1860 First ED - Edgar Poe and His Critics by Poe's Fiancée Sarah Helen Whitman
An unusually attractive first edition of Sarah Helen Whitman’s important and deeply personal defense of Edgar Allan Poe, published only eleven years after his death and preserved in its original publisher’s cloth with the publisher’s catalogue at rear.
Author: Sarah Helen Whitman.
Title: Edgar Poe and His Critics.
Publisher: New York: Rudd & Carleton, 130 Grand Street, Brooks Building, corner of Broadway, 1860.
Edition: First Edition, 1860. Although the copyright page bears the date 1859, the book was in fact first published in early 1860 by Rudd & Carleton of New York.
Language: Text in English.
Size: 7.5 x 5 inches.
Pages: 81 pages, followed by a six-page publisher’s catalogue.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s brown ribbed cloth, decoratively blind-stamped to both boards, with the title Edgar Poe and His Critics lettered in gilt within a decorative frame on the front board. Spine lettered and ornamented in gilt. Dark blue coated endpapers. Light rubbing and minor wear at the spine ends and corners, with a few small marks to the cloth, but the binding remains firm, remarkably attractive and well preserved for its age. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good. The text is clean, bright and firmly bound, with only light age toning and occasional scattered foxing, principally to a few leaves as shown. Complete through page 81, followed by the publisher’s catalogue of newly issued books.
Estimate: USD $250–300.
The book: Edgar Poe and His Critics is one of the earliest and most significant attempts to rehabilitate Edgar Allan Poe’s reputation following the damaging posthumous portrait created by Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Whitman states her purpose with unusual directness in the preface, protesting the “perverted facts and baseless assumptions” that had circulated after Poe’s death and offering instead what she considered a more equitable understanding of his character and life.
The work possesses an intimacy few contemporary assessments of Poe could claim. Whitman had known him personally and had been briefly engaged to him in 1848. Her defense consequently combines biography, literary criticism and personal testimony, challenging the emerging mythology of Poe as an isolated and morally compromised figure. Published in 1860, only eleven years after Poe’s death, it remains an important document in the history of Poe biography and the long reassessment of his literary reputation.
The author: Sarah Helen Whitman (1803–1878) was an American poet, essayist and intellectual associated with the transcendentalist and literary circles of Providence, Rhode Island. She met Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, and their intense literary and romantic relationship culminated in an engagement in 1848. Although the engagement was ultimately broken, Whitman continued to admire Poe and became one of the strongest early defenders of both his character and his literary achievement.
Her Edgar Poe and His Critics was written largely in response to Griswold’s hostile account of Poe and became one of the first sustained efforts by someone who had actually known him to contest the darker legend forming around his memory. Whitman’s personal connection with Poe gives the book a particular historical resonance, making it both an important piece of nineteenth-century literary criticism and an unusually intimate artifact of Poe’s posthumous reputation.