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American Literature Readings in the
21st Century

Series Editor
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University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century publishes

works by contemporary authors that help shape critical opinion
regarding American literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first centuries. The books treat fiction, poetry, memoir,
drama and criticism itself—ranging from William Dow’s Narrating
Class in American Fiction and Amy Strong’s Race and Identity in
Hemingway’s Fiction, to Maisha L. Wester’s African American Gothic and
Guy Davidson’s Queer Commodities: Contemporary U. S. Fiction,
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Beginning in 2004, the series is now well established and continues
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Editorial Board:
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Professor Thomas Fahy, Long Island University, USA
 Professor Deborah E. McDowell, University of Virginia and Director
of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, USA
Professor Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow, UK
Editors
José R. Ibá ñ ez and Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

Retrospective Poe
The Master, His Readership, His Legacy
Editors
José R. Ibá ñ ez
Department of Philology/English Studies Division, University of
Almería, Almería, Spain

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

Department of English Philology, University of Valladolid, Valladolid,
Spain

ISSN 2634-579X e-ISSN 2634-5803

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-031-09985-4 e-ISBN 978-3-031-09986-1
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Introduction: Re-assessing Poe’s Seductive Art
Over 200 years after his birth, Poe’s reputation is firmly established in
world literature. Despite changes to the American canon, he remains a
central figure in American literature and a seminal voice in the
development of the modern short story globally. There is a broad
consensus that Poe’s legacy relies to a great extent on the translations
and essays of Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, so great was the importance
of Baudelaire in the worldwide recognition of Poe that Paul Valéry
remarked that the American author would have been almost forgotten
if Baudelaire “had not taken up the task of introducing him into
European literatures,” a comment that Lois D. Vines considered both an
exaggeration and an understatement (Vines 1999, 1). Had Baudelaire
not regarded Poe as a model, the latter’s fame might well have faded,
and he might now be regarded simply as one among many American
writers of his age. Baudelaire’s discovery was consequential if one takes
a cursory glance at the number of writers who have claimed to be
under Poe’s influence in one way or another.
If, for the French poet and those he influenced, Poe became a cult
figure—we might recall here Mallarmé’s claim that he moved to London
to improve his English in an attempt to better understand Poe—in
England things were radically different. T.S. Eliot’s contentious essay
“From Poe to Valéry,” based on his Library of Congress lecture delivered
in 1948 and published a year later in The Hudson Review, stands out as
one of the most damning pieces of criticism on Poe. Eliot openly
criticized Poe and declared that anyone examining his work would find
nothing but “slipshod writing” (1949, 327). He even made the point
that only a mind that was still adolescent could be attracted to Poe’s
style, which he disparaged as “puerile thinking” (327). What puzzled
Eliot above all was the passionate enthusiasm that Poe’s work aroused
in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, three French poets who each
offered an individual understanding of poetry and who became
advocates for Poe, all playing significant roles in establishing Poe’s
literary reputation.
Despite the harsh comments on Poe and his art, Eliot’s article is
perhaps an interesting case of how writers, critics, artists, and the
general readership have read and understood Poe. The audience for
Poe is indeed a strange one: whereas there have been numerous
anthologies of Poe’s fiction addressed to a young readership,
adaptations of Poe’s work for the screen have largely been aimed at an
adult audience. There is also the fact that Poe has been held in awe by a
large number of adult readers, among them some very notable writers:
Baudelaire, Pedro Antonio de Alarcó n, Stéphane Mallarmé, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Paul Valéry, and Stephen King, to name just a few. All
of them have claimed to have been influenced by Poe’s work, and none
can be characterized as adolescent, though some of them are or were
writers catering to a young readership in their own work.
Some of the contributors to Retrospective Poe have taken Eliot’s
essay as a starting point, thus indicating the importance of Eliot as a
critic even now, with the days of Modernism long gone. Taking that
essay as a point of departure might lead contributors to downplay the
importance of Poe or the extent of his influence on literature. Yet quite
the contrary is true; the chapters herein attest to the vitality of such
reception studies in terms of their subjects and approaches. This may
be because, as Studniarz argues, “Eliot’s response to Poe’s literary
legacy is puzzling and complicated” (99). Eliot may have felt that Poe
posed a threat to the poetry he himself wrote, and thus preferred to
criticize him harshly if only to avoid any literary relationship. To the
names mentioned above we should add another great Modernist
author, Jorge Luis Borges—the precursor of literary Postmodernism—
who also acknowledged the influence of Poe on his work, to the point of
claiming that the American writer was the originator of the modern
short story (Esplin 2018). Borges was an avid reader who repeatedly
pointed out his indebtedness to Poe, whom he had read in his
childhood (16).
In any case, prior to Eliot’s controversial essay, some comparativist
studies had already appeared. In his exhaustive study of the influence of
Poe in Hispanic literature, John E. Englekirk analyzed the influence of
Poe on Spanish-speaking writers on both sides of the Atlantic, singling
out the work of some outstanding representatives of Spanish American
letters, such as Rubén Darío. Englekirk offered an extensive catalogue of
translations and of the critical appreciation of the American writer, plus
a thorough analysis of Poe’s influence on a number of Spanish and
Spanish American authors. This was not the only study of the reception
of Poe abroad. John C. French collected the lectures delivered at the
Edgar Allan Poe Society in Baltimore in 1941 examining Poe’s reception
in Spain, Russia, France, and Germany.
In 1957, Patrick Quinn’s seminal book on the reception of Poe in
France, The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe, addressed Baudelaire’s
appropriation of Poe in the creation of his own literary persona. Quinn
explores the extent of Poe’s influence on writers of fiction and criticism,
such as Marie Bonaparte, in an attempt to identify other appropriations
of Poe.
In 1999, Louis Davis Vines edited Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation,
Affinities, a work that aimed to be “the first attempt to bring together in
one volume an account of Poe’s effect on literatures around the world
and to present analyses of his influence on major writers” (1). This
collective volume not only explored Poe’s impact on over twenty
countries and geographical regions worldwide, as well as his influence
on major writers—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Kafka, and Pessoa, to
name just a few—but also became a landmark in Poe studies in that it
set in motion the globalized, transnational projection of Poe as a
literary figure in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Also in the early years of the twenty-first century, Burton R. Pollin
collected essays on Poe’s ascendancy in Poe’s Seductive Influence on
Great Writers. The volume contains twelve essays plus seven reviews
about notable authors, mostly Anglo-Americans, who had been
influenced by Poe. John T. Irwin explored the relationship between Poe
and Borges in The Mystery to a Solution (1994), an act of interpretation
and reading of their respective works. In 2018, Emron Esplin would
continue the exploration of Poe’s seductive influence on Borges, looking
at the latter’s understanding and interpretation of Poe, in The Influence
and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America, with fresh
readings of Poe’s and Borges’ stories that explain how Borges created
Poe the story writer firstly for the Spanish readership, and then for the
rest of the world.
As the methodological approaches changed, scholars came to favor
reception theory, the study of intertextuality, and even more materialist
studies, such as the history of Poe’s publications in magazines and
anthologies, including translations. In 2014, an ambitious project, led
by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato, was initiated. Translated
Poe picked up the baton of Poe Abroad, acknowledging Vines’ collection
as a source of inspiration. The editors commissioned a select group of
Poe experts who examined translations of Poe’s works from around the
world, while also assessing how Poe’s advocates interpreted his texts
following national traditions in the reading of Poe in each language.
Esplin and Vale de Gato are also editors of Anthologizing Poe (2020), a
volume that examines the works of anthologizers, editors, and
translators of Poe’s texts worldwide. This study reveals why some tales
and poems were anthologized—including some beautifully illustrated
editions—which ultimately meant that they would enjoy broad critical
attention, while others, considered less important texts, were relegated
to the fringes of academic discourse. Indeed, anthologizers and editors
have shaped our understanding and our appreciation of Poe’s work
since the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Esplin and Vale de Gato’s two great contributions are accompanied
by others that may not be so comprehensive but offer detailed analyses
of the reception of Poe’s work from a wide variety of approaches.
Among the books that deserve mention here is Barbara Cantalupo’s
Poe’s Pervasive Influence (2013), a volume that collects some
noteworthy studies on the influence of the writer in Japan, namely in
Edogawa Rampo’s fiction, together with Portugal, Russia, and China. As
Cantalupo acknowledges in the introduction, the book extends Lois D.
Vines’ Poe Abroad, just as Pollin’s Poe’s Seductive Influence did.
Poe’s influence is not limited to literature. The visual arts and the
cinema also show the marks of Poe’s legacy. We are tempted to claim
that it could hardly be otherwise, given the interest that Poe himself
had in the visual arts, as attested by the numerous mentions of painters
in his writing, and this is brilliantly researched by Barbara Cantalupo in
Poe and the Visual Arts (2014a). Poe’s legacy in this field is represented
by the host of painters who illustrated the large number of editions of
his work. This is an exciting field of research in Poe studies, one in
which Pollin made a previous contribution with his Images of Poe’s
Works: A Comprehensive Catalogue of Illustrations (1995), and which
has recently led to other interesting work, such as Margarita Rigal-
Aragó n and Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno’s The Portrayal of the Grotesque
in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated Editions of Edgar Allan Poe
(1884) (2017), a book that presents new readings of how Poe has been
interpreted by painters. They go beyond the analysis of illustrations to
reassess Poe’s life and work, discussing some of his portraits.
Intermedial studies offer new perspectives by exploring the ways in
which a literary text is transposed into another discourse. In this sense,
studies on ekphrasis, such as that by Rigal-Aragó n and Gonzá lez-
Moreno, may help us to understand Poe’s legacy in fresh ways, as
studies of filmic adaptations have also done.
Such film adaptations are linked to an interest in Poe as a popular
icon. Without doubt, his morbid and bizarre stories have attracted a
number of artists from the realm of popular culture. Roger Corman’s
movies are a good example. There are others, such as Jean Epstein,
whose 1928 film La Chute de la Maison Usher was possibly influenced
by the Surrealists’ interpretations of Poe’s stories. Much more
intriguing are the connections to Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini,
Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim, as Scott Peeples explores in The Afterlife
of Edgar Allan Poe (2007). In any case, beyond the comparison of
motifs, adaptations of plots, and other traditional studies, intermedial
analyses will open up new avenues for understanding why we are still
seduced by Poe in such a variety of ways.
One of the most recent achievements in the study of Poe’s life and
work is the monumental Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019a).
Its editors, J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, have sought to compile
a compendium of new developments in Poe criticism, including
examinations of his legacy. For instance, Jeffrey Weinstock reflects on
Poe’s influence in postmodern culture and suggests that the
postmodern elements in Poe’s writing certainly anticipated, and
influenced, what other authors began doing 100 years later (719). Poe’s
well-known influence on Latin American Modernismo is also dealt with
in a contribution by Margarida Vale de Gato, who observes that
Fernando Pessoa’s translations of Poe’s poems into Portuguese feature
“a preference for verbal rhythm,” which, according to Vale de Gato,
might explain why Poe’s poetic reputation in the United States “pales in
comparison to Europe and Latin America” (619). Poe’s visual legacy is
assessed by Barbara Cantalupo, who also develops and extends the
discussion of the influence of Poe in the visual arts. Finally, of special
interest is the advocacy for Poe by three giants of Latin American
letters, Horacio Quiroga, Jorge L. Borges, and Julio Cortá zar, a trinity of
authors who, according to Emron Esplin, can be equated to Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and Valéry (605). These three South American writers not
only advocated for Poe’s oeuvre, but also recreated, imitated, or
translated Poe for a Spanish reading audience.
Retrospective Poe is divided into four parts. Part I, “Poe’s Echoes of
the Classical World and his Current Legacy,” provides the reader with a
general overview of Poe, while offering an invitation to look at classical
