The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (22 page)

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems,
Tamerlane, and Other Poems
. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe's foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore,
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems
(1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week.

He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of
Poems
, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his
MS. Found in a Bottle
won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only
13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's
Moby Dick
. In 1839 he became coeditor of
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine
in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write
William Wilson
and
The Fall of the House of Usher
, stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe's
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from
Burton's
about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor,
Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine
, in which he printed the first detective story,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
. In 1843 his
The Gold-Bug
won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper
, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote
The Balloon-Hoax
for the
Sun
, and became subeditor of the
New York Mirror
under N. P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the
New York Mirror
of Jan. 29, 1845, there appeared, from advance sheets of the
American Review
, his most famous poem,
The Raven
, which gave him national fame at once.

Poe then became editor of the
Broadway Journal
, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny's” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His
The
Raven and Other Poem
s and a selection of his
Tales
came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote
The Literati of New York City
for
Godey's Lady's Book
(May–October 1846). These gossipy sketches on personalities of the day led to a libel suit.

Poe's wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture
Eureka
, a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes is still uncertain.

(b. Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—d. June 9, 1870, Gad's Hill, near Chatham, Kent)

C
harles Dickens is generally considered the greatest British novelist of the Victorian period. His origins were middle class, if of a newfound and precarious respectability; one grandfather had been a domestic servant, and
the other an embezzler. His father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was well paid, but his extravagance and ineptitude often brought the family to financial embarrassment or disaster. In 1824 the family reached bottom. Charles, the eldest son, had been withdrawn from school and was now sent to do manual work in a factory, and his father went to prison for debt. These shocks deeply affected Charles. Though abhorring this brief descent into the working class, he began to gain that sympathetic knowledge of their life and privations that informed his writings. His schooling, interrupted and unimpressive, ended at 15. He became a clerk in a solicitor's office, then a shorthand reporter in the law courts (thus gaining a knowledge of the legal world often used in the novels), and finally a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.

Much drawn to the theatre, Dickens nearly became a professional actor in 1832. In 1833 he began contributing stories and descriptive essays to magazines and newspapers; these attracted attention and were reprinted as
Sketches by “Boz
” (February 1836). The same month, he was invited to provide a comic serial narrative to accompany engravings by a well-known artist; seven weeks later the first installment of
Pickwick Papers
appeared. Within a few months
Pickwick
, his first novel, was the rage and Dickens the most popular author of the day. Resigning from his newspaper job, he undertook to edit a monthly magazine,
Bentley's Miscellany
, in which he serialized his second novel,
Oliver Twist
(1837–39).

Finding serialization congenial and profitable, he repeated the
Pickwick
pattern of 20 monthly parts in
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838–39); then he experimented with shorter weekly installments for
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840–41) and
Barnaby Rudge
(1841). Exhausted at last, he then took a five-month vacation in America, touring strenuously and receiving quasi-royal honours as a literary
celebrity but offending national sensibilities by protesting against the absence of copyright protection.

Novels continued to tumble forth:
Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44),
Dombey and Son
(1846–48),
Bleak House
(1852–53),
Little Dorrit
(1855–57). Dickens's popularity was ever-expanding. He had about him “a sort of swell and overflow as of a prodigality of life,” an American journalist said, and he cut a dandyish figure in London. His journalistic ambitions at last found a permanent form in
Household Words
(1850–59) and its successor,
All the Year Round
(1859–88), to which he contributed some serialized novels—including
Hard Times
(1854),
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859), and
Great Expectations
(1860–61)—and essays. But in the novels of the 1850s Dickens is politically more despondent, emotionally more tragic. The satire is harsher, the humour less genial and abundant, the “happy endings” more subdued than in the early fiction. This turn was the result partly of political reasons, partly of marital troubles. (The actress Ellen Ternan, 27 years his junior, seems to have become his mistress in the 1860s.)

In April 1858 Dickens began a series of paid public readings, the immediate impulse being to find some energetic distraction from his domestic unhappiness. His readings drew on more permanent elements in him and his art: his remarkable histrionic talents, his love of theatricals and of seeing and delighting an audience, and the eminently performable nature of his fiction. Moreover, he could earn more by reading than by writing, and more certainly; it was easier to force himself to repeat a performance than create a book. His initial repertoire consisted entirely of Christmas books but was soon amplified by episodes from the novels and magazine Christmas stories. A performance usually consisted of two items. Of the 16 eventually performed, the most popular were
The
Trial from Pickwick
and
A Christmas Carol
(1834). Comedy predominated, though pathos was important in the repertoire, and horrifics were startlingly introduced in the last reading he devised,
Sikes and Nancy
, with which he petrified his audiences and half killed himself. Intermittently, until shortly before his death, he gave seasons of readings in London and embarked upon hardworking tours through the provinces and (in 1867–68) the United States. Altogether he performed about 471 times.

Tired and ailing though he was in his later years, Dickens remained inventive and adventurous in his final novels.
A Tale of Two Cities
was an experiment, relying less than before on characterization, dialogue, and humour.
Great Expectations
, though not his most ambitious, is his most finely achieved novel.
Our Mutual Friend
(1864–65), a large inclusive novel, offers a critique of monetary and class values. The unfinished
Edwin Drood
(1870) would likely have been his most elaborate treatment of the themes of crime, evil, and psychological abnormality that had recurred throughout his novels. His farewell reading tour was abandoned when, in April 1869, he collapsed. He died suddenly in June 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly. The most abundantly comic of English authors, he was much more than a great entertainer. The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.

(b. May 7, 1812, London, Eng.—d. Dec. 12, 1889, Venice [Italy])

R
obert Browning was perhaps the greatest English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of the dramatic monologue and of psychological portraiture.

Browning received only a slight formal education, although his father gave him a grounding in Greek and Latin. His first published work,
Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession
(1833, anonymous), although formally a dramatic monologue, embodied many of his own adolescent passions and anxieties. Although it received some favourable comment, it was attacked by John Stuart Mill, who condemned the poet's exposure and exploitation of his own emotions and his “intense and morbid self-consciousness.” It was perhaps Mill's critique that determined Browning never to confess his own emotions again in his poetry but to write objectively. In 1835 he published
Paracelsus
and in 1840
Sordello
, both poems dealing with men of great ability striving to reconcile the demands of their own personalities with those of the world.
Paracelsus
was well received, but
Sordello
, which made exacting demands on its reader's knowledge, was almost universally declared incomprehensible.

Encouraged by the actor Charles Macready, Browning devoted his main energies for some years to verse drama, a form that he had already adopted for
Strafford
(1837). Between 1841 and 1846, in a series of pamphlets under the general title of
Bells and Pomegranates
, he published seven more plays in verse, including
Pippa Passes
(1841),
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon
(produced in 1843), and
Luria
(1846). These, and all his earlier works except
Strafford
, were printed at his family's expense. Although Browning enjoyed writing for the stage, he was not successful in the theatre, since his strength lay in depicting, as he had himself observed
of
Strafford
, “Action in Character, rather than Character in Action.”