The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin Classics)

by Edgar Allan Poe

  8. (p. 313) when Yellow or… Violet, who is supposed to have been the first aeronaut: A colourful confusion over Jean Pierre Blanchard, reputed inventor of the parachute. With Dr John Jeffries of Boston, Massachusetts, he made the first sea voyage by air, crossing the English Channel by balloon in 1785. His ascent at Philadelphia in 1793 was witnessed by President Washington.

  Or mix yellow with violet. What do you find but a murky ‘Mr Green, of Nassau-balloon notoriety’? (‘Hans Pfaall’, p. 30). So Samuel Morse became ‘Horse’.

  9. (P. 313) one Neuclid and one Cant: See Eureka, p. 403, note 5.

  10. (p. 313) the advent of one Hog, surnamed the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ : See Eureka, p. 403, note 6.

  11. (p. 314) ‘Ex nihilo nihil fit’ : See Eureka, p. 404, note 9.

  12. (p. 315) the cleverest ancient work on its topic, Logic: John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843). His utilitarian mill-horse, of course, is Jeremy Bentham.

  13. (p. 316) a perfect consistency must be an absolute truth!: To recapitulate Eureka:

  Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms: – thus Poetry and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the ratio of its truth – true in the ratio of its consistency. A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth.

  p. 300

  14. (p. 317) perhaps there are three or four hundred passengers : The ancestor of this jumbo jet was first proposed in a pamphlet by Etienne Gaspard Robertson, ‘La Minerve’ vaisseau aerien, destiné aux découvertes (Paris, 1820). Capable of sailing for six months and making non-stop flights across the oceans, the projected ‘Minerve’ was to have a capacity of sixty passengers with ladders to various parts of the balloon for observation platforms.

  15. (p. 317) fully three hundred miles the hour – that was traveling: cf. Pundita’s eastern alter ego, Scheherazade. The contemporary speed record, Poe noted, was held by the Great Western Railway : ‘between London and Exeter, a speeed of 71 miles per hour has been attained’ (p. 149).

  16. (p. 317) the route for the great Kanadaw railroad… marked out about nine hundred years ago!: Poe–Pundit erred. The Canadian Pacific Railroad spanned the continent by 1885. The route was marked out, not in the 1940s, but throughout the 1870s on British Columbia entering the confederacy.

  17. (p. 318) in the very teeth of the laws of gradation so visibly impressed: cf.:

  Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God – in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven – wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made.

  ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ (1841)

  18. (p. 318) a fellow of the name of Mob : cf. Count Allamistakeo:

  I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant. As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.

  ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845)

  cf. a fictional fellow-Southerner, Colonel Sherburn :

  The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness.

  Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), ch. 22

  Poe’s own youthful, least embittered view of democracy was framed in 1835:

  Let us consider it as something akin to direct evidence that a people is not a mob, nor a mob a people, nor a mob’s idol the idol of a people – that in a nation’s self is the only security for a nation – and that it is absolutely necessary to model upon the character of the governed the machinery, whether simple or complex, of the governmental legislation.

  Reviewing Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi

  But ‘Mob’ is ‘a foreigner, by and by’. These bluestocking views were penned in 1848, the very Year of Revolutions.

  19. (p. 318) those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses: Both Nero, who became Roman Emperor at the age of seventeen, and Heliogabalus, who became Emperor aged thirteen, were notorious for their homosexual liaisons. Especially Heliogabalus, or Elagabalus, was universally known as a ‘faggot’, or ‘Hell of a fag’.

  20. (p. 319) Alpha Lyrae, whose disk… subtends an angle of half a degree: The drift of the solar system towards this star supposedly produced this result.

  21. (p. 319) resembles him closely as regards its spots: During 1840-41 occurred the longest sun spot ever recorded by astronomers. It lasted eighteen months. Schwabe, at that time enquiring into the periodicity of sun spots, announced in 1843 an average cycle of 11.13 years. Sun spots, then, were in the news.

  But that a ‘binary relation’ might exist between sun-spot curves and light curves of the average variable star – in other words, that our sun should be regarded as but another variable star of long period – was still a most novel and revolutionary theory to find in contemporary scientific papers – let alone a Lady’s Book!

  Alpha Lyrae (or Vega), nevertheless, does not form a binary relation with our sun. cf. Eureka, pp. 287–9.

  22. (p. 319) Its first propagator was one Mudler: Johann Heinrich von Mädler (1794–1874). See Eureka, p. 293.

  23. (p.320) in the new temple at Daphnis in the moon : cf. the temple-like structures sighted by Sir John Herschel, according to Richard Adams Locke’s ‘Discoveries in the Moon Lately Made at the Cape of Good Hope’ (1835).

  24. (p. 320) Eureka! Pundit is in his glory : Again, deliberately linking the parody of ‘Mellonta Tauta’ to the metaphysics of Eureka.

