Poe’s Last Jest: The Magazine Prison-House, Colonial Exploitation, and Revenge in “Hop-Frog”

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” in connection with revenge, one of the oldest and richest themes in literature. As the author has done in connection with “The Cask of Amontillado,” this article offers a generalized biographical interpretation of this 1849 story, linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” with its emphasis on “fat,” exploitive “editors and proprietors,” as well as his September 1845 “Marginalia” piece about the sorry state of the American publishing industry. Contending that the story must be read vis-à-vis not only enslavement and slave rebellion, as several critics have done, but also colonization, this article casts doubt on claims that Poe used the tale to settle scores with personal enemies or to revenge himself on the reading public. A brief coda argues that in “Hop-Frog” Poe does not simply avenge himself on those responsible both for his own exploitation as “a poor devil author” and the colonization of American literature generally. Rather, he counterbalances the gruesome, fiery climax with a celebratory compendium of many of his greatest hits through allusions to at least eleven of his writings published between 1835 and 1846.