The Most Influential Person in Poe’s Life?

In today's episode, I would like to deal with and emphasize the overall influence of John Allan on Poe’s life - and what might Poe's life have been like if John Allan had a more positive temperament. And even if some of this information is familiar to you, stay with the Ghost of Mr. Poe and myself for what ultimately is a very sad story.

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Poe.

Transcript

First I’d like to make an apology - I found out that after I had uploaded Episode 293, I somehow had left on the beat counter - I have no idea why - so it sounded like a steady and very irritating beat, beat in the background. I took it down, and uploaded a copy without the beat - but not before several people downloaded the copy with the irritating beat in the background.  Anyway, I will try and be sure that never happens again.

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 294 - The Most Influential Person in Poe’s Life?

Now in the previous episode, I mentioned that today’s episode would be the first of a three part series regarding one of Poe’s greatest, but least known works. However, I have decided to begin that series with episode 297 - so it is coming soon.

However I thought it was more important to deal with and emphasize some of the issues from today’s episode first - namely the overall influence of John Allan on Poe’s life - and what might Poe have been like if John Allan had a more positive temperament. And even if some of this information is familiar to you, stay with the Ghost of Mr. Poe - I believe he will be here soon - and myself to be up-to-date.

Now, many scholars have claimed that the most crucial element of Poe’s life is the fact that at a very early age his life was placed in the hands of a man who just didn’t care and had significant emotional problems.  OK - the task - and it WOULD be a task - of raising an unusual and even difficult child such as the young Edgar Poe would be a challenge for most people.  Some scholars have even admitted that the young Poe could bring out the worst in a parent or guardian.  And it turned out that John Allan was a largely unsympathetic human being - and possibly one of the worse choices imaginable to take charge of Poe’s upbringing.

A little bit of review here - 

John Allan was born on September 10, 1779 in Ayrshire, Scotland. Early in 1795 he emigrated to Richmond, Virginia to work for his uncle William Galt, who had established himself there as a prosperous merchant. The next year, Allan formed a mercantile firm with Charles Ellis. By 1803, he was successful enough to marry a beautiful young socialite, Frances Valentine. The couple remained childless.

Ah, it’s the ghost of Mr. Poe - we were just discussing the influence of John Allan upon your development.

Mr. Bartley - that could prove to be most interesting.

Now, Mr. Poe - if you would take over - possibly starting with your infancy and the introduction of Francis Allan?

Certainly, Mr. Bartley - You see in 1811, Frances Allan was among the charitable Richmond matrons to take an interest in the ailing and indigent actress, my mother Eliza Poe - my mother was extremely ill and unable to perform and after Mrs. Poe’s death in December, Mrs. Allan—who was said to have been taken by the unusual charm and precocity of Miss Eliza Poe’s middle child—persuaded her husband to give the nearly-three-year-old Edgar a home. Edgar’s elder brother William Henry was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in Baltimore, while baby Rosalie became the ward of another Richmond family, the Mackenzies.

Mr. Poe, how were you accepted by your foster-parents.  

Ah, Mr. Bartley - as a child, I received a decidedly mixed blessing in my foster-parents. By all accounts, Frances Allan and her new “son” genuinely loved each other, but later writers have pointed out that the little we know of my foster mother gives the impression of a sickly and even shallow woman who was simply an inadequate substitute for the strong maternal figure that I so desperately needed.

A letter John Allan wrote in 1816 referred to his wife “complaining as usual.” Four years later, Charles Ellis - remember - he had formed a firm with John Allan - Charles Ellis commented that Mrs. Allan had of late been unusually “even-tempered and accommodating,” and that if she could manage to maintain her attitude, “she would make the path through life much more even to herself” - not exactly a glowing compliment.

Mr. Poe - I wonder if as a child you could sense any problems in the marriage.

Ah, yes, Mr. Bartley - Even though he Allans evidently maintained a surface harmony, their marriage obviously had its troubles. I later learned that John Allan fathered at least three illegitimate children, and it is reasonable to guess he was guilty of other affairs that left no such obvious evidences. Perhaps by the time I reached my teens, I even became aware of my foster-father’s darker side, and this could explain the remarkably hostile turn in our relations, but that is really more assumption than established evidence.

Mr. Poe - would you consider yours a stable home?

