law becomes a science and a system, it ceases to be justice. The errors into which a blind devotion to
principles
of classification has led the common law, will be seen by observing how often the legislature has been obliged to come forward to restore the equity its scheme had lost.’—
Landor
.
^*

¹
‘N. Y. Express.’

²
‘N. Y. Herald.’

³
‘N. Y. Courier and Inquirer.’

⁴
Mennais was one of the parties originally suspected and arrested, but discharged through total lack of evidence.

⁵
‘N. Y. Courier and Inquirer.’

¹
‘N. Y. Evening Post.’

²
‘N. Y. Standard.’

¹
Of the Magazine in which the article was originally published.

¹
An incident, similar in outline to the one here imagined, occurred, not very long ago, in England. The name of the fortunate heir was Thelluson. I first saw an account of this matter in the ‘Tour’ of Prince Pückler-Muskau, who makes the sum inherited
ninety millions of pounds
, and justly observes that ‘in the contemplation of so vast a sum, and of the services to which it might be applied, there is something even of the sublime.’ To suit the views of this article I have followed the Prince’s statement, although a grossly exaggerated one. The germ, and, in fact, the commencement of the present paper was published many years ago—previous to the issue of the first number of Sue’s admirable ‘
Juif Errant
.’ which may possibly have been suggested to him by Muskau’s account.
^*