Poe Read Free

Boston Harbor, with the admonition to her infant son to “love Boston, the place of his birth.” He never did obey that injunction. She was carried to St. John's churchyard, with her son and daughter in attendance.
    In a letter written some twenty-four years later, Poe said of his mother, “I myself never knew her—and never knew the affection of a father. Both died … within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with Adversity, but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.” It seems unlikely that the father died so soon after the mother. Poe was keen upon theatrical effect, even concerning those matters closest to him. But the other claim may be genuine. It is possible, even plausible, that he did not remember knowing his mother. Overwhelming grief may lead to the blessing of amnesia. Those early years may have remained quite obscure to him.
    But they were understood by him in another sense. He hardly knew what the death of his mother meant at the time but, as the years passed, the sense of grief and of loss grew larger and more oppressive. There was something missing. Something precious had gone. He was a perpetual orphan in the world. All the evidence of his career, and of his writing, suggests that he was bound by ropes of fire to the first experiences of abandonment and of loneliness.The image of the dead or dying woman, young and beautiful and good, fills his fictions. We may recall here the lines of Exeter in
King Henry V:
    And all my mother came into mine eyes,
    And gave me up to tears.
    And what of these unfortunate children, deserted first by a father and then unwillingly abandoned by a mother? In her last days, lying upon a straw mattress in a rented room, Eliza Poe had been visited and comforted by what were known in the newspapers as “ladies of the most respectable families.” Among these was the wife of a merchant and businessman, John Allan, who had migrated from Scotland to the land of financial promise. Frances, or “Fanny,” Allan had formed an attachment to the young Poe. She was then twenty-five years old but had no children of her own, and the sight of the forlorn infant had awakened strong sensations within her. She persuaded her husband that little Edgar should be given a home, while Rosalie was taken into the care of another Scottish mercantile family, the Mackenzies. So Edgar, then a small child, was removed to a house of strangers on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Main Street, above the business premises of Ellis and Allan. At his christening on 7 January 1812 he was given the name of his surrogate parents: he became Edgar Allan Poe.
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    The descriptions of the young boy, during these early years in the Allan household, are uniformly favourable. Neighbours in Richmond recalled him as “a lovely little fellow, with dark curls and brilliant eyes, dressed like a young prince;” he was characterised by charm and cleverness, blessed with an affectionate and generous temperament, noted for a frank and vivacious disposition. It sounds almost too good to be true. Little Lord Fauntleroy was nothing compared to him. He danced on the table, to the delight of Fanny Allan's female companions, and recited
The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
He toasted “the ladies” with a glass of sweet wine and water. He was petted, and dressed up, by Mrs. Allan. He seems also to have gained the affection of her husband. John Allan was thirty-one when Edgar joined the family. He was a man of business, but neither dour nor hard; on the contrary he seems to have been keen to the delights and pleasures of life. He already had two illegitimate children, living in Richmond. He must also have had some fellow feeling with the young Poe, since he himself was an orphan.
    Other figures in the Allan family remain anonymous and elusive: they comprise the household of slaves who lived in partitioned quarters. Among them was the “mammy” deputed to care for the young