and (post)modern readings of Poe’s work, particularly in Greece.
Chapters 1 and 2 offer insights into the presence of the Hellenic world
in Poe, and examine traces of Poe’s literature in nineteenth-century
Greece, respectively. Greek interest in Poe might have been triggered by
his comparison with Lord Byron. In the opening chapter, Harry L. Poe
criticizes T.S. Eliot for having understood Poe’s horror fiction as
representing the whole body of his work. Indeed, part of the
extraordinary breadth of Poe’s writing is the focus on the universal
themes of life and death, love, beauty, and justice, which for Harry L.
Poe evoke two great cultural strands in the Western world: Hellenist
and biblical. This chapter offers a comprehensive assessment of the
classical strand of Poe by analyzing the presence of Hellenic elements in
his poetry and fiction.
In Chap. 2, Dimitrios Tsokanos considers the impact of Charles
Baudelaire’s renditions of Poe’s work on a European readership,
particularly in terms of the presence of the American author in Greece
and the reasons for his late arrival there compared to neighboring
countries. Tsokanos pays special attention to the translations by
Emmanuel Rhoides (1836–1904), a Greek writer, journalist, and
translator who produced the first Poe renditions in Greek in 1877,
offering a less embellished kind of translation, one which would later
come to constitute the Greek face of Edgar Allan Poe.
Chapter 3 looks at the social fascination that death and mourning—
usually the demise of children, infants, and young women—produced in
nineteenth-century popular culture. In it, Eulalia Piñ ero Gil discusses
Poe’s awareness of the impact of these social realities, which he also
experienced in his own life. This chapter analyzes the influence of the
deaths of young women on the deranged personality of many of Poe’s
male characters, who, traumatized by the illness and death of their
loved ones, end up committing transgressive acts in search of a
fetishistic desire for consolation.
Part II, “Poe and Modernism,” offers readings of Poe with a
Modernist perspective. While the break of Modernism with
Romanticism is a truism in the critical response to both literary
movements, the chapters in this section explore and qualify the extent
of that break in particular cases that relate Eliot’s work, both poetry
and criticism, to Poe’s oeuvre. Kevin J. Hayes discussed the influence
Poe had on avant-garde painters in “One-Man Modernist” (2002).
Strangely enough, little research has been done on the influence that he
may have had on Modernist writers despite the Modernist assertions of
the distance that separated Romanticism and Modernism. In this
section, contributors explore the connections, quite frequently silent
and denied, that linked Eliot and Poe.
The first two chapters, Chaps. 4 and 5, present new readings of the
troubling literary relationship that Eliot had with Poe (as indeed he had
with other predecessors such as Samuel T. Coleridge and William
Wordsworth). Viorica Patea contributes a judicious chapter that
explores the influence of Poe on both Eliot and Ezra Pound. For this
purpose she goes back to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry to analyze
the type of influence that Poe exerted over them and then moves on to
examine Poe’s influence on the American Modernists, following the
traditional notion of Poe’s voyage from America to Europe and then
back to America in his development as a cultural icon. Patea analyzes
the Romantic poetics underlying those of Eliot, linking them to the
poetics of Poe to identify a ghostly influence that the latter exercised
over Eliot. The chapter may be read as an exploration of Eliot’s debt to
Poe as well as to the British Romantics, despite all efforts by Eliot to
deny such an influence in his essays on Poe and on the Romantics, and
even in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
In Chap. 5, Stephanie Sommerfeld distinguishes between poeta
ludens, Poe, and poeta doctus, Eliot. Based on this distinction, she
explores their approaches to literature by examining some of the
literary strategies used by both authors, for example the importance of
skill, bathos, intertextuality, or even class, in order to evaluate how
these function in each poet’s work. The distinction Sommerfeld makes
between doctus and ludens illuminates both Poe’s and Eliot’s
approaches to poetry, the main difference being that of the degree of
seriousness with which each writer observed life. Sommerfeld argues
that Poe demythologized transcendence by resorting to satire in his
tales, while Eliot favored transcendence as a way to overcome the
existential crisis of society in the wake of the horrors of the twentieth
century. She concludes that Eliot’s “maturity,” seen through the lens of a
poet writing in the twenty-first century, is less mature than Poe’s
“puerile” writing.
In Chap. 6, Sławomir Studniarz argues that Poe’s literary legacy is
“puzzling and complicated.” He advances the idea that Eliot’s criticism
of Poe was hindered by the influence that Poe exercised over the French
poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He studies
sonority in “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” following Roman Jakobson’s
theory of the poetic text, in an attempt to show that Eliot’s criticism of
Poe was not really criticism, but rather a pretext to write about himself
and the Modernist poetics he defended. Studniarz goes a step further
and gives examples of poets such as William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate,
and Edith Sitwell, to name just a few, who loved Poe beyond their
adolescence, thus rebuking Eliot’s dictum, and suggesting that Eliot’s
essay is a misreading guided by critical prejudice.
In Chap. 7, Bonnie McMullen focuses on the seduction Poe exercised
over Francis Scott Fitzgerald. McMullen considers Poe and Fitzgerald in
terms of their familiarity with the theatrical life, their writing of short
fiction, and their changing fortunes. She analyzes “William Wilson” and
“A Short Trip Home” and seeks points of connection between the two
stories, looking particularly at concrete similarities. She analyzes the
architecture and the townscape, the university lives of the characters,
and, most importantly, the characters themselves, as she makes a
detailed argument that Fitzgerald uses doubles of Poe’s characters in
his own story. In this way, McMullen concludes, Poe becomes the
presiding ghost in Fitzgerald’s story.
Part III, entitled “Poe’s Readership in Spain,” offers a handful of
examples of the ways in which Poe’s fiction has been marketed to young
or adult Spanish-reading audiences. In Hispanic contexts, Poe’s texts
were read and understood differently depending on the readers’ ages.
Editions of Poe’s tales catered to the interests of these specific
audiences, and illustrations were carefully selected by the editors.
 Chapter 8 is an approach to Poe’s literary criticism and aesthetic
reception in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Prior to those decades,
authors and artists from the previous half century had made extensive
use of Charles Baudelaire’s translations of and commentaries on Poe
published in Spain. In their chapter, Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia and
José Manuel Correoso-Rodenas explain that during one of the most
convoluted periods of twentieth-century Spain, a group of critics,
among them Carlos Ferná ndez Cuenca and Josep Farrá n i Mayoral,
managed to subvert the image of Poe created by Baudelaire. These
authors began to offer more academic and historical readings of Poe,
and their critical editions soon became milestones “within the Hispanic
intellectual panorama” (139) and a reference point for national and
international scholarship.
In Chap. 9, Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n
analyze how Poe’s texts were introduced to Spanish readers and how
they were made available to a select audience following a reading based
on “maturity.” In this regard, the inexpensive, abridged editions for
children of Poe’s lesser known stories, published in booklet format
during the first decades of the twentieth century and during the
Francoist dictatorship, contrast with hardcover editions from the 1950s
to the 1990s, which were for adolescents and highbrow audiences,
many of them characterized by evocative illustrations aimed at
suggesting what reflections on the tales readers might have.
Chapter 10 focuses on the Spanish reception of “Berenice,”
particularly on the different (audio)visual representations of this tale in
Spanish popular culture. In their study, Ana Gonzá lez-Rivas Ferná ndez
and María Isabel Jiménez Gonzá lez first examine the work of two well-
known Spanish illustrators and then explore the impact that “Berenice”
had on the Spanish comic genre. Their chapter concludes with a close
study of “El trapero” (“The Ragman”), a loose adaptation of “Berenice”
by Narciso Ibá ñ ez Serrador, a Spanish director, screenwriter, and Poe
lover, who produced one of the all-time favorite TV series in the 1980s,
Historias para no dormir [Stories to Keep You Awake], for Televisió n
Españ ola, Spanish public television.
Part IV, “Poe’s Long and Far-Reaching Legacy,” is a reflection on the
deep impact that Edgar Allan Poe had on the American readership and
on overseas audiences. This section opens with Chap. 11 in which J.
Gerald Kennedy argues that Poe foresaw the collective anxiety and the
“culture of fear” of contemporary society that began to emerge as a
result of the secularization of Western civilization, when scientific
skepticism undermined religious belief. Kennedy sets out to explore
some of Poe’s “troubling texts,” that is, a handful of poems and tales that
show Poe’s theological qualms and illustrate how he anticipated our
culture of fear, foreseeing as he did the proliferation of false narratives
(today’s “fake news”) and the threat of atomic annihilation and
weapons of mass destruction, and even anticipating the threat of
environmental destruction.
In Chap. 12, Jeffrey A. Savoye seeks traces of sentiments of nostalgia
in history up to the time of Poe. In his view, the American author lived
in a cultural environment awash with nostalgia, a longing for the
reinvention of a romanticized Southern past. Nostalgia is a concept that
has gone largely unobserved by Poe scholars in their discussion of his
enduring legacy in the popular imagination, and this chapter analyzes
in detail the national sense of this sentiment and how Poe’s image
benefited from it.
In Chap. 13, John Gruesser offers a comprehensive study of how
“The Gold-Bug” was reproduced in books and journals during the time
of the Jim Crow laws in the United States. Though Jupiter was an
emancipated African American, the caricatural nature of his description
pointed to the veiled racism present in antebellum American society.
Gruesser investigates how Poe’s work has been seen as suitable for
diverse educational purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
despite some of his texts having been seen as including elements of
racism. He analyzes the shift from a readership who would accept
racism before the Civil War to one that would look with suspicion on
that same racism. To make texts more palatable to such readers, editors
would use a range of strategies to conceal the explicit racism of “The
Gold-Bug,” but would continue to reinforce the racial hierarchy of the
period.
In Chap. 14, Marta Miquel-Baldellou analyzes the fascination that
Stephen King has felt for Poe. She reads King’s indebtedness to Poe as a
metaphorical Jungian shadow, linking this concept to Harold Bloom’s
theory of anxiety. She emphasizes intertextual references and the
psychoanalytic content of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The
Monkey,” one of King’s early stories. Some of those references do not
come from Poe but from Marie Bonaparte’s analysis of Poe’s fiction,
leading to a discussion of the similarities of the childhood experiences
of both Poe and King. The doubling of fictive elements, as well as
specularity and sexual drive, become dominant elements in the
analysis. Miquel-Baldellou’s chapter is interesting in itself and also
because it points to the way in which one particular author needed the
ghostly presence of Poe to develop his career as a writer of terror
fiction.
In Chap. 15, Eusebio Llà cer-Llorca analyzes Roger Corman’s famous
adaptation of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Llà cer-Llorca focuses on
strategies of amplification, such as the blending of the plot of “The
Masque” with that of “Hop-Frog,” the addition of characters that do not
appear in the literary text, and the intertextual links that Corman
established with other works of literature. He also examines
architectural elements and the use of colors, time, and characters. By
discussing these narrative elements, Llà cer-Llorca assesses the ways in
which Corman made use of a literary text to create a filmic discourse
that went beyond a simple adaptation of a single story.
The final chapter in the volume is a thought-provoking analysis of
the influence of Poe on Japanese writers. Takayuki Tatsumi explores
twentieth-century readings and interpretations of Poe’s “The Man of
the Crowd,” a tale which inspired writers such as Edogawa Rampo, who
created narratives of city strollers, and Sakate Yoji, whose play The Attic
permits readers to retrace the history of voyeurism, which began with
Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and continued with the Dupin trilogy,
stories which Tatsumi interprets as narratives of city strollers which
redefine “eccentric voyeurs as possible detectives” (299).
The chapters collected in Retrospective Poe attest to the multi-
layered influence that Poe has exerted for close to two centuries, and
the responses to his works by other writers, be they of praise and
emulation or, much more rarely, of harsh criticism. Eliot’s essay, despite
its insensitivity, reveals his reticent attraction to Poe’s work, thus
creating a ghostly figure that will resurface in other authors. The
influence is not limited to the literary sphere. Both in the visual arts and
in the cinema, Poe has been a point of reference, in the process turning
into something close to an icon of pop culture. This shift from the
domain of high culture to that of popular culture might have been
foreseen by Eliot, and indeed might serve to help explain his essay.
Although this book has a structured approach, the editors invite
readers to focus their initial attention on those sections or chapters that
best reflect their interests. As editors, we hope that the volume and its
content will trigger further enriching debates on how Poe’s texts have
been read and understood by his global readership over the course of
almost two centuries.

