Poe Read Free Page A

Poe whenever Fanny Allan was elsewhere. We know that in the household lived a young slave called Scipio, and an older slave called Thomas. There were no doubt others. Poe always defended the institution of slavery, for which he seems to have harboured affectionate memories. He owed a largerdebt, too, to the small black community in which his imagination was awakened by stories of graves and charnel houses.
    Poe's maternal grandmother, Eliza Poe, described him as “the Child of fortune” in being fostered by such a kindly couple. But there is of course no record of
his
feelings on the matter. He must have been aware, however, that he was living on the charity and kindness of those who had no true relationship to him; this instilled in him a sense of uncertainty, or of defensiveness. It made him fearful. There is a childhood story of his being driven past a log cabin surrounded by graves, at the sight of which he screamed out, “They will run after us and drag me down!”

The Schoolboy
    I n the late spring of 1815 John Allan decided to remove himself and his family to E ngland. There had been a slump in the fortunes of his business in Richmond, and the mercantile climate of London seemed more propitious. He wanted, in particular, to renew trading relationships with the tobacco importers of the capital. So at the end of June the Allans set sail on the
Lothair
for Liverpool, a journey that would take almost five weeks. The party consisted of John Allan, Frances Allan, Anne Moore Valentine in her capacity as sister and companion of Frances, and the black slave known only as Thomas. They took their small charge with them.
    Poe was on the ocean for the first time. On the pilot boat, riding out to sea, John Allan reported that “Ned [Edgar] cared but little about it, poor fellow.” But the sight of the waves and of the rolling horizon impressed itself upon the imagination of the boy who was to return to it inhis future writing. When they arrived on the other shore Allan reported the six-year-old as asking “Pa say something for me: say I was not afraid coming across the Sea.” This suggests that he was trying to conceal his fear.
    They docked in Liverpool on 29 July, but did not travel directly to London. Instead John Allan decided to visit his relations in Scotland; there were sisters at Irvine and Kilmarnock, and other relatives in Greenock, from where they travelled on to Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scottish grand tour lasted for some two months, and at the beginning of October the Allans took a carriage to London. They rented lodgings in Southampton Row, just south of Russell Square, where they all soon caught cold from the damp and heavy London air. There is a picture of the household, given by John Allan in a letter, where he describes “Edgar reading a little Story Book.” It may be the book that Poe mentioned in an essay some years later, when he remarked on “how fondly do we recur in memory to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe!”
    There was, however, more exacting reading. In early April 1816, Poe was enrolled at a boarding school in Sloane Street superintended by two sisters known as the “Misses Dubourg.” An extant bill from this establishment includes such items as a “Separate Bed,” a “Seat in Church,” “Mavor's Spelling” and “Fresnoy's Geography.” The rest of the curriculum is unknown, but Poe prospered under its regimen. In June 1818, John Allan told a correspondentthat “Edgar is a fine Boy and reads Latin pretty sharply.”
    His progress was such that, a month later, “Edgar Allan” was enrolled for tuition in another school. He became a pupil of the Manor House School, in Stoke Newington, under the aegis of the Reverend John Bransby. It was located in what was then a country village, with an ancient church and a number of fine old houses; Daniel Defoe had once lived in the same street as the school. Here Poe studied Latin,