  25. (p. 321) a new fountain at… the emperor’s principal pleasure garden : cf. Xanadu, where Kubla Khan a ‘stately pleasure-dome’ decreed :

  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

  A mighty fountain momently was forced…

  Coleridge, Kubla Khan, lines 17–19

  26. (p. 321) Paradise… literally speaking, an island time out of mind : ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden… And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ (Genesis ii, 8–10)

  Manhattan, that one time ‘Paradise’, is some 12½ miles long and 2½ miles broad at its widest point. The island is bounded by the Hudson River on the west, New York Bay on the south, the East River on the east, and the ‘narrow arm’ of the Harlem River on the east and north.

  27. (p. 321) a portion of the Knickerbocker tribe of savages: A term almost synonymous with ‘Dutch’ Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving’s pseudonym for his burlesque History of New York (1809), popularized the term. Some thirty-eight writers of the Knickerbocker Group and others represented by the Knickerbocker Magazine had been pilloried by Poe in ‘The Literati of New York City’ (Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1846).

  28. (p. 321) its first discovery by Recorder Riker, a knight of the Golden Fleece: A ‘Riker’ who was certainly the first ‘Amriccan’ to strike it rich! Peter Minuit of the Dutch West India Company, so the legend goes, fleeced the Manhattan Indians, buying their island for 24 dollars’ worth of trinkets (1624).

  29. (p. 322) A MONUMENT TO THE MEMORY OF GEORGE WASHINGTON: The Washington Monument Association of New York in the 1840s attempted to finance the erection of a monument to the first President. The proposed location was to be Hamilton Square (at Third and Fifth Avenues, between 66th and 68th Streets). With appropriate fanfare a corner-stone was laid. But no design for the memorial had been agreed upon. The result was a fiasco – a prize example (for Poe) of democratic fickleness.

  30. (p. 323) ‘solitary and alone’… quoting the great Amriccan poet Benton!: cf. the pedestal of Ozymandias, king of kings :

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  But Poe is quoting not Shelley, but from Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘
expunging’ speech of 14 January 1837: ‘And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on myself. Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my opponents, I put this ball in motion.’ The pompous pleonasm became a national byword.

  The Missouri senator (‘Old Bullion’) was the devoted advocate of Jackson’s hard money policy. Himself a victim of the panic of 1837, Poe had good reason to mock Benton’s literary and financial and populist pretensions.

  31. (p. 323) one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor; Zacchary Taylor (‘Old Rough and Ready’), of course, was the twelfth President of the United States. Perhaps Pundita’s inspection of the newspapers was so cursory that she confused Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons (who had been murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844) with John Smith of Pocahontas fame (early investor in the Virginia Company and settler at Jamestown).

  Select Bibliography

  W. H. G. ARMYTAGE, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

  BURTON R. POLLIN, ‘Politics and History in Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” : Two Allusions Explained’, Studies in Short Fiction vol. 8 (1971), pp. 627–31

  VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY

  First Published

  The Flag of Our Union (14 April 1849)

  This imitation of a scientific report upon a supposed discovery of turning lead into gold was Poe’s salute to the forty-niners in this year of the Gold Rush to California. Such synthetic manufacture or alchemy, he implied, had political implications for Californian immigrants. A technical advance in Bremen might yet undermine the Golden West.

  At the same time he was courting two women and himself desperately seeking funds to start the Stylus. As he wrote to Annie L. Richmond:

  … to be poor is to be a villain. I must get rich – rich. Then all will go well – but until then I must submit to be abused.

  (21 [? ] January 1849)

  Or to Frederick W. Thomas, editor of the Louisville Chronicle:

  I shall be a littérateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.

  (14 February 1849)

  Oddly enough he thought he had another ‘Balloon-Hoax’ on his hands. He really believed the public would be taken in. So he wrote to Evert A. Duyckinck,

  If you have looked over the Von Kempelen article you will have fully perceived its drift. I mean it as a kind of ‘exercise’, or experiment, in the plausible or verisimilar style. Of course, there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end. I thought that such a style, applied to the gold-excitement, could not fail of effect. My sincere opinion is that nine persons out of ten (even among the best-informed) will believe the quiz (provided the design does not leak out before publication) and that thus, acting as a sudden, although of course a very temporary, check to the gold-fever, it will create a stir to some purpose.

  But ‘if you decline the quiz,’ Shh! he gestures wildly in a postscript, ‘please do not let out the secret.’

  1. (p. 324) the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago : Dominique François Arago (1786–1853), Director of the Paris Observatory and Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Science.

  2. (p. 324) the summary in ‘Silliman’s Journal’: Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale, founder-editor of the American Journal of Science and Arts.

  3. (p. 324) the detailed statement… by Lieutenant Maury: Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–73), head of the Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington since 1842. Soon after his wind and current charts began to appear, culminating in Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic (1847). As early as June 1836 Poe had reviewed Maury’s A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation for the Southern Literary Messenger. But the peculiar relevance of Maury’s charts, at the time of the Gold Rush, was their spectacular success in cutting the sailing-time between New York and San Francisco, via Cape Horn, from 150 to 133 days.