References
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. Un ensayo autobiográfico. Barcelona:
Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores.
Cantalupo, Barbara. 2014a. Poe and the Visual Arts. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP.
Cantalupo, Barbara, ed. 2014b. Poe’s Pervasive Influence. Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh UP.
Eliot, T.S. 1949. “From Poe to Valéry.” The Hudson Review 2, no. 3
(Autumn): 327–342.
Englekirk, John Eugene. 1934. Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature.
New York: Instituto de las Españ as en los Estados Unidos.
Esplin, Emron. 2018. Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of
Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America. Athens: University of Georgia
Press.
Esplin, Emron. 2019. “Poe and his Global Advocates.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott
Peeples, 597–617. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato. 2014a. “Introduction: Poe
in/and Translation.” In Translated Poe, edited by Emron Esplin and
Margarida Vale de Gato, xi–xxi. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds. 2014b. Translated
Poe. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP.
Esplin, Emron and Margarida Vale de Gato, eds. 2020. Anthologizing
Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons. Bethlehem,
PA: Lehigh UP.
French, John C. 1941. Poe in Foreign Lands and Tongues. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP.
Gonzá lez-Moreno, Fernando and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n. 2017. The
Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated
Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Hayes, Kevin J. 2002. “One-Man Modernist.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 225–240.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Irwin, John T. 1994. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the
Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Kennedy, J. Gerald and Scott Peeples. 2019a. “The Unfolding
Investigation of Edgar Poe.” In The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan
Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, 1–17. Oxford:
Oxford UP.
Kennedy, J. Gerald and Scott Peeples, eds. 2019b. The Oxford
Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Peeples, Scott. 2007. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. Rochester, NY:
Camden House.
Pollin, Burton R. 1995. Images of Poe’s Works: A Comprehensive
Catalogue of Illustrations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Pollin, Burton R. 2004. Poe’s Seductive Influence on Great Writers.
New York: iUniverse.
Quinn, Patrick F. 1957. The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Vale de Gato, Margarida. 2019. “Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An
Impure Legacy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by
J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, 618–640. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Vines, Lois Davis, ed. 1999. Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation,
Affinities. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2019. “Postmodern Poe.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott
Peeples, 718–734. Oxford: Oxford UP.
José R. Ibáñez
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
Acknowledgments
This book is partly a result of the selection of papers delivered at the
Second International EAPSA Conference, “Beyond Childhood and
Adolescence…Growing with Edgar Allan Poe,” organized by the Edgar
Allan Poe Spanish Association in Almería, February 2020, just a few
weeks before the outbreak of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In addition
to the initial screening of conference papers, the editors extended
invitations to other Poe scholars, who kindly agreed to submit
contributions for this volume. As editors, we hope that Retrospective
Poe will find its place as a landmark in the ongoing discussion of Edgar
Allan Poe and his profound influence on global literatures.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all contributors,
who kindly welcomed the idea of participating in this venture. We also
wish to thank the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association (EAPSA) for
their wholehearted support, both during the Conference and with this
volume. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the University of
Almería, in particular CEI Patrimonio, for their much valued help.
Special thanks are also due to the Faculty of Humanities (University of
Almería) and the Lindisfarne Research Group for their financial
assistance. José would like to thank his family, in particular his father,
brothers, and sister, for their constant encouragement. Santiago would
also like to thank his family for their much valued support, and to
dedicate the book to his late father: “Only through time time is
conquered.”
Finally, we would like to extend our sincere thanks to Molly Beck
and Mary Amala Divya Suresh, of Palgrave Macmillan, for their patience
and the invaluable help they have extended to us in all issues related to
publication.
Contents
Introduction:​Re-assessing Poe’s Seductive Art
Part I Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World and his Current Legacy
1 “The Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome”:​
Edgar Allan Poe and the Classical World
Harry Lee Poe
2 Poe’s Arrival in Europe and the Case of Greece
Dimitrios Tsokanos
3 “Darkness There and Nothing More”:​Edgar Allan Poe and the
Popular Culture of Necrolatry and Thanatography
Eulalia Piñ ero Gil
Part II Poe and Modernism
4 Poe Among the Modernists:​A (Ghostly) Reappraisal
Viorica Patea
5 Poe:​Poeta Ludens
Stephanie Sommerfeld
6 “Poe’s Poetics and Eliot’s Poetry:​A Denial of Influence?​”
Sławomir Studniarz
7 Echoes of Poe in the Jazz Age:​The Haunting of F.​Scott Fitzgerald
Bonnie Shannon McMullen
Part III Poe’s Readership in Spain
8 Beyond Baudelaire’s Views of Poe:​Carlos Fernández Cuenca and
Josep Farrán i Mayoral, Literary Criticism, and Aesthetic Reception
in 1930s and 1940s Spain
Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia and José Manuel Correoso-Rodenas
9 Reading, Understanding, and Praising Poe’s Illustrated Oeuvre:​
From Childhood to Old Age
Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno and Margarita Rigal-Aragó n
10 Poe’s “Berenice” in Popular Culture:​Contemporary
(Audio)visual Representations in Spain
Ana Gonzá lez-Rivas Ferná ndez and María Isabel Jiménez Gonzá lez
Part IV Poe’s Long and Far-Reaching Legacy
11 Death, Doubt, and Poe’s Global Ascendancy
J. Gerald Kennedy
12 Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder:​Nostalgia and Poe’s
American Readership
Jeffrey A. Savoye
13 Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” Reading, and Race
John Gruesser
14 Growing up in Poe’s Shadow:​Intertextuality, Jungian
Projections, and the Anxiety of Influence in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Stephen King’s “The Monkey”
Marta Miquel-Baldellou
15 “The Masque of the Red Death” in Literature and Cinema:​Poe’s
Short Story and Corman’s Film Adaptation
Eusebio V. Llà cer-Llorca
16 The Man of the Crowd and His Descendants:​Poe, Rampo, and
Sakate
Takayuki Tatsumi
Index
List of Figures
Fig. 9.1 Front cover for El gato negro by Vicente Buil de la Torre
(Barcelona: Rovira y Chiqués, 1907). (Source: “LyA” Collection/UCLM.
Artwork in the public domain. Photo by authors)

Fig.​9.​2 Front cover for “King Pest” by Manuel Prieto (Madrid:​Revista

Literaria, 1953).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in the public
domain.​Photo by authors)

Fig.​9.​3 Inside illustrated page by Alonso (Madrid:​Maisal, 1980).​

(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in the public domain.​Photo
by authors)

Fig.​9.​4 Color illustration for “The Gold-Bug” by José Segrelles

(Barcelona:​Araluce, 1914).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in
the public domain.​Photo by authors)

Fig.​9.​5 Illustration of “Morella” by Jaime Azpelicueta (Barcelona:​

Editorial Juventud, 1968).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Courtesy of
Editorial Juventud.​Photo by authors)

Fig.​9.​6 Illustration of “Berenice” by Á ngel Bellido (Madrid:​Gisa

Ediciones 1976).​(Source:​“LyA” Collection/​UCLM.​Artwork in the public
domain.​Photo by authors)

Fig. 10.1 Illustration “Los dientes de Berenice” (Berenice’s teeth), by

María Espejo, included in the volume Diez cuentos de terror, by Edgar
Allan Poe (2017b), page 35. (Courtesy of María Espejo)
Fig.​13.​1 “This is a strange scarabæus, I must confess”

Fig.​13.​2 “The lanterns having been lit, we all fell to work”

Fig.​13.​3 “We found ourselves possessed of even vaster wealth than we

had at first supposed”

Fig.​13.​4 “Lor-a-marcy! what is dis here pon de tree?​”

Notes on Contributors
José Manuel Correoso-Rodenas
holds a PhD in English (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and
is an Assistant Professor of English at the Universidad Complutense de
Madrid (Spain). His areas of interest and research are mainly Gothic
literature and Native American studies, in which he has presented
several papers at national and international conferences. He has also
published on all the above-mentioned subjects. Among his recent
publications, some of the most outstanding examples are: “Pintar lo que
no se ve. Ediciones ilustradas de ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) en la
colecció n LyA” (2021) and “Poe in the Age of Spanish Populism:
Conversations between the Word and Image in the Spanish Editions
from the 1930s and 1940s” (The Edgar Allan Poe Review). He has also
edited the volume Teaching Language and Literature On and Off-Canon
(2020).

Fernando González-Moreno
is a Tenured Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain,
where he teaches Art History. His research interests focus on
iconography and illustrated book history. He has studied the illustrated
reception of, among other authors, Edgar Allan Poe, about whom he has
published several articles and book chapters, for example The Portrayal
of the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated Editions of Edgar
Allan Poe (1884): An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Relations Between
the Visual and the Verbal (2017). He co-directs the interdisciplinary
research group “LyA,” which explores the relations among the different
arts, and also co-directs the research project “Edgar A. Poe on-line. Text
and Image” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness. One of the main results of this project is the digital
catalogue-library “Poe Online” (http://www.poeonline.es/).

Ana González-Rivas Fernández

is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at the Autonomous
University of Madrid. Her main interests lie in Anglo-American Gothic
and fantastic literature, comparative literature, myth criticism, classical
reception studies, intermediality, and popular culture. She is the
secretary of the SELGyC (Spanish Association of Comparative
Literature), the secretary of Asteria (International Association of Myth
Criticism), and a member of the Governing Board of the EAPSA (Edgar
Allan Poe Spanish Association). As regards Poe, she has published
several articles on his work and its connection with Greek and Latin
literature, and the reception of his tales and poems in contemporary
popular culture. Moreover, she teaches the course “Edgar Allan Poe and
the Tales of the Fantastic” within the Master’s Degree in Literary and
Cultural Studies in Great Britain and Anglophone Countries
(Autonomous University of Madrid).

John Gruesser
is a Senior Research Scholar at Sam Houston State University in
Huntsville, Texas. His book Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century
American Counterparts (2019) won the Patrick F. Quinn Award for the
best monograph on Poe, conferred by the Poe Studies Association,
which named him an Honorary Lifetime Member in 2020. He is the
author of Race, Gender and Empire in American Detective Fiction (2013)
and A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line
(2022). He edited the essay collection Animals in the American Classics:
How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction (2022) and, with Alisha
Knight, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, by
Pauline E. Hopkins (2021).

José R. Ibáñez
holds a PhD in Modern Languages from Wayne State University, Detroit,
and works as an Assistant Professor in the English Studies Division of
the Department of Philology at the University of Almería, Spain. He co-
edited, with José Francisco Ferná ndez and Carmen Mª Bretones, the
volume Contemporary Debates on the Short Story (2007). He translated
and edited with Blasina Cantizano Una llegada inesperada y otros
relatos (2015), a volume of short stories by Chinese-American author
Ha Jin, which won the 29th translation award of the Spanish
Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN). He has been vice-
president of the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association and currently
serves on the editorial board of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. In February
2020, he organized the 2nd International Conference of the Edgar Allan
Poe Spanish Association (EAPSA), held in Almería.

Alejandro Jaquero-Esparcia
is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
(Spain). His research fields are the theory of Arts during the Early
Modern Period (with a special focus on the relationship between Art
and Poetry) and the interrelation of images and texts. In this sense, he
has studied the relations of theory and visual arts in the narrative and
poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, resulting in publications like the
collaboration in the catalogue 100 Illustrated Milestones of Edgar A.
Poe’s Work: Reasoned Catalogue of the “LyA” Collection (2020) and
“Edgar A. Poe and the Arts: the Artistic Ideology Suggested through
‘The Assignation’” (Revista de Humanidades—UNED, 42 [2021] pp. 33–
58).

María Isabel Jiménez González

holds a BA in English Studies from the University of Castilla-La Mancha
(Spain), where she is working as an Assistant Professor. She has over
twenty years of experience at different teaching levels and institutions
(UCLM, UCAM, CUD, etc.), including high school education. She also
holds a PhD in nineteenth-century American Literature and her
research focuses on the writer Edgar Allan Poe. María Isabel has
attended many conferences, in Spain and abroad, and has published
several articles and book chapters on Poe’s science fiction short stories
and poems. She is also interested in children’s literature, steampunk
literature, and English teaching and learning through ICT, among other
topics.

