The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [306]
4 A former criminal who became the head of Napoleon’s security forces, François Eugène Vidocq later published a memoir, which in translation was adapted and serialized in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.
5 A plausible equivalent would be, I tended to them.
6 After the fact, from effect to cause.
7 Of denying that which is, and explaining that which is not.
The Gold-Bug
1 Swammerdamm was a seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and collector of entomological specimens; the title of his major work might be translated The Bible of Nature; or The History of Insects.
2 Poe presumably identified Jupiter as a freed slave to avoid criticism from Northern readers that he meant to idealize slavery. Jupiter’s devotion and simplicity fit a common racial stereotype; yet he later manifests his independence by threatening playfully to beat Legrand.
3 The human-head beetle.
4 Eagerness.
5 When the tale first appeared in the Dollar Magazine, the cipher was correctly represented; in subsequent versions (including the one followed here) Poe inadvertently introduced minor inconsistencies.
The Oblong Box
1 The ship Independence sinks on or about July 4 near the site of the first English settlement in the New World.
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
1 Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) developed a therapeutic treatment for nervous disorders that relied upon “animal magnetism” to place patients in a trance. The “magnetic control” of the mesmerist over the subject anticipated techniques of modern hypnosis.
2 Bedloe seems to refer here to Indian tribes that once inhabited Virginia but which had (by the 1840s) disappeared as a result of conflicts with white settlers.
3 No such venomous leech exists.
The Purloined Letter
1 There is nothing more inimical to wisdom than too much acuteness.
2 An undistributed middle term, which in formal logic produces fallacious reasoning.
3 You can bet that every public idea, every received convention, is nonsense, for it has suited the majority.
4 Ambitus denotes circularity; religio denotes superstition or (in another sense) scrupulousness; homines honesti was a Ciceronian epithet for partisans.
5 The force of inertia.
6 The descent into Hades is easy.
7 Horrible monster.
8 A scheme so deadly, if unworthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.
Gotesqueries The Man That Was Used Up
1 In the magazine world of Poe’s day, to “use up” someone meant to annihilate them with criticism.
2 Written during the second Seminole war, as General Zachary Taylor led the U.S. Army against combined Indian forces in Florida that included some Kickapoos, Poe injects a skeptical note by equating Bugaboo and Kickapoo: In Poe’s usage, a bugaboo (or bugbear) referred to an imaginary, needless object of dread.
3 Weep, weep, my eyes, and dissolve into water! The first half of my life has put the other half in the tomb.
4 Poe here satirizes the national self-adulation that helped to justify Indian removal.
5 In which matters he figured greatly.
6 Poe cites Othello, III, iii, 330-33. Iago, plotting to excite in Othello doubts about Desdemona’s fidelity, remarks that the hero will never again know restful sleep.
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
1 Poe’s reference to the odd eccentricities of the “southern provincialists” alludes to prejudices about the America South, inspired in part by abolitionists whose ideas of reform Poe satirizes by reversing master-slave relations.
2 Numbers 13:33 refers to a race of giants, the sons of Anak, who rule a land that devours its inhabitants.
3 A horrible monster, enormous, deformed, and sightless. In shorter form, the same phrase from Virgil also appears in “The Purloined Letter.”
4 Phalaris, the tyrant who ruled Agrigentum, Sicily, in the fifth century B.C., placed prisoners in a hollow brass bull that amplified their screams.
5 The sheer incongruity of an orchestra of French lunatics playing “Yankee Doodle” in the midst of a revolt hints at American implications.
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