Authors and Animals

If Petrarch can have a stuffed cat, then why not a stuffed raven for Charles Dickens?

The truth is, I have no idea if Petrarch stuffed his own cat (or rather, I hope paid a profesisonal to do so), or if some zealous fan fed and cared for the cat after the poet’s death and then stuffed him for the sake of future fans.

Twice this week I have encountered Charles Dickens in places where I didn’t expect to find him, once at the Eastern State Penitentiary. Dickens wrote a chapter in his American Notes about Philadelphia and the prison he toured when it was new, which was featured in the outstanding audio tour they have there. And I ran across him again today at the Philadelphia Free Public Library when I was looking for their collection of Edgar Allan Poe materials. I expected the giant stuffed raven at the end of one hallway to be Poe’s, but it wasn’t.

Dickens supposedly, while writing Barnaby Rudge, which featured a raven as a minor character, sought out a raven to do the character justice and ended up adopting one he named Grip after the character. Scholars have argued that Dickens’ portrayal of Grip was what inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Raven.”

The rare book department of Philadelphia Free Public Library [PFPL], Central Branch not only has an astounding collection of Poe materials (given to them through the bequest of Richard Gimbel—a famous Poe collector), but a substantial Charles Dickens collection as well. Highlights of the Dickens collection include one of his desks (not the one that recently sold for more than $850,000) and a chair, as well as his dear stuffed pet.

Apparently, visitors to the rare book room of the PFPL there to see Poe materials are rare; the archivist I talked to today said they only see about one each month.

But with 200^th anniversary of Poe’s birth, perhaps more fans will stumble upon the raven that may have inspired “The Raven.”

"Sorrow floats", as John Irving might say about one of his own stuffed characters. Sometimes you just can't get away from them.

Edgar Allan Poe House (the New York-Bronx house)

New York’s Poe house, the "cottage" where Edgar Allan Poe lived until his death and where Virginia Clemm Poe died, is set to get a make-over. But this is its second major renovation. The house was moved from its original location many years ago and in 1975 went through a restoration. Because the house at one time was above a subway line, the house has suffered from vibrations that most old homes cannot withstand.

Because Virginia Poe died in this house, the house holds a special claim over Poe fans (especially fans of “Anabelle Lee” and “The Bells”). Poe, perhaps because of his dark short stories and sometimes-grim poetry, holds a beloved place in the hearts of literary tourists. Poe tourism may even be on the rise as new Poe fans are born every day, as teenagers often find Poe's work some of the few assigned readings to which they can relate. E.L. Doctorow put in a NYTimes piece, “All that morbidity is read and lapped up by children.”

Edgar Allan Poe lived in many houses. In 2001, the city of New York lost one Poe house in Greenwich Village to an expansion of the NYU law school. In a compromise with preservationists, NYU developers agreed to keep/rebuild the facade of the house and offer space within the larger building that houses part of the law school. Sadly, they “rebuilt” the building as a false front, using new bricks and salvaging only a 2x8 panel of original bricks that they display inside. A Times reporter likened the façade to the “Cask of Amontillado.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though they’ve bricked up the spirit of Poe inside the new law building.

All of this Poe-house musing is in service of a question, a question about lost houses, as surely despite the façade the Greenwich Village, that house is lost. How does restoration affect the literary spirit of an author’s house? Is it better to lose the house entirely? Is a restored house a lost house? These questions are not new ones, John Ruskin ruminated on the “restoration” of old buildings in Europe almost 160 years ago. It seems, he preferred ruins to restorations:

From John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) Dutton: New York, 1963.

“There was yet in the old some life, some mysterious suggestion of what had been, and of what had been lost; some sweetness in the gentle lines which rain and sun had wrought . . .

Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model will have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton…

But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place” (199-200).

What will happen in the little Poe cottage in the Bronx?

How Buildings Survive

The home that Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas was torn down long ago. It happens all the time. Old houses are razed to make way for new.

I’m interested in how it is that buildings survive. What we can learn from the ones that do? What can we learn from the ones that are lost? Some are saved in my new home city, Philadelphia,

because of their association with a famous person or because they are considered old enough and “historic” enough to be

important. Others, despite their associations and age, are wiped out.

I started this project, researching historic houses in the U.S., while I was living in Lawrence, Kansas, and love and family have inspired my move far from my Oklahoma roots to Philadelphia. Here it is, frankly, quite a bit easier to explore old buildings. Not necessarily just because this is a city where so many historic buildings have managed to survive, but because in this part of the country there is an expectation that it might matter whether or not they do survive. And should they survive, or should they be resurrected (as in the case of the National Park Service’s President’s House Site), it matters a great deal the kinds of stories that are told with them.

I’m most interested, currently, in the intersections of literature and places, real places and imagined ones. What makes folks visit historic places, and what makes people interested in visiting the homes of authors that they admire? What makes folks spend time walking around the small town, Red Cloud, Nebraska in search of Willa Cather or fly halfway around the world to Prince Edward Island to visit an imagined Green Gables? What makes readers invest in a Paris walking tour in search of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? And what forces contribute to the fact that I can visit the Edgar Allan Poe House, where Poe wrote “The Black Cat” but I can’t visit the house that Hughes describes in his autobiographical novel, Not without Laughter?

Here I keep track of my visits to historic sites, research, and adventures in Philadelphia.