J. Gerald Kennedy
is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University and former
president of the Poe Studies Association. His books include: Poe, Death,
and the Life of Writing (1987), “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”
and the Abyss of Interpretation (1994), a new edition of the Portable
Edgar Allan Poe (2006), and three edited or co-edited collections of
essays, The Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001); Romancing the
Shadow: Poe and Race (2001), co-edited with Liliane Weissberg; and
Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (2012), co-edited
with Jerome McGann. With Scott Peeples, he co-edited the massive
Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019). His principal contribution
to American studies is his book Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism
and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (2016).

Eusebio V. Llàcer-Llorca
is Full Professor of English Philology at the Universitat de València. He
has taught Spanish and English, and lectured on various subjects,
mainly American Literature and Translation, in the United States and
Spain. He also has broad experience as translator of texts in the literary,
scientific, commercial, and technical fields, and is the author of two
books on translation theory: Introducción a los estudios sobre
traducción: historia, teoría y análisis descriptivos (1997) and Sobre la
traducción: ideas tradicionales y teorías contemporáneas (2004). His
main areas of research are translation theory, discourse analysis, and
American literature, especially about the horror tales by Edgar Allan
Poe, and is co-editor of A 21st-Century Retrospective View about Edgar
Allan Poe/Una mirada retrospectiva sobre Edgar Allan Poe desde el siglo
XIX (2011).
Bonnie Shannon McMullen
is an Independent Scholar. She has taught tutorially at the University of
Oxford and lectured at other universities in Britain, the United States,
Canada, and Japan. Her scholarly publications include articles on
George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She has explored
the influence of Blackwood’s Magazine on Poe’s fiction and critical
writing. In addition, she has investigated Poe’s formative role in the
shaping of a recognizable American idiom. Her work on Poe has
appeared in The Edgar Allan Poe Review and Studies in American Fiction
and she has contributed a chapter, “Poe in Britain: 1852–1914” to
Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons
(2020).

Marta Miquel-Baldellou
is a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Lleida, Spain. She
holds an International PhD in English Philology with a dissertation that
addresses the fiction of Poe and Bulwer-Lytton through a comparative
and biographical approach. Her research in Poe studies focuses on the
influence that Poe has exerted on contemporary popular writers,
mainly Stephen King. In 2016, she was granted an AEDEAN
postdoctoral scholarship to approach King’s fiction from the
perspective of mythcriticism and comparative studies. She is also a
member of the PSA (Poe Studies Association) and the EAPSA (Edgar
Allan Poe Spanish Association). Her articles on Poe’s fiction have been
published in international journals, like The Edgar Allan Poe Review,
and monograph collections, such as Luisa Juá rez’s Poe Alive in the
Century of Anxiety (2011) and Nadia D’Amelio’s Les traductions
extraordinaires d’Edgar Allan Poe (2010), among others.

Viorica Patea
is Full Professor of American and English Literature at the University of
Salamanca, Spain. She is the author of various studies on Dickinson,
Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Sylvia Plath, and
George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad:
Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (1989) and T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land (2005). She has edited various collections of essays
such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (2001) and
Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (2012), which
received the Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book (2013)
from the Spanish Association of American Studies. Together with Paul
Scott Derrick, she has edited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing
Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (2007).

Eulalia Piñero Gil

is Full Professor of American Literature and Gender Studies at the
Autonomous University of Madrid. She is the President of the Spanish
Association for American Studies (SAAS). She has also been a member
of the Board of the European Association for American Studies. She has
published extensively on the American Renaissance, women’s
literature, gender studies, music and literature, American and Canadian
poetry, and comparative literature. She has published many book
chapters on Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and edited a critical edition of his
short stories in Spanish, Narraciones Extraordinarias de Edgar Allan Poe
(1999). She has translated and edited works by American writers such
as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, and John Dos Passos. In 2020, she co-
edited Live Deep and Suck all the Marrow of Life: H. D. Thoreau’s Literary
Legacy.

Harry Lee Poe

is Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University in
Jackson, Tennessee. He is the author of twenty books. His work on
Edgar Allan Poe includes two books, Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated
Companion to his Tell-Tale Stories (2008), for which he won an Edgar
Award in 2009, and Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the
Universe (2012). He contributed chapters to Edgar Allan Poe in 20
Objects (2016) Poe and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and
Anthologizing Poe (2020), and has written a number of articles. He
served for ten years as President of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in
Richmond and is descended from Edgar Allan Poe’s cousin William Poe.

Margarita Rigal-Aragón
is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Her
research focuses on the life and works of Edgar A. Poe. She edited Los
legados de Poe (2011) and Poe’s Narrativa Completa (2013), with
updated information about Poe’s life and works. She co-directs the
Research Group of Interdisciplinary Studies between Literature and Art
(“LyA”). Among other results of this group, we can find The Portrayal of
the Grotesque in Stoddard’s and Quantin’s Illustrated Editions of Edgar
Allan Poe (1884) (2017), “Poe and the Art of Painting” in The Edgar
Allan Poe Review (2018), “Under the Spanish Eye” in Anthologizing Poe:
(2020, edited by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale do Gato), and “A
man must laugh or die: Visual Interpretations of Poe’s Comical and
parodical Tales” in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (2021), all of them
together with Fernando Gonzá lez-Moreno. She is the President of the
Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association.

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Valladolid (Spain) where he
teaches American Literature. His research focuses on the reception of
literature written in English in Spain (Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, P.B.
Shelley) and American short fiction (E.A. Poe, N. Hawthorne, H. Melville,
R. Carver, R. Ford, S. Dybek, among others). He has published Presencia
de Edgar Allan Poe en la literatura española (1999) and En torno a los
márgenes. Ensayos de literatura poscolonial (2008) and has edited
Pioneros. Cuentos norteamericanos del siglo XIX (2011). He has also
translated and edited some of Henry James’ short fiction (2005) and
Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (2019).
Jeffrey A. Savoye
is an Independent Scholar. He is Secretary/Treasurer and Webmaster
for The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He is also an Honorary
Member of the Poe Studies Association. He co-edited with John W.
Ostrom and Burton R. Pollin The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (2
vols., 2008, third edition, revised), the standard edition of Poe’s
correspondence. He is also the author of dozens of articles on Edgar
Allan Poe which appeared in The Edgar Allan Poe Review and Poe
Studies/ Dark Romanticism.

Stephanie Sommerfeld
is an Assistant Professor of North American Studies at Georg-August-
University of Gö ttingen, Germany. Her recent publications include a
chapter on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket in the volume The American Novel of the Nineteenth Century,
which is part of De Gruyter’s series Handbooks of English and American
Studies, and “The Posthumanist Technological Sublime as Cultural
Technique: Poe’s ‘The Man That Was Used Up,’” published in a special
issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. She is the author of
“From the Romantic to the Textual Sublime: Poesque Sublimities,
Romantic Irony, and Deconstruction” in Deciphering Poe (2015) and
“Post-Kantian Sublimity and Mediacy in Poe’s Blackwood Tales,” which
appeared in a special issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review edited by
Sean Moreland, Devin Zane Shaw, and Jonathan Murphy.

Sławomir Studniarz
is an Associate Professor at the University of Warmia and Mazury in
Olsztyn, Poland. His field of research is nineteenth-century and
twentieth-century American Literature, although he has also published
articles on the poetry of Samuel Beckett. He has published three
monographs on Edgar Allan Poe, two in Polish and one in English. He
has edited a volume of essays titled Edgar Allan Poe—artysta i wizjoner
(2013). His two articles on Poe’s poetry have appeared in the Edgar
Allan Poe Review, and one, on his short fiction, in Revista de Estudios
Norteamericanos. His latest book publications are the monograph on
Poe’s poetry The Time-Transcending Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (2016)
and Narrative Framing in Contemporary American Novels (2017).

Takayuki Tatsumi
is Professor Emeritus at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. He has served as
president of the American Literature Society of Japan (2014–2017),
president the Poe Society of Japan (2009–2020), and vice president of
the Melville Society of Japan (2012–). He has also served on the
editorial boards of multiple journals: The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Mark
Twain Studies, and Journal of Transnational American Studies, to name a
few. His major works include: Disfiguration of Genres: a Reading in the
Rhetoric of Edgar Allan Poe (1995); Full Metal Apache: Transactions
between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (2006, the winner of
the 2010 IAFA [International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts]
Distinguished Scholarship Award); and Young Americans in Literature:
The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville
(2018).

Dimitrios Tsokanos
is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough College, UK. His PhD
dissertation, “Intertextual Hellenic Motifs in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales and
Poems,” traces back the Hellenic influence in the works of Poe. He has
published book chapters and articles on Poe: “Hellenic References in
Edgar Allan Poe’s Critique on Contemporary Society” (2016), “‘If doubt
yet Cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus:’ Philhellenic Patterns
in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales” (2016), and “‘The Black Cat’ Revisited: A
Prolegomenon to Poe’s Greek Imitators” (The Edgar Allan Poe Review,
2017), as well as “‘The Black Cat’ and Emmanuel Rhoides: A Note” (The
Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2021).
Part I
Poe’s Echoes of the Classical World and
his Current Legacy
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
J. R. I. Ibáñ ez, S. R. Guerrero-Strachan (eds.), Retrospective Poe, American Literature
Readings in the 21st Century
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09986-1_1

1. “The Glory that was Greece and the

Grandeur that was Rome”: Edgar Allan
Poe and the Classical World
Harry Lee Poe1
(1) Union University, Jackson, TN, USA

Harry Lee Poe

Email: hpoe@uu.edu

T. S. Eliot’s assertion that the works of Edgar Allan Poe belong to

adolescents and have no appeal for adults suggests that Eliot had not
read much Poe (1970, 212). Eliot probably made the mistake, as is often
the case with Poe critics, of projecting Poe’s few horror stories upon the
whole body of his work when he dismissed Poe’s significance in “From
Poe to Valéry.” Poe had a fear that he might be typecast as writing just
one kind of story when his own preference and critical judgment
insisted on variety. While Eliot’s remarks tended to focus on the horror
stories that Poe himself did not like, he also excluded science fiction
and detective fiction from legitimate literature, thus eliminating the
need to recognize Poe’s contribution to the development of two of the
most important kinds of stories told by modern culture.
Rather than discussing Poe’s contribution to the formation of
modern culture, however, this chapter will explore Poe’s continuity
with the classical culture of antiquity. While Eliot made broad
generalizations about the adolescent appeal of Poe’s writing, he did so
without reference to the breadth of what Poe actually wrote and how
he wrote. The three great tasks of adolescence are self-esteem,
independence, and identity. Poe did not deal with these adolescent
issues, except when they might come into play in the psychological
disorder of a character. Instead, Poe dealt with the great universal
themes of life and death, love, beauty, and justice. In so doing, he relied
upon the evocative qualities of the two great strands of Western
culture: the classical culture inherited from the Greeks and the biblical
culture inherited from the Hebrews.1 This chapter will focus on the
classical strand in Poe.
In Poe’s long struggle to establish a monthly journal, he made clear
to his potential financial backers and subscribers that he intended to
produce a more expensive journal that appealed to a core of educated
readers. Poe’s incorporation of the classical world into his prose and
poetry reflects the demands he made upon his readers. He did not write
for children. Poe expected his readers to be familiar with Homer, Virgil,
Aeschylus, and the great body of classical literature. A reader who did
not know the classics would miss much of Poe’s poetry and tales. Poe
did not use classical references simply as symbols or allegory so much
as he used them to evoke and inform in his effort to create an effect on
his readers. Perhaps recognizing the classical in Poe, George Bernard
Shaw wrote of Poe in his centennial year, “He wrote as if his native
Boston was Athens, his Charlottesville University Plato’s Academy…”
(1970, 98).
A cursory glance at Poe’s writings illustrates the part played by the
classical world in his writing. He spoke of Diana, Helen, Pallas Athena,
Monos and Una, Berenice, Eiros and Charmion, and Psyche. He
referenced naiads, hamadryads, Anacreon, Hymen, and Delos. He left
titles in Greek: Zante, Pæan, Eureka, Mellonta Tauta. This chapter will
explore how Poe made use of the classical world in stories and poems.

