Peter Ackroyd - Poe: A Life Cut Short

Eliza Poe, Poe's mother (The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia)

Fanny Allan, Poe's adoptive mother (The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia)

John Allan, Poe's adoptive father (Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, Virginia)

Manor House School at Stoke Newington

Moldavia, home of the Allan family, in Richmond, Virginia

Elmira Royster, aged fifteen (Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, Richmond, Virginia)

Elmira, now the widowed Mrs. Shelton (The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia)

Watercolour miniature of Poe (Henry E. Huntington Library)

Maria Clemm, Poe's aunt and mother-in-law (Ingram-Poe, University of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)

Poe in the early 1840s (Harvard College Library/Maryland Historical Society)

Street scene in Baltimore (Maryland Historical Society)

Title page of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (Maryland Historical Society)

Illustration for The Gold Bug (Maryland Historical Society)

The Philadelphia Market

Fanny Osgood (New York Historical Society)

Poe, aged thirty-nine (Brown University Library)

An early steamboat on the New York to Albany route (Pennsylvania Historical Society)

The cottage at Fordham (Bronx County Historical Society)

Likeness of Virginia Poe, painted immediately after she died (Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin)

Annie Richmond (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Helen Whitman (The Providence Athenaeum) Poe in 1848 (The Library of Congress)

Every effort has been made by the publishers to trace the holders of copyrights. Any inadvertent omissions of acknowledgement or permission can be rectified in future editions.

O n the evening of 26 Sep tember 184 9, Edgar O Allan Poe stopped in the office of a physician in Richmond, VirginiaJohn Carterand obtained a palliative for the fever that had beset him. Then he went across the road and had supper in a local inn. He took with him, by mistake, Dr. Carter's malacca sword cane.

Poe was about to embark on the steamboat to Baltimore. This was the first stop on his way to New York, where he had business to transact. The boat was to leave at four o'clock on the following morning, for a journey that would last approximately twenty-five hours. He seemed to the friends who saw him off to be cheerful and sober. He expected to be away from Richmond for no more than two weeks. Yet he forgot to take his luggage with him. This was the last verifiable sighting of Poe until he was found dying in a tavern six days later.

He arrived in Baltimore on Friday, 28 September. He lingered in this city, instead of making his way to Philadelphia, the next stop on his way to New York, and there are accounts of his drinking. He may have been drinking to ward off the effects of the fever. He may have feared a precipitate heart attack. He had been told, by the doctors in Richmond, that his next seizure would prove fatal.

It is possible that he then travelled by train to Philadelphia. He visited some friends in that city, and became drunk or ill. On the following morning, in his bewildered state, he declared that he was going on to New York. But in fact, by accident or design, he returned to Baltimore. There are unsubstantiated reports that he then tried to return once more to Philadelphia but was found insensible on the train. The conductor took him back to Baltimore. The truth is lost. Everything is in a mist.

Neilson Poe, his cousin, later wrote to Poe's mother-in-law and unofficial guardian, Maria Clemm, that at what time he arrived in the city [Baltimore], where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain. Despite much research and speculation, no further light has been thrown upon the matter. He may have been wandering through the streets, or making his unsteady way from tavern to tavern. All that is known for certain is that, on 3 October, a newspaper printer sent a message to Joseph Evans Snodgrass: There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears to be in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Snodgrass had been the editor of the Saturday Visiter, to which Poe had contributed. Ryan's 4th ward polls refers to a tavern that was being used as a polling place for Congressional elections taking place that day; Ryan was the name of the proprietor of the tavern.

The printer's note was sufficiently serious to summon Snodgrass. He entered the barroom and found Poe sitting, stupefied, with a crowd of drinking men around him. His odd clothes caught Snodgrass's attention. He was wearing a tattered straw hat, and a pair of badly fitting trousers. He had a secondhand coat, but no sign of waistcoat or neckcloth. With the possible exception of the straw hat, these were not the clothes with which he had left Richmond. Yet, surprisingly, he still held Dr. Carter's malacca cane. In his inebriated and beleaguered state, it might have seemed to him an instrument of defence.

Snodgrass did not approach him, but ordered a room for him in the same tavern. He was about to send word to Poe's relatives in Baltimore, when two of them coinciden-tally arrived. One was Poe's cousin Henry Herring, who had come to the tavern on electoral business. He was related to a local politician. Snodgrass recalled that they declined to take private care of him on the grounds that he had in the past been abusive in this state of intoxication; instead they advised that Poe be removed to a local hospital. They managed to get him into a carriage, carrying him as if a corpse, and he was admitted to Washington College Hospital.