Letter to the Editor

Abstract

By mistake, the most important illustration was omitted from my “Marginalia” note (“The First Caricature of Poe Reconsidered,” Edgar Allan Poe Review 23, no. 2 [Fall 2022]: 228–32). I am writing now to correct this and explain why I think the illustration is significant as an early, satirical representation not only of the speaker of “The Raven” but also of Poe himself. That the image ran in the first (June 14, 1845) issue of a Bostonian satirical magazine called The Jester at the height of the “Little Longfellow War” and only four months before Poe’s provocative appearance before the Boston Lyceum on October 16, 1845, suggests that it is a previously unnoticed piece of the Poe-Boston puzzle.Obviously not a portrait of Poe, this generic image of a drunkard is surrounded by Poe associations—including the avian title of the poem, the pun in the headnote, and the conspicuously parodic first line. Insofar as Poe was developing a reputation as an intemperate drinker around the time this was published, the insult would have come through if and when Poe saw the magazine, which was noticed in the June 21, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal during Poe’s time as coeditor.In “‘The Raven’: Imitated, Admired, and Sometimes Mocked” (Edgar Allan Poe Review 22, no. 2 [Fall 2021]: 274–311), I discuss “The Turkey” in relation to other early parodies of Poe’s most famous poem. Along with this illustration, the text of “The Turkey” transforms Poe’s grieving, haunted, and romantic speaker into an impoverished and violent drunkard. Supported by the Staggering Man silhouette, “The Turkey,” largely unnoticed until now, is the most snarky parody of “The Raven” published during Poe’s lifetime and the most defamatory Bostonian salvo in the Longfellow War.The recovery of “The Turkey” as it ran in The Jester raises two questions. First, is the Staggering Man silhouette—published three and a half years before Darley’s Tomahawk Man appeared in the January 3, 1849, issue of Holden’s Dollar Magazine—the earliest satirical representation of Poe? And, second, could seeing it and reading “The Turkey” have intensified Poe’s sense of anti-Frogpondian grievance in the runup to his arguably self-destructive performance at the Boston Lyceum? Following the lecture, Poe wrote his most scathing comment about the city his mother urged him to love: “We like Boston. We were born there—and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact” (Broadway Journal, November 1, 1845). Can we hear the gobbling of a turkey behind the bitterness of these words?