A Classical Education
In the summer of 1815, young Edgar Poe left Richmond with his foster
parents to spend five years in London while Mr Allan rebuilt his trading
business between England and America. The experience would expose
Poe to many people and places that would percolate into his stories
many years later. In London, Poe began his formal education with the
Dubourg sisters who ran a school in Chelsea around the corner from
Jane Austen’s brother.
Beyond the everyday experience of London, however, Poe could lose
himself in the fabulous collection of the British Museum just around the
corner from the Allan house in Russell Square, a collection augmented
in 1816 by the addition of the Elgin Marbles, which would stoke Poe’s
classical imagination. The recently acquired Rosetta Stone may have
sparked Poe’s lifelong interest in cryptography, which played a central
role in “The Gold-Bug.” The collection of mummies may have been the
origin of his comic tale “A Few Words with a Mummy.”
In 1817, young Poe left the tutelage of the Dubourg sisters to study
at the Manor House School in Stoke Newington, a village a few miles
just north of London. The Reverend John Bransby, a classical scholar
with an MA from Cambridge, presided over the little school. Poe could
not have received a comparable education in Richmond in 1817. This
grounding in the literature of the classical world provided Poe with a
rich vocabulary and cast of characters to draw upon in his poetry and
prose in later years.
Benjamin Fisher deserves to be quoted in full from an important
paragraph on this subject in which he concisely explained the extent of
Poe’s incorporation of the classical world in his work even while
creating the modern world of literature:

Poe’s poems and tales often ‘speak to’ conditions in his day
much more than what I have called the Poe legend seems to
recognize. Poe’s verse may devolve from Classical forms adapted
to poetry in the English language; as do many of his themes. ‘To
Helen’ (1831) may epitomize Poe’s use of Classical legendry. His
education would have familiarized him with lore concerning
Helen of Troy. Poe’s observations about prosody are scattered
throughout his criticism, especially in ‘The Rationale of Verse’
(1848), Classical or Neo-classical underpinnings are strong in
‘Sonnet—To Science,’ his concept of plot and unified effect
devolves from Aristotle, and many of the tales resemble the
Classical dialogue in theme and form. ‘The Colloquy of Monos
and Una,’ ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ or ‘The Cask
of Amontillado’ might be categorized as Poe’s revivals of that
 ancient form. Even when there are not the two-person
interchanges of speech neatly patterned as in these works, the
methodology hovers over many of Poe’s writings. Although the
dialogue is usually thought of as a prose form, the verbal
exchanges in ‘The Raven,’ ‘Lenore,’ ‘Ulalume’ and ‘Eldorado’
show likenesses to the dialogue, whatever may seem atypical. In
Poe’s writings the unusual does not mean the unrealistic, as
readers of ‘Silence—A Fable,’ ‘The Raven’ or ‘The Murders in the
Rue Morgue’ know. (2008, 15)
Though “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” does not contain the
obvious classical artifacts like a bust of Pallas, it represents Poe’s
adoption of an important feature of Greek drama which figures
prominently in almost all of Poe’s horror. The action takes place off
stage or before the beginning of the telling of the tale. The reader must
imagine the blood and gore, for Poe will only allude to it. Rarely does
anyone actually die in a Poe story—before or after, but rarely during.
Much has been written about Poe’s contemporary setting in the
United States and the relationship between his writing and the social
context. One might think that Poe’s attention to the classical world
would be out of step with the United States in the 1830s and 1840s,
except that the still young republic intentionally created images and a
mythos that invoked and evoked the ancient republics of Athens and
Rome. My great-great-great grandfather was named Caius Marcellus
Swift. Henry Clay’s abolitionist cousin was Cassius Marcellus Clay.
Associations with the classical world were fashionable. With its Neo-
classical architecture, the federal city was an intentional effort to
present itself to the world as the embodiment of the classical ideal. To
be an educated person was to have one foot in the classical world. This
trend continued long after Poe’s death, and we hear Abraham Lincoln
borrowing phrases and themes from the funeral oration by Pericles
when he gave his own Gettysburg Address to honor the fallen dead.
The primary way Poe made use of the classical tradition involved
names. Classical names conjure up associations for those who know
them. They do not symbolize so much as they suggest and evoke older
stories, ideas, attitudes, personality traits, and behaviors. Benjamin
Fisher has drawn attention to the way Poe used the same Greek stem
for the names of some of his heroines: Helen, Lenore, Eleonore (Fisher
2008, 41, 75, 83). The name ελένη (elenē) may derive from ελανη
(elanē), meaning “torch,” or from Σελή νη (selēnē), meaning “moon.” In
either case, the stem is associated with the idea of light, and thus the
“radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Because of the
prevalence of classical names in antebellum America, however, not all
classical names found in Poe’s work need have an intended classical
association. Pym’s companion when he set sail was named Augustus,
and the protagonist of Poe’s second novel was Julius.
This brief chapter cannot explore in any depth the ways that Poe
used the classical world in his writing, but some of the more obvious
instances will serve to illustrate the extent to which the classical world
formed part of the fabric of thought and common understanding in
antebellum America.

Poetry
Not surprisingly, Poe’s reliance on the classical world appears in his
earliest poetry, written while he was still studying ancient languages
and literature. This reliance, however, was not the artificial dependence
of youth in aping a fashion for the culture’s most ancient and revered
literature. It was simply the common language and idiom of his modern
world. His familiarity with the classical world continued to be part of
his poetry until the end.

“Tamerlane” (1827)2
Though “Tamerlane” is set in Central Asia, Poe could not help
referencing the classical world. Tamerlane, the military leader, has an
affinity with Caesar of Rome. Tamerlane also referred to his beloved as
Ada, whom Alexander the Great made the Queen of Caria in Asia Minor.

“Romance” (1827)
Anacreon, the lyric poet of the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE,
makes an appearance in “Romance.” Poe also mentioned him in a
catalogue of Greek authors in “Some Ancient Greek Authors,
Chronologically Arranged” in the April 1836 issue of The Southern
Literary Messenger (Poe 1836, 301).
“Sonnet—To Science” (1829)
Diana and her car, naiads, and hamadryads all ornament the landscape
of “Sonnet—To Science.” The naiads; the water nymphs found in rivers,
lakes, and springs; the hamadryads, the spirits who inhabited the trees;
and Diana, the goddess who protected all animal life of the forests,
made nature a place filled with vitality that evoked awe and wonder.

“To-- --” (1829)

In “To-- --” Poe references the Stoic philosophers and Zeno, the pre-
Socratic philosopher famous for his paradoxes, whom Aristotle credited
with developing dialectic.

“To Helen” (1831)

Helen of Troy with her classic face, Nicean barks, naiads, Greece, Rome,
and Psyche all manage to squeeze into the three short stanzas of “To
Helen.” Mabbott summed up the poem aptly when he wrote, “Beauty is
the lasting legacy of Greece and Rome, and its supreme symbol is the
most beautiful of women, Helen, daughter of Zeus, who brings the
wanderer home and inspires the poet” (Mabbott 1969, 1: 164). Poe,
never one to refrain from inventing a new word, may have done so
when referring to Nicean barks. That he capitalized Nicean implies the
place name of Nicea, the coastal town where the early church
formulated the Creed, but the word can also have a double meaning
derived from nike, the Greek word for the means of victory (1:167). Poe
indicated that he wrote the poem in honor of Jane Stanard, the mother
of his childhood friend Bob Stanard, who had first encouraged him to
write poetry (Quinn 1942, 177).

“Israfel” (1831)
The seven Pleiads or Pleiades, the nymph daughters of Atlas and the
companions of Artemis, stop in their tracks in “Israfel.” Poe did not add
the Pleiades to this poem until his revision of 1841 (Mabbott 1969,
1:178).

“Irenë” or “The Sleeper” (1831)

The three Destinies, or the Fates (Greek Moirai, Latin Parcae), with
Irene, goddess of peace, close by the River Lethe of Hades all sleep
through “The Sleeper” (Graves 1957, 33–34, 48–49). The poem includes
the Greek expression “Ai! ai!” (ΑΙ) which Poe accurately translated as
the woeful “alas!—alas!” It refers to the myth of the accidental slaying
of Hyacinthus by Apollo who caused the hyacinth to grow from the
blood of the dead hero whose petals were said to bear the inscription
“ai, ai” (78–79).3

“The Valley of Nis” or “The Valley of Unrest” (1831)

Nis, or Naissus, supposed birthplace of Constantine, has its own poem
in “The Valley of Nis” in which Helen of Troy flits by again. Poe
published the poem in Poems (1831), but revised it substantially in
1836 when he published it in The Southern Literary Messenger. In 1845,
he published it three times, eliminating half the poem and making
minor revisions with each new publication in The American Review, The
Broadway Journal, and The Raven and Other Poems. With these
revisions, he completely eliminated the classical references, and he
changed the name to “The Valley of Unrest” (Mabbott 1969, 1:190).

“A Pæan” (1831)
Poe gives this poem the title of a Greek verse form. A paean (παιαν) was
a solemn song of praise or of victory. In this case, the song is a funeral
hymn, not of sorrow but of victory for one who has overcome death to
enjoy heavenly bliss. Poe addresses his paean to Helen, probably Mrs
Stanard who had recently died.

“Enigma” (1833)
Mabbott assigned “Enigma” to Poe. The poetic puzzle appeared in the
Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833, signed only with the initial P. Based
on the initial and the classical content, and views later expressed by
Poe, Mabbott made the attribution. While praising Shakespeare, the
answers to the puzzle include Homer, Aristotle, Kallimachus, and
Euripides twice.

“Serenade” (1833)
In this short poem, Poe includes references to Elysium, the realm of the
blessed dead; the seven Pleiades, whom he also mentioned in “Israfel”;
and Endymion, who was given the gift of eternal slumber and was
visited each night by the moon goddess Selene (Graves 1957, 210). The
poem is addressed to Adeline, a name of French origin whose root is
derivative of Ada, the Carian queen alluded to in “Tamerlane.”

“The Coliseum” (1833)

“The Coliseum” requires no explanation for it has outlasted the days of
the classical education. It remains a seemingly timeless monument to
the classical age, although a skeleton. It was built by Vespasian and
Titus, the father-son duo who defeated the Jews in the Jewish War of 66
CE, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and seized imperial power after
the forced suicide of Nero.

“Sonnet to Zante” (1836)

Zante, or Zakynthos, an island in the Ionian Sea where Artemis once
wandered and which Odysseus ruled, was singled out by Poe in “Sonnet
to Zante.” Poe attempted to link Zante etymologically with the name of
the fallen hero Hyacinthus, but it is a difficult connection to make.

“Dream-Land” (1844)
In “Dream-Land,” Poe collects the Eidolon of Night and other Ghouls,
the woods of the Titans, and the ultimate distant place of Thule. An
eidolon (εἴδωλειον) was thought to be the phantom of someone dead,
but it also had the idea of an idol. Thule was the northernmost place in
the known world in antiquity, which has been associated with the
islands north of Scotland (Mabbott 1969, 1:345). The Greek word
(θύ ελλα), however, relates to dreadful storms which the Greeks
probably encountered when they ventured so far away from
civilization.

“The Raven” (1845)

“The Raven” has a cold, unyielding bust of Pallas Athena and a
Plutonian midnight for company. We assume that Poe meant Pallas
Athena when he mentioned a bust of Pallas, for antiquity had many who
bore the name of Pallas. Athena took the name when she accidentally
killed her playmate, Pallas, whom some stories call a girl and others call
a boy (Graves 1957, 44–45). Athena was a goddess of war, but not the
goddess of war. She preferred to settle disputes and to extol mercy in
legal proceedings. When forced to combat, however, she always won,
even against Ares, the god of war. The crow is associated with Athena
for bringing her bad news about the tragic death of three women of
Athens. Poe’s raven may have an intended association with Athena’s
black bird (96–99). Pluto (meaning “the rich one” because grain was
the source of wealth, and it came from beneath the earth) is a name for
Hades, the god of the realm of the dead (94, 122).