Somewhat, Mr. Bartley, although by all accounts John Allan had been reluctant to give me a home, from what little we know of my childhood relationship with his my ” it appears to have been stable, and even somewhat affectionate. 

Interesting, Mr. Poe - do you believe that John Allan and his wife were genuinely proud of you?

Ah, Mr. Bartley - that is a most complex question.  One must realize that 

John Allan was said to have shared his wife’s pride in their little foster-son—although one sometimes gets the impression they saw him as a pleasing household pet to show off before guests—and the surviving letters from my childhood, while they do reveal a rather dispassionate attitude, still speak of me approvingly as a "fine Boy."  

Mr. Allan wrote a letter in 1815, soon after the family had arrived in England for what would prove to be a five-year sojourn. In the midst of a list of family news he was giving Charles Ellis, he mentioned that the six-year-old Edgar had asked him to pass on a message: “Pa say something for me, say I was not afraid coming across the Sea.”)

So, Mr. Poe - that seems to point at a good relationship between father and son.

Ah, Mr. Bartley - my relations with Allan took a mysteriously nasty turn as I became a troubled adolescent increasingly conscious of my outsider status in the Allan household. 

Why would you say that?

Mr. Bartley - let me provide you with proof. One of the earliest pieces of evidence for John Allan’s increasing disgust with me - his young ward - comes from a bizarre letter that John Allan wrote to Edgar’s seventeen-year-old brother William Henry in 1824.

Allan expressed a creepily extravagant, fawning attitude towards my brother, expressing his “desire to Stand as I ought to do in your Estimation.” He compared “Henry,” “my Brave & excellent boy,” with the “miserable, sulky & ill-tempered” fifteen-year-old Edgar. “The boy possesses not a Spark of affection for us nor a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness towards him.” For good measure, Allan referred to Rosalie Poe in the letter as “half your Sister,” raising questions about her paternity that will probably never be answered.

Mr. Poe - that is most unfortunate.

Yes, Mr. Bartley - the beginning of the end for John Allan and myself came when I was sent to the University of Virginia in February 1826. 

Now remember that William Galt, the uncle of John Allan, had died and left John Allan a very wealthy man.  However for reasons which remain a complete mystery, John Allan sent me to a highly expensive school - the University of Virginia - with funds that were far short of what was needed for even basic living expenses. 

I knew that I desperately tried to make up the deficit - and began gambling. The result was that, in addition to my school bills, I was now burdened with humiliating “debts of honor." John Allan evidently refused to pay any of the money that I owed. And John Allan’s solution to the problem was to simply force me to withdraw from the university after only one semester—a break that I would forever resent.

Yes, Mr. Poe - I understand your humiliation.

Ah, Mr. Bartley - but the situation between John Allan and myself worsened. After I returned to Richmond, tensions between John Allan and I increased until, like an active volcano finally finding release, we had what was probably their worst quarrel to date in March of 1827. I angrily fled the Allan home—essentially for good, as it would turn out—and, obviously still fuming, I wrote my foster-father a letter the same day, announcing my determination “to find some place in this wide world, where I will be treated--not as YOU have treated me.” I went on to list reasons for his departure—reasons that were obviously a rehash of our earlier fight:

“Since I have been able to think on any subject, my thoughts have aspired, and they have been taught by you to aspire, to eminence in public life — this cannot be attained without a good Education, such a one I cannot obtain at a Primary school — A collegiate Education therefore was what I most ardently desired, and I had been led to expect that it would at some future time be granted — but in a moment of caprice — you have blasted my hope because forsooth I disagreed with you in an opinion, which opinion I was forced to express —

Again, I have heard you say (when you little thought I was listening and therefore must have said it in earnest) that you had no affection for me —

You have moreover ordered me to quit your house, and are continually upbraiding me with eating the bread of Idleness, when you yourself were the only person to remedy the evil by placing me to some business —

You take delight in exposing me before those whom you think likely to advance my interest in this world…”

Mr. Bartley, as you well know, I may have had my original plans, but ended up enlisting in the Army. After Frances Allan—who had evidently stayed devoted to her foster son to the last—died in February 1829, I got a brief leave of absence and returned to Richmond, where Allan and I patched up a truce of sorts.  He and I agreed that Allan would help me obtain an appointment to West Point—an agreement Allan eventually fulfilled, but with remarkably bad grace. In his letter to Secretary of War John Eaton, Allan essentially washed his hands of the young man who still thought of him as “Pa,” writing that Poe “is no relation to me whatever; that I have many whom I have taken an active Interest to promote their with no other feeling than that; every Man is my care, if he be in distress.”

