By the time “The Visionary” was reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger (July 1835), Poe had already provided the magazine with several tales not previously published: “Berenice” (March 1835), “Morella” (April 1835), “Lion-izing” (May 1835), and “Hans Phaall” (June 1835). Some of these tales, especially “Morella,” were probably already written even if not necessarily in a final form. For the last of these, however, we have Poe’s complaint to Thomas Willis White, the publisher of the Messenger, in a letter of July 20, 1835: “Hans Phaal cost me nearly a fortnights hard labour and was written especially for the Messenger. I will not however sin so egregiously again in sending you a long article. I will confine myself to 3 or 4 pages” (CL 1:96). If we can take Poe at his word, “Hans Phaal” was a fully new tale, composed close to the time of publication. In mid-1835, Poe was still living in Baltimore, communicating with White by correspondence, actively trying to ingratiate himself with the publisher and clearly hoping for more official employment, as did eventually manifest.“The Visionary” would be followed in the Messenger by “Bon-Bon” (August 1835), “Loss of Breath” (September 1835), “King Pest the First” (September 1835), “Shadow” (September 1835), “MS. Found in a Bottle” (December 1835), “Metzengerstein” (January 1836), “The Duc de L’Omelette” (February 1836), “Epimanes” (March 1836), and “A Tale of Jerusalem” (April 1836). “MS. Found in a Bottle” is suitably acknowledged as being reprinted “From ‘The Gift,’ edited by Miss Leslie.” “Metzengerstein” is the last of these tales that specifies “For the Southern Literary Messenger,” a designation somewhat inconsistently applied, although it is not clear if this inconsistency is a matter of subterfuge or carelessness. (It was common practice to draw the attention of subscribers to new, and presumably exclusive material.) Along with “Bon-Bon,” the tales “Loss of Breath,” “The Duc de L’Omelette,” and “A Tale of Jerusalem” are all actually reprints from the Philadelphia Saturday Courier of 1832. (“Bon-Bon” was originally printed as “A Bargain Lost,” and “Loss of Breath” as “A Decided Loss.” Both stories were essentially rewritten over the bones of the previous versions, such that Poe may have considered them as new works, and not entirely without cause.) “King Pest” and “Shadow” were presumably newly written, or at least newly completed. “Epimanes,” although submitted to the New England Magazine in 1833, had never been published before, as Poe’s submission to the editors of that magazine was apparently ignored, yet that tale did not bear the claim of having been written for the Messenger. Poe also reprinted a number of poems, and his essay “Letter to B—” (from his Poems of 1831), but mostly he appears to have been too busy writing criticisms to attempt any new works of fiction. (The next tale would be the initial installments of Pym, probably written near the end of 1836, but not published until the beginning of 1837. By the time that Pym appeared in print, Poe had left his role as editor in part due to renewed periods of drinking and in part due to reoccurring battles with White over the editorial tone of the Messenger.)In reprinting “The Visionary,” the Messenger included the usual comment at the top of the text that it was written “For the Southern Literary Messenger,” incorrectly implying that it was an original story previously unpublished. It is unclear whether this misleading claim is a matter of miscommunication or a minor deception on the part of Poe or the editor. Poe surely wanted to continue his presence in the Messenger, and the need to resort to a work already printed, even if revised, may in part be explained by his letter to White of June 12, 1835, where Poe comments that he has recovered from a recent illness. When submitting his story “The Visionary” to White, Poe quite likely intentionally obscured the fact that it had already been printed just a year earlier in another magazine. The changes in the new text are extensive, and suggest that Poe submitted to White a manuscript, not only because a copy of the Lady’s Book with many small markings would be troublesome for the printers to read, but because using printed pages would make it impossible to hide the fact that it had already been printed. A manuscript, even one with perhaps some last-minute changes marked, had the disadvantage of appearing somewhat messy, but it would also have suggested a new composition whether or not Poe expressly stated so.Accepting that “The Visionary” was printed in the Messenger from a manuscript, an open question might be whether Poe still had some older manuscript of “The Visionary” on hand, and just made additional modifications to that, or he took on the more substantial task of writing out a whole new manuscript specifically for the new publication. Presumably there had been an original draft manuscript created as the story was composed, possibly one with many changes or corrections. From this draft, Poe would have made a fair copy manuscript, in which form it was presumably submitted to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833 as part of the selections entered in the contest, from which “MS. found in a Bottle” was ultimately chosen and published. The tight time frame for the printing in the Lady’s Book strongly suggests that Poe simply sent them the manuscript that had been returned unused by the Visiter. In preparing the story for publication in the Lady’s Book, that manuscript was destroyed by the typesetters, as was the common practice. With the printed form in hand, it was unlikely that Poe would have kept the draft manuscript. I suspect that it is most likely that Poe wrote out a fully new manuscript, incorporating revisions as he went along.Further arguing for an interceding form of a new manuscript for printing in the Messenger is that reading Poe’s handwriting appears to have allowed a new misspelling to creep into the Messenger version of the story, a subtle error that was retained in subsequent printings and has mistakenly become part of the standard text: “that fitful stain of melancholy” instead of “that fitful strain of melancholy.” T. O. Mabbott gives “stain” in his official text, and lists this verbal difference as a variant, retaining what certainly seems like an error. I would suggest that “strain” (being a type of melancholy) makes more sense than “stain” (as if melancholy is itself a disfiguring blemish). The chief rationale for accepting “stain” is that Poe did not change it in any subsequent printing, but it is possible that Poe simply did not notice the error of a single letter that makes a valid word by its presence or its absence. The next printed text would be in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), which was set from the revised copy of the text with additional minor changes marked as it had appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger (from the Duane set). The final reprint appeared in Poe’s own Broadway Journal (for June 7, 1845), with more extensive changes, probably from a copy of the text as it has been printed in the 1840 Tales. The likely error of “stain” persisted unnoticed through this chain of repurposed texts. I disagree with Mabbott in his assertion that the Griswold text, which also reads “stain,” contained authorized changes. If Griswold did indeed merely copy the story from the Broadway Journal, which is my assumption, it does not constitute another vote in favor of “stain.”Although Griswold and his typesetters almost certainly never saw the early version of “The Visionary” in the Lady’s Book, that first printing of the story has been known since at least 1894–95. We can be this precise because the story incorporates a version of “To One in Paradise” for which the variants are noted by Stedman and Woodberry in their volume of the poems. That edition is the first to attempt to present full textual variants, but only for Poe’s poetry. Harrison also gives the variants of “To One in Paradise,” but does not list that printing of the tale or give those variants among the texts of the fuller work, suggesting that he knew of the poem only through the variants recorded by Stedman and Woodberry. Copies of the 1834 Lady’s Book, indeed any of the issues for 1830–39, were far less common than for later volumes as the early numbers were printed in smaller runs. The circulation expanded considerably once it became Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1840. Mabbott, who appears to have been the first to evaluate the variants for the tale, was the first editor to have known of the earlier use of “strain” and thus to give it consideration in textual decisions. Had more editors had access to the earlier text, the form of “stain” might have been questioned earlier and “strain” been restored in standard editions.