“Eulalie” (1845)
In this love poem for his wife, Poe invokes Astarte, the Canaanite
goddess whom the Greeks identified as Aphrodite. Astarte regards
Eulalie as her true child and worthy of the devotion of the narrator.

“Ulalume” (1847)
The difficult and strange “Ulalume” includes Diana, Psyche, the
splendor of Sibyl, a row of cypress trees Titanic, and Lethean peace. The
Lethean fields were found in Hades, but they were separated from the
place of punishment by the River Lethe and provided a place of rest for
the virtuous. The Lethean realm belongs to a much later classical
tradition than Homer. The name Ulalume is one of Poe’s many
constructions, but it is based on Latin roots. Mabbott suggested a
connection with the Latin verb ululare, to wail, and the Latin noun
lumen, light (Mabbott 1969, 1:419). Astarte is the Hellenization of the
Middle Eastern fertility goddess Ishtar or Ashtoret and was associated
with Venus, as seen in her depiction in this poem (White 2006, 7, 11–
12).

“To Helen (Whitman)” (1848)

Diana makes another brief appearance in “To Helen (Whitman),” as
does an allusion to the Elysian Fields.
Poe’s poetry receives scant attention from modern scholars. There
are many reasons for this, but one might involve the many classical
references. While classical studies formed the core of an education for
Poe and his world for the preceding 2000 years, few well-educated
people today recognize the sources that he drew upon to paint his
images. Poe expected his audience to know the references which would
allow the reader’s own imaginative interaction with the classical
stories. While reference works are readily available online to identify
classical references, the act of stopping to search breaks the spell.

Prose Works
“The Assignation” (1834)4
Poe named the female character in “The Assignation” the Marchesa
Aphrodite (Fisher 2008, 75). In his earlier version, published as “The
Visionary,” she was the Marchesa Bianca. Aphrodite, known to the
Romans as Venus, was the goddess of sexual desire (Graves 1957, 49).
In creating the atmosphere for this story, Poe packs the conversation of
the narrator and Mentoni with classical references and images. Mentoni
is satyr-like. The stranger has Herculean strength. The stranger
references the remains of an inscription in Sparta, ΛΑΣΜ (LASM), which
he takes to be part of ΤΕΛΑΣΜΑ (TELASMA, a word not found in a
classical Greek or koine Greek dictionary). They discuss a painting of
Venus and of Apollo. The stranger quotes Socrates and indicates Ionian
embellishments. Thus, he sets the stage for a classic Greek tragedy.

“Berenice” (1835)
“Berenice” first appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger in March
1835. Berenice was the troublesome sister and rival of Cleopatra whom
the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt managed to dispatch from this world
like her other siblings. Egaeus, or Aegeus, was the father of Theseus and
King of Athens, for whom the Aegean Sea was named (Tsokanos 2017,
217). The paternity, however, was ambiguous, for Poseidon had also
lain with the mother of Theseus, and Aegeus had failed to produce an
heir through two previous wives (Graves 1957, 323–324). Another
Berenice was the sister and lover of Herod Agrippa II of Judea whose
behavior played a part in prompting the Jewish rebellion of 66 A.D..
“Shadow—A Parable” (1835)
Oinos narrates the events surrounding the funeral wake for Zoilus, a
carping critic of Homer in ancient Greece (Fisher 2008, 64). The wake
takes place under a sinister conjunction of Ares (Mars), Jupiter, and
Saturn. The story is set in the early Hellenistic city of Ptolemais. The
mourners sang the songs of Anacreon whom Poe had also mentioned in
“Romance.” The name Oinos means wine in Greek (οἶνος). Since Oinos
narrates the tale, one might say that the fantastic story is the result of
the wine speaking.

“Ligeia” (1838)
In comparing Ligeia’s beauty with that of the daughters of Delos, Poe
drew upon the classical tradition that the island of Delos was sacred to
Apollo and Artemis, deities of the sun and the moon (Fisher 2008, 75).
The narrator reveals that his marriage was so ill omened that it might
have been presided over by Ashtophet, a non-existent Egyptian deity of
misfortune Poe created probably by joining Ashtoreth and Tophet.
Tophet was the place during the apostasy of Judah where child sacrifice
was made to the god Moloch (Is. 30:33; Jer. 7:31–32, 19:6, 11–14).
Ashtoreth, in turn, is associated with Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, and
Venus (Graves 1957, 244; Morford and Lenardon 2003, 635). Thus, Poe
created a predatory goddess of love. In Ligeia, her husband found the
classic Greek chin which Apollo had only revealed to Cleomenes in a
dream. Her eyes were more profound than the “well” of Democritus
who first propounded the idea that matter is composed of atoms that
cannot be destroyed and that space is an infinite void.

“Siope” (1838)
Also known as “Silence—A Fable,” this story first appeared in the
Baltimore Book, a gift book for 1838. The central figure of interest
appears draped in a Roman toga. The narrator also remarks on the lore
of the sybils, the most famous example being the Oracle of Delphi in
service to Apollo.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “... unselfish kindness of the American missionaries, their
patience, sincerity and truthfulness, have won the
confidence and esteem of the natives, and in some
degree transferred those sentiments to the nation
represented by the missions, and prepared the way for the
free intercourse now commencing. It was very evident that
much of the apprehension they felt in taking upon
themselves the responsibilities of a treaty with us would
be diminished if they could have the Rev. Mr. Mattoon as
the first United States Consul to set the treaty in motion.”

A VISIT HOME
The first decade of Dr. House’s service was drawing to a close
without any apparent need for a furlough, as need was then
understood. He had become acclimated, accustomed to conditions
of Siamese life and was apparently contented with his bachelor
state. That the tropics had proved to be more friendly than he had
expected, is implied in his frequent expressions of surprise at
continued good health, even assuring his friends at home that his
physical condition was better than before he left America. But this
was not the common lot of missionaries in the early days. On the
tenth anniversary of his departure from New York he wrote:
“Of the company of the Grafton two already are dead
and three compelled to return home from broken health.
Mr. Mattoon and I alone are left on the field—besides Mrs.
Mattoon, the eighth of the party.”
The enervating conditions of life in Siam are described with good
understanding by Mr. George B. Bacon in his volume on Siam:
“It is when we remember the enervating influence of the
drowsy tropics upon character that we learn fitly to honour
the men and women by whom the inauguration of this new
era in Siamese history has been brought about. To live for
a little while among these sensuous influences without any
very serious intellectual work to do or any grave moral
 responsibility to bear is one thing; but to live a life among
them with such a constant strain upon the mind and heart
as the laying of the Christian foundations among heathen
must necessitate is quite another thing.
“This is what the missionaries of Siam have to do. The
battle is not with the prejudice of heathenism only, nor with
the vices and ignorance of bad men only; it is a battle with
nature itself.... The fierce sun wilts the vigour of his mind
and scorches up the fresh enthusiasm of his heart....
Therefore I give the greater honour to the earnest men
and to the patient women who are labouring and praying
for the coming of the Christian day to this people.”
When Dr. House parted with his parents in the New York harbour,
it was with the mutual expectation of never seeing each other again.
The separation was intensified in its realism by the slowness of
communication. His message announcing safe arrival in Siam did
not reach his parents until thirteen months after his departure. Their
response to this message was one which stirred his emotions to the
depths and made him oblivious of all around him; it told of his father
and mother and cousins kneeling together upon receipt of the news
and offering thanksgiving for the beginning of his missionary work.
The many friends who wrote letters to him doubtless never
understood what joy they gave him by their messages. After
receiving a consignment of mail he writes: “Their letters do cheer, do
strengthen, do inspire new resolves, and make me ashamed of my
unworthy service.” He records with expressions of esteem the
names of those from whom he receives communications by each
mail; and to one who knows something of the home church these
names stand as a roster of zealous workers, names of families that
continue to the present day.
The affectionate interest of the people was more than individual; it
came to be almost a community interest. The “monthly concert of
missions” saw the old session house filled with people eager to hear
the latest letter from their own foreign missionary. On his part he kept
in mind the day of these church gatherings and, allowing for the
difference of time, he estimated that his Monday morning hour of
devotions corresponded with the Sunday evening at home, and
surmised “in our little session room at Waterford many a fervent
prayer was going up for me and my fellow labourers from those
whose prayers will prevail at the throne of grace.”
It is not surprising that the home church grew mightily in the grace
of giving and developed a generosity which, long before forward
movements, attained a standard of giving more to beneficence than
to their own work and led the Presbytery in their gifts to the foreign
work. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., who served the church as pastor 1863-
9 and later became one of the most powerful public advocates of
missions, bore this testimony to their zeal, on the occasion of the
church’s centennial in 1904:
“I owe much of my own enthusiasm for missions to my
six years in this church. It was most active and aggressive
in this department of service. It had its own missionary in
the field, and kept in living contact with him by
correspondence, gifts and prayer. This missionary
atmosphere I breathed with immense profit, and I was
compelled either to lead my people in missionary work or
to resign my pastorate. My real missionary education
began here in a church far ahead of me in intelligence and
enthusiasm for God’s work.”
No mention of home-going appears in Dr. House’s journal or
correspondence till a letter from his mother, in 1852, shows her
sternly-repressed desire to see her son:
“The Lord has a work for you to do in Siam, and much
as I long to see you I would not call you home from it. But
if health or benefit of mission require it, I would say ‘Come
at once—come home that we may embrace you once
more; and then return with new vigour to help forward that
glorious work which is yet to be accomplished in Siam.’”
More than a year later a joint letter from the parents enlarges upon
the subject. First the father writes:
 “When your health should make necessary that you
should have the invigourating influence of a sea voyage
and our climate, you may tax me for the expense, if I
should be spared. If not, I hope to leave sufficient at your
disposal to relieve your mind from any anxiety on the
subject. I am anxious only for you to be wise and to adopt
the course most likely to prolong your life and to serve
your Master as a missionary. Whether we shall be
permitted to meet again on earth is a small matter
(although there is nothing here that would offer me more
happiness) when compared with the magnitude of the
work in which you are engaged. Therefore I can say with
your dear mother that I cheerfully submit to the disposal of
Him who has crowned our lives with loving-kindness and
who will order all that concerns our children and ourselves
for His own glory.”
His mother then adds:
“I hope that you will not think because I do not ask you
to come home that we do not desire to see you—we do
indeed long for your return that we may see you in the
flesh. But we cannot, dare not ask you to desert your post
which we feel is one of great honour and responsibility;
and we trust you may be made an instrument in the hand
of God for doing much for the interest of the Redeemer’s
kingdom.”
Just at this juncture occurred the beclouding of friendship on the
part of King Mongkut. As the mission work came to a standstill, the
missionaries held a conference to determine their course of
procedure. Dr. House was ready to carry out his long-cherished plan
to transfer his labours to Lao, but the decree forbidding travel
rendered this impossible. The letter of his parents had insinuated
into his mind the alternative of a visit to America. When he casually
mentioned this to his fellow missionaries they gave cordial and
earnest approval. The expectation of the early arrival of a recruit to
their force removed the objection of leaving the Mattoons alone.
Then came the visit of Sir John Bowring, with his eventual offer of a
free passage to Singapore. Availing himself of this offer, Dr. House
left Siam in April, 1855, and sailed for America via England, reaching
home in midsummer.

WELCOME HOME
It was indeed a joyous homecoming. The son had come again to
the embrace of loving parents after an absence of nine years. He
had returned to his native land after many adventures in a strange
country, little known to the Western world. He had returned to a
church that keenly felt the solemnity of her commission to preach the
Gospel and had high reverence for her servants that carried the
banner. He had brought back first hand knowledge of pagan lands
and vivid memories of personal experiences and observations. Then
a returned missionary was more rare than even a departing
missionary. The Church at large was eager to see through the
missionary’s eyes the strange peoples to whom they were sending
the Gospel message.
Numerous opportunities came to Dr. House to tell his story. Large
audiences greeted him wherever he appeared. These opportunities
he used especially to awaken the Church to the importance of the
work in Siam. The periods of obstruction were past. The treaty with
England had just been completed, and the American government
was about to send an envoy to ask for a treaty. The glowing promise
of the sunrise inspired the hearts of people at home to listen with a
ready mind to his appeal. With great joy he secured two ready
recruits to go back with him, Rev. and Mrs. A. B. Morse. Following
this visitation to the churches a new interest in Siam is manifest
through the reports, and there began a series of reinforcements
checked only by the Civil War.