How pompous and self-righteous sounding.

I quite concur.

However, as you well know, the uneasy peace between Allan and myself was irrevocably shattered by the beginning of 1831. When I had sought my cadetship, he hired a “substitute,” a Sergeant Graves, to take his place in the Army - a common practice Although I evidently gave Graves his $75 fee, it appeared that I owed the man other debts. When Graves wrote me on the subject, Poe sent an apologetic reply, attributing his financial confusion to the fact that “Mr. A is not very often sober.” 

Mr. Poe - what were you THINKING?

Mr. Bartley - I guess I wasn’t thinking rationally.

But I do know that Graves forwarded this unbelievably ill-judged letter to Allan himself, with predictable results. We do not know exactly what Allan wrote to me after hearing from Graves,

Mr. Poe - I can only imagine …

Yes, Mr. Bartley, but the general import of any reply can be gauged from the reply that I wrote from the Military Academy on January 3. And due to the fact that it proved to essentially be the epitaph of our relationship, the reply deserves quoting in full:

Please continue, Mr. Poe.

I shall thus … I suppose (altho’ you desire no further communication with yourself on my part,) that your restriction does not extend to my answering your final letter.

Did I, when an infant, solicit your charity and protection, or was it of your own free will, that you volunteered your services in my behalf? It is well known to respectable individuals in Baltimore, and elsewhere, that my Grandfather (my natural protector at the time you interposed) was wealthy, and that I was his favourite grand-child — But the promises of adoption, and liberal education which you held forth to him in a letter which is now in possession of my family, induced him to resign all care of me into your hands. Under such circumstances, can it be said that I have no right to expect any thing at your hands? You may probably urge that you have given me a liberal education. I will leave the decision of that question to those who know how far liberal educations can be obtained in 8 months at the University of Va. Here you will say that it was my own fault that I did not return — You would not let me return because bills were presented you for payment which I never wished nor desired you to pay. Had you let me return, my reformation had been sure — as my conduct the last 3 months gave every reason to believe — and you would never have heard more of my extravagances. But I am not about to proclaim myself guilty of all that has been alleged against me, and which I have hitherto endured, simply because I was too proud to reply. I will boldly say that it was wholly and entirely your own mistaken parsimony that caused all the difficulties in which I was involved while at Charlottsville [sic]. The expenses of the institution at the lowest estimate were $350 per annum. You sent me there with $110. Of this $50 were to be paid immediately for board — $60 for attendance upon 2 professors — and you even then did not miss the opportunity of abusing me because I did not attend 3. Then $15 more were to be paid for room-rent — remember that all this was to be paid in advance, with $110. — $12 more for a bed — and $12 more for room furniture. I had, of course, the mortification of running in debt for public property — against the known rules of the institution, and was immediately regarded in the light of a beggar. You will remember that in a week after my arrival, I wrote to you for some more money, and for books — You replied in terms of the utmost abuse — if I had been the vilest wretch on earth you could not have been more abusive than you were because I could not contrive to pay $150 with $110. I had enclosed to you in my letter (according to your express commands) an account of the expenses incurred amounting to $149 — the balance to be paid was $39 — You enclosed me $40, leaving me one dollar in pocket. In a short time afterwards I received a packet of books consisting of, Gil Blas, and the Cambridge Mathematics in 2 vols: books which I had no earthly use since I had no means of attending the mathematical lectures. But books must be had, If I intended to remain at the institution — and they were bought accordingly upon credit. In this manner debts were accumulated, and money borrowed of Jews in Charlottesville at extravagant interest — for I was obliged to hire a servant, to pay for wood, for washing, and a thousand other necessaries. It was then that I became dissolute, for how could it be otherwise? I could associate with no students, except those who were in a similar situation with myself — altho’ from different causes — They from drunkenness, and extravagance — I, because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me. I call God to witness that I have never loved dissipation — Those who know me know that my pursuits and habits are very far from any thing of the kind. But I was drawn into it by my companions. Even their professions of friendship — hollow as they were — were a relief. Towards the close of the session you sent me $100 — but it was too late — to be of any service in extricating me from my difficulties — I kept it for some time — thinking that if I could obtain more I could yet retrieve my character — I applied to James Galt — but he, I believe, from the best of motives refused to lend me any — I then became desperate, and gambled — until I finally i[n]volved myself irretrievably. If I have been to blame in all this — place yourself in my situation, and tell me if you would not have been equally so. But these circumstances were all unknown to my friends when I returned home — They knew that I had been extravagant — but that was all — I had no hope of returning to Charlottesville, and I waited in vain in expectation that you would, at least, obtain me some employment. I saw no prospect of this — and I could endure it no longer. — Every day threatened with a warrant &c. I left home — and after nearly 2 years conduct with which no fault could be found — in the army, as a common soldier — I earned, myself, by the most humiliating privations — a Cadets’ warrant which you could have obtained at any time for asking. It was then that I thought I might venture to sollicit [sic] your assistance in giving me an outfit — I came home, you will remember, the night after the burial — If she had not have died while I was away there would have been nothing for me to regret — Your love I never valued — but she I believed loved me as her own child. You promised me to forgive all — but you soon forgot your promise. You sent me to W. Point like a beggar. The same difficulties are threatening me as before at Charlottesville — and I must resign.

