Poe’s Taking of Pelham One Two Three Four Five Six

Abstract

I t’s not that Poe hijacked a subway train. Rather, he transformed a narrative train—Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1828 novel Pelham. This essay will focus on six of his transformations from Pelham for six of his greatest tales.1 Scholars have long acknowledged some of Poe’s obligations to Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman. Fred Lewis Pattee wrote in 1923 that “whatever debt [Poe’s short story ‘The Visionary’] owes is to the Bulwer of the Pelham period.” In the 1960s, G. R. Thompson observed Poe’s indebtedness to Bulwer’s novel for elements of “Lionizing,” “Marginalia,” “Ulalume,” and “The Bells.” In the 1970s, Stuart and Susan Levine noted Poe’s borrowing such features as Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise, Crebillon, and Faubourg St. Germain from Bulwer’s Pelham for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Stephen Rachman, in 1995, stated that the epigraph from a chapter in Pelham became the epigraph for “The Man of the Crowd.” The Burton R. Pollin edition, Collected Writings (1981–97), has a number of references to Pelham (see 2:110, 112–13, 181, 214– 15, 409, 495, 501; 4:95, 112; 5:80, 132), to which the Levines’ 2004 edition of Eureka adds another reference.2 Yet there is more. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was a highly successful British novelist whom Poe in February 1836 considered to be “unsurpassed by any writer living or dead” (Writings, 5:121). Although his opinion of Bulwer did diminish over time—perhaps in part because of Horace Binney Wallace’s disparagement of him in the 1838 novel Stanley3—Poe continued to transform passages from Bulwer’s work. And we should not be deterred in our investigation of Bulwer by his modest reputation in our own time—owing, in part, to Snoopy’s use of the now-cliched first line of Bulwer’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (honoring extravagantly bad writing). Bulwer was an important literary figure in Poe’s time; further attention to his Pelham, a “silver fork” novel of urban mystery and intrigue, reveals important additional source material for Poe’s tales. The search that led to my study of Bulwer’s Pelham began in 1982 when I visited Poe scholar Palmer C. Holt at his home in Englewood, Florida; it continued in 2005 when I visited the Palmer C. Holt Collection of the Holland/New Library of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.