BELATED MARRIAGE
During this sojourn in America Dr. House was married on
November 27, 1855, to Miss Harriet Maria Pettit, formerly of
Waterford. The marriage came as a surprise to most of his friends.
He had so frequently declared that he would never marry that his
change of mind came without warning. His missionary friends had
frequently twitted him on this subject, but in good part he defended
his position. Usually after these banterings he would enter in his
journal the reason why he chose to go out single and why he thought
best to remain unmarried.
His argument was that it would have been an imposition upon a
woman to have led her into a strange world, into a primitive state of
civilisation, afar from kin and friends. He persuaded himself that the
care of a wife, the anxiety for her safety and the responsibility of
rearing children would seriously interfere with his one great purpose,
an undivided attention to the propagation of the Gospel. The
Siamese, among whom polygamy was practised, could not
understand why this one missionary had no wife. Several of the
princes suggested that he take a Siamese woman in marriage, and
one nobleman even offered to provide a wife for him.
However, there are indications that his arguments were as much
to repress his own idea as to confute the bantering. During those
years he was a permanent guest at the family of the Mattoons. He
frequently expresses generous appreciation of sharing the home
comforts of his friends, and confesses that he did not know how he
could have gotten along without this domestic care of Mrs. Mattoon.
Thus while stoically denying the need of a wife he gratefully accepts
the ministrations of the wife of his colleague.
Then, after having married and having fully settled in a home of his
own, his real feelings assert themselves, for he writes, upon return to
Siam:
“And mine, too, is a pleasant home, the one to which
four weary months voyaging have brought me, a
pleasanter home than once—for it has a new inmate.
Taking such a partner into the concern is indeed a great
addition to a bachelor establishment.”
And a year later:
 “You don’t know how nicely we are jogging on in the
good old road of domestic felicity. And when you hear me
say at the end of fourteen months that I am more fully than
ever of the opinion that I have as my companion in my
journey the most suitable one for me that could have been
found had I tarried seven months or seven years longer in
the States, you will allow that, at least, I am contented with
my choice.”
He shows the reversal of mind on this subject complete when, in
1871, he writes:
“I must confess that I feel this wholesale sending out of
unmarried women into the field just now so in vogue in our
church is an experiment.... And I do not think much better
of the sending unmarried young men to some fields. ’Tis a
pity the secretaries of our Board who ought to know the
wisest way do not guide opinion on this subject and more
strongly impress upon candidates who apply to them the
desirableness of making their arrangements before they
leave home—not but what Providence may bless some
favoured mortals more than they deserve.”

ORDINATION AND RETURN

Another event of personal moment to the doctor was his ordination
to the Christian ministry. Before his first departure for Siam he had
been licensed to preach, a Presbyterial authorisation necessary to
give the seal of approval to the preaching which it was expected
would be incidental to the medical profession. But now, having given
himself exclusively to the Gospel work he sought full ordination with
its authority to administer the sacraments and perform the rites of the
church. In January, 1856, he was duly ordained by the Presbytery of
Troy.
Accompanied by the new recruits, Rev. and Mrs. A. B. Morse, Dr.
House and his bride sailed in March, 1856, by way of England and
Singapore, and arrived at Bangkok in July. The reception accorded
Dr. and Mrs. House was an evidence of the position which the
missionary had attained in the esteem of the Siamese. He was the
recipient of many gifts from the Chinese and Siamese servants and
attendants at the mission; while a period of two weeks was largely
occupied with calls from the prime minister, the minister of foreign
affairs, several of the princes, many of the old friends among the
nobles, the old teachers and a multitude of native friends at large.
The welcome was so spontaneous that it gave evidence of a
genuine honour, and of an appreciation of the years of service
rendered by the doctor higher than he had imagined the people felt.
But perhaps the most signal token of esteem on this occasion was
shown by King Mongkut. No advance notice of the arrival of Dr.
House and party having been received, their appearance at the
customs house some miles below the city was a surprise, which in
some manner was quickly heralded to the king, so that when the
party approached the city, officials were waiting to receive them:
“Before we got to our own landing our friendly
neighbour, H. R. H. Prince Kromma Luang Wongsa, hailed
us, and we must needs land at his place. Shaking of
hands was not enough, but his arm was offered in English
fashion ... and thus escorted by the leading prince of the
kingdom was Harriette conducted to her future mission
home, Mr. Mattoon and I following.... And soon our native
church members and teachers and the school children
came flocking around.
“But the king had heard of my arrival and the prince had
a message from him for me that he was waiting to see me
at the palace. So, thither I must go—the prince took me in
his own boat. Some public ceremony was going on, and
the whole court was assembled at the river house in front
of the palace. The king, on a lofty platform handsomely
roofed over, by the water edge; while yet at a distance he
saw me and called out my name, inviting me to ascend
the steps that led to his pavilioned seat, when he shook
hands cordially. His Majesty spoke of the letter he had
received from me while away. Then he said, ‘Your wife has
 come with you!’—and then turning to his courtiers added,
‘Formerly Maw House declared he would not have a wife,
and now he has taken one.’ ‘Oh, your majesty,’ I replied,
‘wisdom has come to me and I have changed my heart in
that matter,’ which made them all smile.
“He then said my wife must come and visit the royal
palace. He had missed me very much. I must come and
live near him. Turning to one of his ministers he said, ‘He
guessed they must build a house over there’ (pointing out
a spot near the palace). I must take an office under the
government. The prime minister told me I must become a
Siamese nobleman.”
Dr. House and Mr. Mattoon were sent for again by the king a few
days later, and availed themselves of this occasion to present to His
Majesty several useful presents sent out by American admirers.

TOURS WITH MRS. HOUSE

While in America, in 1855, the Sunday school of his home church
provided funds for the purchase and outfitting of a boat for touring.
The result was a boat equipped for the work, affording more comfort
than possible in the native boats. Along the side of the small cabin,
lockers were fitted, serving both as seats and place for storage. A
removable table between afforded space for writing or eating. For
the night an extension bridged the space between the lockers, and
this, covered with cushions, made a comfortable double bed. In
December of 1856 Dr. House made the first tour with Mrs. House.
Customs, and scenes in Siam had by this time grown so familiar to
him that his letters home do not contain details as did his earlier
letters. Their first tour together, in company with some of the other
missionaries, was up the Meklong River in western Siam as far as
the town of Kanburi amidst some fine mountain scenery. Several
other trips occurred; one of them to Petrui:
“A fortnight or more,” he writes, “exploring some of the
totally unvisited districts of the eastern portion of the plain
 which constitutes central Siam—you know my passion for
penetrating into remote and unexplored regions and out of
the way places.”
If perchance this enthusiasm conveys the impression that these
journeys were of unmingled pleasure and simple romance it is well to
have that fancy checked by some material facts; for, continuing the
narrative of this trip, the doctor writes:
“Upon review of the tour I can recall but few that I
remember with more satisfaction. But for pleasure—I
cannot say much for a tour. Our confined quarters (cabin
five by seven), the rocking of the boat with every
movement of ours or of the boatmen, the hot sun upon the
roof and sides by day and the myriads of mosquitos as the
evening comes on (and such ravenous merciless
mosquitos, too), the monotony of the scenery on the lower
stream and absence of all that is pretty or picturesque in
the villages and houses of the natives, and last but not
least the universal uproar among all the dogs whenever
one steps ashore anywhere in their villages—all detract
largely from the romance and not a little from the comfort
of a mission tour in this country.”

MARKS OF GROWTH
Dr. House continued to be superintendent of the mission school
after his return in 1856, and although he makes very few references
to this work in his journal from now on, yet there are occasional
items which mark the growth. From this period Mrs. House appears
as a factor in the educational work, but her achievements will occupy
a separate chapter. In August after the return the doctor writes:
“Our school is much enlarged—many applicants to learn
English. The eldest child of the son of the Prime Minister
now comes regularly to Mrs. Mattoon, a very bright lad of
seven. At the request of the king I am teaching two
princes; one of sixteen, his grandson, the other a
 grandson of the late king, a boy of eleven. And by order of
H. M. a dozen of the sons of his servants are now learning
English in our school as day scholars.... There is a
spacious bamboo school house going up in the back part
of our lot.”
This growth, however, was in the educational work. While the
workers did not belittle the importance of the school, they were well-
nigh sick of heart with deferred hopes, a feeling that is reflected in
their report to the Board for the year 1856:
“It requires no little faith to conduct, day after day and
year after year, these patient labours; especially as they
have not resulted in the conversion of those on whom
time, talents and prayers of the missionaries are spent.”
This increase in school was so rapid that shortly after they had
established themselves on the site granted by the king it became
evident that this lot in the city would not allow for the expansion
commensurate with the growth. With the awakening of a desire for
education and of an interest in the foreign religion the earlier
necessity of having a location within the city itself had passed, for
what the mission had to offer was being sought after. Accordingly, a
parcel of ground, the gift of Mr. D. O. King, was obtained on the west
bank of the river in the lower suburbs known as Sumray. There new
buildings were erected, and in November, 1857, the transfer of the
mission was effected to that site, which became the scene of the
most notable achievements of the mission in Bangkok and continues
to the present day the center of a pervasive Christian influence.
At the end of the first year in the new location, Dr. House wrote
home: “School occupies me much of the time. We have a new
Siamese teacher, a most respectable old gentleman; may he get
good from us, saving good.” This teacher was Nai Chune, who, a
year later, became the first Siamese convert. The significance of this
addition to the teaching force is that the pupils are no longer
predominantly Chinese lads, but that the demand for teaching the
Siamese language requires a native teacher.
 The winter season, being free from rains, was the time best suited
for touring in the country. In February of 1858 Dr. and Mrs. House
started up the Meinam to revisit the scenes of their former tour.
Finding the river alive with pilgrims going to Prabat for the annual
veneration of Buddha’s footprint, they decided to join the pilgrimage
as affording an excellent opportunity for distributing tracts. On this
visit to the shrine the visitors did not experience the same opposition
to entering the sanctum as Dr. House had on his first visit.