As to your injunction not to trouble you with farther communication rest assured, Sir, that I will most religiously observe it. When I parted from you — at the steam-boat, I knew that I should never see you again.

As regards Sergt. Graves — I did write him that letter. As to the truth of its contents, I leave it to God, and your own conscience. — The time in which I wrote it was within a half hour after you had embittered every feeling of my heart against you by your abuse of my family, and myself, under your own roof — and at a time when you knew that my heart was almost breaking.

I have no more to say — except that my future life (which thank God will not endure long) must be passed in indigence and sickness. I have no energy left, nor health. If it was possible, to put up with the fatigues of this place, and the inconveniences which my absolute want of necessaries subject me to, and as I mentioned before it is my intention to resign. For this end it will be necessary that you (as my nominal guardian) enclose me your written permission. It will be useless to refuse me this last request — for I can leave the place without any permission — your refusal would only deprive me of the little pay which is now due as mileage.

From the time of writing this I shall neglect my studies and duties at the institution — if I do not receive your answer in 10 days — I will leave the point without — for otherwise I should subject myself to dismission.”

Well, Mr. Poe - that letter definitely has a tone of finality about it.

Yes, Mr. Bartley, and I did leave West Point - and to be candid -  there is no reason to think Allan felt the least concern about where I went or what I did. The attentions of Poe’s erstwhile “Pa” were occupied by Louisa Patterson, whom he married in October 1830. The couple soon had three sons, and this new family made Allan all the more determined to cut his only remaining tie with the old. Although there would be a sporadic correspondence between us over the next several years, Allan made it all too clear that he felt no further sense of responsibility for Poe.

That is most unfortunate, Mr. Poe.

Ah, Mr. Bartely - I found myself writing such lines as “I am sorry that it is so seldom that I hear from you or even of you — for all communication seems to be at an end; and when I think of the long twenty one years that I have called you father, and you have called me son, I could cry like a child to think that it should all end in this. ..I write merely because I am by myself and have been thinking over old times, and my only friends, until my heart is full — At such a time the conversation of new acquaintance is like ice, and I prefer writing to you altho’ I know that you care nothing about me, and perhaps will not even read my letter.”

And with those words, Mr. Bartley, I take my leave.

Farewell, Mr. Bartley.

Goodbye, Mr. Poe.

In summary, even though Edgar Poe was probably not without some blame in their relationship - whatever errors he made have made - it is chilling to see how easy it was for John Allan to ruthlessly and completely sever all ties with an obviously suffering youth who sincerely needed love and attention.  It is chilling to see the ease and thoroughness with which Allan was able to completely forget about an obviously suffering youth who had spent virtually all his life wanting and needing John Allan to be a loving father.

Join me for podcast 295 - John Allan’s Will - where this podcast delves into the final indignity that John Allan imposed upon Edgar - a cruelty from the grave.

Sources include Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson, the Baltimore Edgar Allan Poe website, the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe scholar Rob Velella.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.