  4. (p. 324) By reference to the ‘Diary of Sir Humphry Davy’… pp. 53 and 82: At the end of an article on ‘Alchymy’, Isaac D’Israeli recorded: ‘Sir Humphry Davy told me that he did not consider this undiscovered art an impossible thing but which, should it ever be discovered, would certainly be useless.’ (Curiosities of Literature, 1823)

  ‘Diary’ seems to refer to the two-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart (1836) written by his brother, John Davy. It was on page 53 of the one-volume abridgement (in the nine-volume Collected Works of 1839–40), however, that Burton R. Pollin discovered the reference to ‘nitrous oxide’ on which the whole elaborately protracted private joke appears to hang.

  5. (p. 324) to be found at the Athenœum Library: The Baltimore Athenaeum Library.

  6. (p. 325) for a Mr Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine: It was from the Maine Medical School in Brunswick that a young medical student, George Eveleth, had addressed Poe in 1846. A warm correspondence ensued between the eminent author and humble admirer. But, as Burton R. Pollin ingeniously argued, this reference to Mr Kissam (or Mr Quizzem, is it?) conceals a surreptitious stab at the youngster for daring to rival the grandeur of Eureka with his own cosmological theories and then consulting – to add insult to injury – a rival, Professor Draper, in New York City.

  7. (p. 325) so eminent a chemist as Professor Draper: John William Draper (1811–82), once supported by Poe against the scurrilous attacks of the North American Review (1845), soon to be denounced in a letter to Eveleth as:

  The chief of the very sect of Hog-ites to whom I refer as ‘the most intolerant and intolerable sect of bigots & tyrants that ever existed on the face of the earth.’… A merely perceptive man, with no intrinsic force – no power of generalization – in short, a pompous nobody. He is aware (for there have been plenty to tell him) that I intend him in ‘Eureka’.

  (26 June 1849)

  8. (p. 325) At page 13… his researches about the protoxide of azote : Garbled – not from a fantasy ‘Diary’ – but p. 272 of volume 3 of Davy’s Collected Works:

  Having previously closed my nostrils and exhausted my lungs, I breathed tour quarts of nitrous oxide from and into a silk bag. The first feelings were similar to those produced in the last experiment; but in less than half a minute, the respiration being continued, they diminished gradually and were succeeded by a sensation analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles, attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and the extremities.

  Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration (1799)

  ‘Azote’ was Lavoisier’s term for nitrogen. So the whole send-up of Sir Humphry’s stylistic shortcomings in his description of the physical effects of nitrous oxide, it turns out, is itself fuelled and inflated on laughing gas.

  9. (p. 326) in the ‘Home Journal’… several misapprehensions: The Home Journal had, from the start, proved friendly to Poe. Yet an appeal published towards the end of 1846, to aid him while his wife lay dying, had rankled. The ‘Viele Leiden’ (much suffering) so ‘misconceived’ and misconstrued by that paper – pointless in connection with Von Kempelen – ‘poignantly illustrates the obsessive force of the last grim days of Virginia’s life… It also serves to confirm more substantially the transmutation of Poe into the successful gold-maker, Von Kempelen.’ (Burton R. Pollin, Discoveries in Poe, p. 187)

  10. (p. 326) a late number of the Presburg ‘Schnellpost’ : Or ‘Courier’ – a name, adopted from Berlin, for a New York German-language bi-weekly, started in 1843: Deutsche Schnellpost für Europäische Zustände, öffentliches und sociales Leben Deutschlands. Copies regularly landed on Poe’s desk as associate editor, later editor, of the Broadway Journal.

  Bratislava, a medieval city of Slovakia, was formerly the capital of Hungary. Usually spelt ‘Pressburg’ in German, the city was once renowned for the study of occult sciences.

  11. (p. 327) ‘The Literary World’ speaks… confiden
tly: As had Poe in writing to the editor of the Literary World, Evert A. Duyckinck. Yet that offer of ‘the article’ for ten dollars, or less, was apparently turned down.

  12. (p. 327) The family is connected… with Maelzel, of Automaton-chess-player memory: Poe’s hoax (‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’) figures a notorious hoaxer (Baron Wolfgang Von Kempelen) whom Poe himself had exposed (in ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ of 1836), though that too, in its way, was a bit of a hoax (being derived largely from Sir David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic, 1832).

  Clearly Poe saw something of himself in this Baron who ‘had no scruple in declaring’ his automaton ‘to be a “very ordinary piece of mechanism – a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion” ’ (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836). But more hopefully, in this context, he must have identified with Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the showman with a Midas touch, who brought the chess-player, as well as metronome and Panharmonicum, to the United States.

  13. (p. 327) We were fellow-sojourners… at Earl’s Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island: Which is perhaps the key to the whole devious wish-fulfilment of Von Kempelen’s ‘Discovery’. For it was here that Poe stayed in 1848 while courting a prosperous widow of Providence, Mrs Helen Whitman. How he longed to be a prosperous suitor, able to match her cash with cash: ‘were I wealthy,’ he wrote, ‘or could I offer you worldly honors…’ (1 October 1848). Yet even after Mrs Whitman had dispossessed herself of her property, at her family’s instigation, Poe bungled the suit. For it was at Earl’s Hotel too, on 20 December 1848, that Poe gave a public reading of ‘The Poetic Principle’, which dissolved in fiasco. A drunken bout at the bar finally put an end to the affair.