A PRESBYTERY ORGANISED
The recruits to the mission force so far had been temporary
additions only. Owing to the death of his wife, followed by the failure
of his own health, Mr. Bush was compelled to resign after four years.
Mr. Morse, who went out upon Dr. House’s return, was forced to give
up within two years by reason of health. At the end of ten years there
had been only one net increase in the mission force, Mrs. House. In
1858 two men arrived who became important factors in the work,
Rev. Daniel McGilvary and Rev. Jonathan Wilson, with his wife.
When the announcement was received that these two men had been
commissioned, Dr. House wrote home:
“These two friends became interested in Siam mission
at the time of my visit to Princeton. If they reach us, I shall
have new reason to bless the heavenly Guide who led me
almost unwillingly back to my native land.”
The doctor’s estimate of the reflex benefit to Siam from that trip to
America was all too modest; for that visit was the beginning of an
ever increasing interest in that country on the part of the church and
of a constantly enlarging supply of men and money. Concerning this
visit to Princeton, Dr. McGilvary says in his Autobiography:
“I was entering upon my senior year when it was
announced that Dr. S. R. House, of Siam, would address
the students. Expectation was on tip-toe to hear from this
new kingdom of Siam. The address was a revelation to
me.... My hesitation was ended....
 “The call found Jonathan Wilson and myself in much the
same state of expectancy, awaiting for a clear revelation of
duty. After anxious consultation and prayer together and
with Dr. House, we promised him that we would give the
matter our serious thought; and that if the Lord should
lead us thither we would go.”
With the increase of ordained men on the field, the time seemed
ripe to associate themselves together in the official relationship of a
Presbytery. At an informal meeting in the summer of 1858 the
following call was issued:
“Whereas, in the providence of God there are now in the
mission a sufficient number of ordained ministers to
constitute a Presbytery and as it seems expedient that we,
cut off as we are from the privileges and oversight of our
respective Presbyteries, should meet together from time to
time in a formal public capacity as a judicatory of the
Church of Christ to consult for her best interests in this our
field of labour; and hoping that it may be beneficial to
ourselves and the Church at large,
“Therefore, Resolved, That in accordance with the
resolutions of the General Assembly held in Baltimore in
May, 1848, making provision for ‘the formation of
Presbyteries by the action of missionaries in foreign fields’
a Presbytery be constituted at Bangkok on the first day of
September next, to be called the Presbytery of Siam and
to be composed of the following persons, viz.: Rev.
Stephen Mattoon and Rev. S. R. House, of the Presbytery
of Troy, New York; Rev. J. Wilson, of the Presbytery of
Beaver, Pennsylvania, and Rev. Daniel McGilvary, of the
Presbytery of Orange, North Carolina; and that said
Presbytery be opened by a sermon by Rev. S. Mattoon,
the oldest of the ministers of the mission; and
“Resolved, second, That the day of the opening of the
Presbytery be observed by the members of the mission as
a day of special prayer for the blessing of the Spirit of God
 upon us, and that a special meeting for prayer be held at 9
a. m.”
At the appointed time the Presbytery of Siam was formally
organised, Rev. Samuel R. House being chosen first Moderator and
Rev. Daniel McGilvary being elected Stated Clerk. Mr. Mattoon, who
was about to take a furlough in America, was appointed the first
commissioner to the General Assembly, to meet in Indianapolis the
following spring. Here, again, as in the organisation of the first
church, the missionaries were taking a step in anticipation of the fruit
of faith more than in actual need. Two of the very important functions
of a Presbytery are to oversee the churches and to ordain
candidates for the ministry. But there was only one church in Siam at
the time and there were only two “native” members on the roll; and a
Presbytery could add little to the fellowship of the missionaries
except the formalities. However, the workers in the field were certain
of the harvest and in simple faith they went about setting up the
organisation for the proper care and nurture of the native churches
that were yet to be established.
In December of 1858, when the dry season had returned, Dr.
House, accompanied by Mr. McGilvary, made a twelve-day tour up
the Meinam, commencing labours at Angtong and continuing as far
as Bansaket. The results of the tour were unusually hopeful:
“In two or three instances it did seem as if the Spirit had
prepared their hearts to welcome the doctrine of
Christianity.... I could not but say to my good Brother
McGilvary, who as well as myself was struck with the deep
interest manifested, ‘Surely there must be much prayer
going up for us here in Siam.’ Tears would come in my
eyes as I solemnly urged them to leave their refuge of lies
and trust in a living Saviour, ready and mighty to save.
And on their part they desired to know, not how they might
make merit (the usual question of Siamese), but what they
were to do to secure the salvation, the news of which then
for the first time reached their ears. It seemed like the
dawning of a better day.”
 IX
FIRST THE DAWN, THEN THE
DAYLIGHT
In the annals of missions much has been made of the long years of
patient labour before a first convert was gained in other lands. It is
written of Judson that he preached the Gospel six years in Burma
before a native made confession of the Christian faith. Morrison
patiently taught the Gospel seven years in China before he was
rewarded with one disciple. The Telegu mission in India is described
as one of the most remarkable in the history of missions in the
contrast between the first long fruitless period and then the rapid
growth; and in confirmation it is cited that “at the end of two decades
only one native assistant could be reported, one church with nine
members and two schools with sixty-three pupils.”
But in Siam, from the time Dr. Gutzlaff arrived until the first
enduring convert from among the Siamese was gained, thirty-one
years elapsed. It is true that during those years much of the energy
of the other missions had been directed toward the conversion of the
ex-patriate Chinese, from whom there had been an encouraging
response; none the less, the Siamese were also the object of
constant prayer and faithful wooing. From the time that Dr. House
and Mr. Mattoon reached Siam to devote themselves particularly to
the winning of the Siamese, twelve years and six months passed
before one lone Siamese renounced the faith of his fathers and
acknowledged the Christian religion to be the truth. These
wearisome years of waiting were lengthened in their tediousness by
the chagrin of having impostors simulate conversion for iniquitous
ends.
The story of this remarkable first native convert is best given by Dr.
House in his own way. First under date of March 6, 1859, he writes
home of the promise of the first-fruit:
“I have had a long talk with Nai Chune. Since the fourth
month of last year he has been convinced of the truth of
Christianity. He has broken the necks of his household
gods and melted them. ‘If I think he venerates the gods
still he will go into the temple and do the same.’ Those
stories in their sacred books about its raining diamonds
and gold he regards not like the beneficent miracles of
Christ which I told him.
“I was going to give him some idea of the historical
evidences when he cut me short by saying, ‘I have tried
Buddhism—and what benefit has it been to me? I have
thrown away a large part of my life in studying it. But I was
a child then—God must forgive me.’ He has ceased to
gamble and to drink spirits, to both of which he formerly
was addicted. He says that he sometimes weeps with joy
when he thinks of God’s goodness to him. He prays to
Jehovah, keeps the Sabbath, and for months has been a
faithful attendant on preaching, to which he often invites
his acquaintances, bringing them with him.
“He is an educated man of about forty years, has a wife
but no living children. He was once a priest, in the king’s
own watt for some eight years. At one time he used to call
upon me often and learned several chemical experiments.
Since the mission moved to its new location in his
neighbourhood (where he has a small property) he called
to renew acquaintance. I had much conversation with him
formerly about religion; but he seemed almost too willing
to believe. I mistrusted his motives, past experience
having made me too cautious perhaps. When he called
 subsequently I had no confidence in his sincerity. Mr.
Mattoon, however, thought somewhat better of him.
“He is now the Siamese teacher of our school, and is
very faithful to his duties. The most interesting feature of
his case and what, with other things, has removed my
doubts, is the true moral courage with which he avows his
change of his belief to his countrymen and relatives. I do
not think anything but the grace of God could make a
Siamese brave enough to do this.”
Five months later, the doctor records the reception of the convert
into the Mission Church on Aug. 7, 1859:
“My eyes have at length been permitted to see what has
long been my heart’s desire and prayer to God, the
baptism of a Siamese. Nay, to my unworthy hands has this
privilege fallen, to receive into the visible fold of Christ by
the ordinance of His appointing this new member of the
flock.
“For over twelve years of hope deferred has this great
blessing been sought and prayed for, but ‘sought and
never found’ till now. Blessed be the name of Him who in
His mercy and sovereign grace has been pleased to visit
us with His favour and make the teaching and preaching
of His servants here the means at last of bringing one
heathen soul out of nature’s darkness into the light and
peace of His kingdom.
“Nai Chune, a Siamese, an educated man of nearly
forty years of age, after a satisfactory examination on his
views and experience was today received to our
fellowship by baptism in the sacred name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Ghost. May he walk worthily of the
name he has named today, and be a witness for Christ his
God and Saviour among his countrymen. He appears
remarkably well. He is courteous and intelligent, a true
Siamese gentleman in manners; is serious-minded,
 sedate, seems to realise the goodness of his Heavenly
Father to him.”
The joy of this conversion was soon followed by a shadow of
sorrow. For a little more than three months later occurred the death
of faithful Quakieng. Fortunately the work among the Siamese had
developed so favourably that less emphasis was being placed on the
instruction in Chinese; and in a sense Nai Chune took the place of
Quakieng, but with a transfer of the major effort to the teaching of the
Siamese language.
During this year King Mongkut had finished a new grand audience
hall in connection with the palace, fashioned partly in European
style. At the opening of the hall the king gave a feast to which many
of the European and American sojourners were invited, among
whom were Mr. and Mrs. House. In a letter to his father the doctor
tells privately of a proffer of honour and service made to him by the
king: “H. M. said, ‘You with your wife must come and live here [at the
palace] and have the young princes, my children, for your pupils.’ I
excused myself, my hands being already full.” With the cessation of
teaching by the missionary ladies in the palace, the king had
engaged an English lady, Mrs. Leonowens, as a tutor for some of the
inmates of the palace, including his sons. Apparently, however, her
teaching duties diminished after a time and she was occupied chiefly
as an amanuensis for the king, and she was still connected with the
palace at the time the king made this request of Dr. House.
Whether the king had serious intent in this proposition it is difficult
to judge; but the suggestion does indicate that he still held Dr. House
in high regard and that his estimation for Western education had not
waned. The mission school by this time had become a well-
established, well-organised institution, the management of which
required the full attention of the doctor. His original term of service as
Superintendent continued until 1861, when relinquishment of the
office was apparently due to the fact that he was appointed to open a
new mission station at Petchaburi.

NEW STATION AT PETCHABURI

 Although the work at Bangkok had been steadily growing, no
extension of the field was undertaken until 1861, when a station was
opened at Petchaburi, where Dr. House and Mr. Mattoon had made
several visits. In that year two new missionaries with their wives had
come out in company with Rev. and Mrs. Mattoon on their return
from furlough in America; these were Rev. S. G. McFarland and Rev.
N. A. McDonald. Of the many places where the missionaries had
visited with the hopes of one day establishing a local work,
Petchaburi then seemed the most favourable because the acting
governor had personally solicited the missionaries to provide
teaching of English; and had offered, on condition that they would
teach his son the language, to provide a place for their school.
The Mission had voted to assign Dr. and Mrs. House to establish
the new station. The doctor visited the field, procured a lot and made
ready for the work, and then returned to bring his wife. But the day
before their departure, the doctor had the misfortune to fall from a
horse, sustaining injuries which, at the time, it was feared would
prove to be permanent. Under these circumstances the mission
changed the appointment, and sent instead Revs. Daniel McGilvary
and S. G. McFarland with their wives, who thus became the first
occupants of the new mission.
At this point it will be interesting to note that in his journal, in 1861,
Dr. House records that the missionaries had felt constrained to ask
the Board for an increase in salary from the prevailing six hundred
dollars to seven hundred dollars, giving as a reason that the cost of
living had greatly increased since the country had been opened to
Western commerce, so that articles of provisions had in some cases
increased as much as one hundred per cent. Dr. House himself had
received a patrimony at the death of his father, which he used not
only to supplement his salary for living expenses, but very
generously for assisting in the work of the mission. Entries in the
journal indicate that he had undertaken, at his own expense, repairs
and enlargement of the mission house in which he lived.

THE REMARKABLE STORY OF NAI KAWN

 Within a month after the new station at Petchaburi was opened,
the missionaries reported the extraordinary case of a Siamese who
had come to believe upon God and Christ through portions of the
Scripture that had come into his hands, although he had never seen
a missionary and had never met a Christian. The name of this man
was Nai Kawn. Writing to his family in America under date of July 17,
1861, Dr. House quotes in part from a letter which Mrs. McFarland
had written to Mrs. House giving the story; and in part from Mr.
McGilvary:
“I wish Dr. H. could be here to examine a ‘diamond’ we
have found here (i. e., a native of Petchaburi, which name
means ‘city of diamonds’). We do believe it a true, genuine
diamond, and though it needs to be polished it will one
day shine in our Saviour’s diadem in glory. It seems an
extraordinary case in many respects. The man is a middle
aged Siamese, resides about five miles from Petchaburi
capital; had never seen a missionary, but some of our
Christian tracts and portions of the Scripture—which he
had got from his neighbours—appears to have been the
means of enlightening his mind and converting his heart.
He had taught his little boy the Lord’s prayer and the ten
commandments.”
“Mr. McG. writes: He certainly has the clearest idea of
the Scripture of any heathen convert I have met with. He
literally knows John, Acts, Romans (all the Bible he has
yet seen) by heart; can repeat whole chapters without
missing a word. He evidently studied for months and
years.... Seems delighted to find us, as if his highest wish
had been realised. Wishes to come and live with us at
once to learn more perfectly the Gospel, and to assist to
teach and distribute books. To try his sincerity, no
encouragement was offered him, fearing he might wish
support from the missionary. ‘Oh, no,—he wished no
compensation, as he had enough to live on.’ He has a few
hundred ticals and wants no more. He has settled one son
with three hundred ticals, and the other son he has just left