Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

I have followed Edgar Allan Poe's subsequent career as a poet and critic with interest. I heard with regret of his tribulations in later life and his death. I wondered whether traces of his boyhood experiences in England may be descried in some of his work. With the help of American correspondents, I even attempted to explore the circumstances of his death, which was shrouded in mystery. I failed to dispel the mystery. But I did acquire a piece of information that Flora never had.

The facts, such as they are, appear to be these. On the 26th of September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dined at a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia. Friends and associates believed that on the following day he intended to set out for Baltimore, a voyage of some twenty-five hours by steamer. Not only is the precise time of his departure disputed, but so are his means of travel and the time of his arrival.

In short, Poe vanished. There are no confirmed sightings of him whatsoever between the evening of 26th September in Richmond and his reappearance, a week later, in Baltimore. A printer named Walker noticed him at Gunner's Hall, a tavern in East Lombard-street. The city was in the throes of an election which brought with it a drunken orgy of corruption and intimidation. Gunner's Hall was one of the polling stations.

Poe was "in great distress", and asked Walker to notify a friend, Joseph Snodgrass, who arrived in due course with several of Poe's relations. They assumed that Poe was drunk. "The muscles of articulation seemed paralysed to speechlessness," Snodgrass recorded in 1856, "and mere incoherent mutterings were all that were heard."

They arranged for Poe to be taken to the Washington College Hospital where he was treated by the resident physician, Dr John J. Moran. According to a letter Moran wrote a few weeks afterwards to Poe's aunt Mrs Clemm (the sister of David Poe), his patient was at first unconscious of his condition. Later his limbs trembled and he was seized with "a busy, but not violent or active delirium – constant talking – and vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects…" By the second day, he was calm enough to listen to questions but "his answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory".

Dr Moran tried to cheer his patient by saying that soon he would be well enough to receive friends. Edgar Allan Poe "broke out with much energy, and said the best thing his friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol." Soon he became violently delirious – despite his weakness, two nurses were required to hold him down.

Poe continued in this state until the evening of Saturday the 6th of October, "when he commenced calling for one 'Reynolds', which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning." Then, "enfeebled from exertion", he became quieter for a short time. At last, "gently moving his head he said 'Lord help my poor Soul' and expired!"

The precise cause of death is unknown – no death certificate was issued. No one, then or now, knows who "Reynolds" is or was. My agents state that, while neither Snodgrass nor Moran may be entirely trustworthy as a witness, there seems no reason to doubt the essential veracity of their accounts. They add that Poe appeared in good spirits in Richmond, where he had lectured to great applause and become engaged to be married. They also drew my attention to rumours current in Baltimore to the effect that when Poe arrived in the city he fell in with old friends, who persuaded him to take a drink to celebrate their reunion. Poe had eschewed alcohol for some months, and it is said that he was yet another victim of mania a potu.

Perhaps. But may there not be another explanation for Edgar Allan Poe's disappearance and for the extraordinary prostration that led to his collapse and death? Remember Poe's despair – his wish for suicide – his repeated calls for "Reynolds". Remember that according to the Parish Register, Tom Shield's middle name was Reynolds, the surname of his mother's family.

Was Shield in Baltimore in 1849?

As a man, Edgar Allan Poe was frail in mind and body. What if he had suddenly learned the true history of those months in England in 1819-20? Above all, what if he had come face to face with the terrible truth about his father?

It could drive a stronger man to drink. It could drive a stronger man to death itself.

It is time to lay down my pen. I shall lodge this narrative with my lawyers and leave instructions that it is to be opened by the head of the family seventy-five years after my decease. After such an interval of time, neither Shield's account nor these notes I have appended to it will have the power to hurt anyone.

The older I become, the more I wonder about Sophie herself. Is she alive? Is she with Thomas Shield? If they were lovers, and I think there can now be little doubt of that, did they marry? If they married, what became of their lives? Which continent gave them a home? Are there children, grandchildren? Is she happy?

Mr Carswall's watch has informed me with its tiny chime that it is two o'clock in the morning. If I blow out the candles and pull back the curtains of the library's bow-window, I shall look out over mile after mile of nothing, a night without boundaries.

I wrote earlier that if truth is infinite, then any addition to our knowledge of it serves also to remind us of what is unknowable. And that of course brings me back to what might have been, to Sophie, for ever unknowable, for ever hidden in the illimitable darkness.

JRR

Clearland-court

"Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history," wrote Novalis, a remark Penelope Fitzgerald chose as the epigraph to her novel about him, The Blue Flower. The history of Edgar Allan Poe is littered with shortcomings and also richly overlaid with myths, speculations and contradictions. It would be irresponsible wilfully to add to them: hence this attempt to describe where the history ends and the novel begins.

Poe's grandfather, David, Sr, was born in Ireland in about 1742. The family emigrated to America, eventually settling in Maryland. David became a shopkeeper and manufacturer of spinning wheels. During the Revolutionary War he was commissioned as Assistant Deputy Quartermaster General for Baltimore, and given the rank of major. In 1781 he used his own money to buy supplies for American forces under Lafayette, and his wife is said to have cut 500 pairs of pantaloons with her own hands for the use of his troops. In David Poe's old age he may have taken part in the defence of Baltimore against British attack in 1814, during the War of 1812.

Poe's father, David, Jr, was born in 1784. He made an abortive attempt to study law but in 1803 became an actor. In 1806 he married Elizabeth Arnold, a widowed Englishwoman who had made her debut as an actress ten years before in Boston, Massachusetts. Edgar, the second of their three children, was born on 19th January 1809. What evidence survives (mainly from hostile theatre critics) suggests that David Poe was a mediocre actor, hot-tempered and often intoxicated. On the other hand in his six years on the stage he played one hundred and thirty-seven parts, some of them important ones, which suggests that he was neither incompetent nor unreliable.

David Poe was commended by the editor of a Boston theatrical weekly in December 1809. Afterwards we are left with hearsay. He was reported in New York in July 1810. It is probable, but by no means certain, that he deserted his wife in 1811.

Elizabeth Poe died in Richmond, Virginia, on 8th December 1811. No one knows where or when her husband died, which has not prevented biographers from providing at least three specific dates for his death over a period of approximately fourteen months. All we know for sure is that David Poe drops out of recorded history at some point after December 1809.