The Stolen Poe Daguerreotype

It is, perhaps, one of the most famous portraits in the world, so ubiquitous in print and online that no one seems to realize that the original has gone missing. I refer to the "Ultima Thule" daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, which was stolen along with its large black walnut frame from the photographer's store window at 33 Westminster Street, Providence, sometime in the late 1850's. Daguerreotypes, of course, are "one offs" -- there is no way, strictly speaking, to print another from them -- but one can take a fairly good, though far from perfect, daguerreotype of a daguerreotype, and it was through this means that the "Ultima Thule" portrait has come down to us today, and become so common. Indeed, the source for most reproductions is a third-generation copy at the Library of Congress, which bears its maker's attempt to obtain copyright in 1904. The original can usually be distinguished by its sharpness and fine detail, among other qualities; the detail of such images is phenomenal, as the 'grain' size is nearly microscopic.

But who stole the Poe daguerreotype? And where might it be today? The answer is actually fairly clear: the thief was one Ossian Euclid Dodge, a singer of comic songs, unsuccessful music store proprietor, and scam artist, who on several occasions in the last two decades of his life showed the photograph to others, claiming to have been given it by Poe himself. Dodge, shown here on a sheet music cover (the collection included a ditty about mesmerism -- thus the creepy engraving), rose and fell from fame rather quickly as a singer, and decided to try his fortunes further west, opening a music shop on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. There, in 1860, he lent his daguerreotype to a local portrait painter, whose depiction of Poe does not survive. His fortunes failing there, he moved still further west, ending up in St. Paul, Minnesota. At some point along the way he was married, and had two children, who were still quite young when he packed up and left for London in 1875, taking his wife's inheritance with him and leaving his family penniless. The local paper indicated that he would not be missed:

"Ossian E. Dodge, long notorious for his machine poetry and domestic jars, especially while living at St. Paul. is reported to be editing a paper in London. It will be remembered that he departed not long since with a little fortune, said to belong to his wife, who was left behind."

Dodge, whose journalism consisted of only a few desultory travel pieces, nevertheless took up expensive rooms at the Savoy Hotel, and it was here that John Henry Ingram, Poe's first important biographer, caught up with him.  Ingram had let it be known that he was looking for portraits of Poe, and received word that Dodge had a daguerreotype that he'd be happy to show him.  They met, and Ingram on examining the photograph recognized it as the original of the "Ultima Thule" portrait. It was only after writing to Sara Whitman, Poe's last beau and the original owner of the daguerreotype, that Ingram learned it had been stolen; intrigued, he arranged to meet Dodge again at his rooms at the Savoy. That meeting, alas, never took place, as Dodge died in his bed before he could keep the appointment.

As a foreigner who died with a complicated will in Britain, Dodge's estate was of course taken up by the notorious Court of Chancery. His wife and children made various attempts to represent their interests, and were eventually sent a small box of his possessions; the Poe daguerreotype was evidently not among them. And yet, in the 'unclaimed property' office of Chancery, there still remained a box of materials related to Dodge's estate -- indeed, it may remain there still, somewhere in the National Archives at Kew. How I should like to have a look at that box!  For, although famous today, the image would have stirred little recognition in London in the 1870's, and it may simply never have been noticed, lying among the scattered papers of a notorious reprobate like Dodge.

P.S. those interested in the story will want to visit the E.A. Poe Society of Baltimore's page on the "Dodge" daguerreotype.

Top 10 Books of 2012: An Eclectic List

At this time of year, there's only one thing more inevitable than the Mayan Apocalypse: Top 10 lists of books.  Best Books of the Year. Best young adult fiction. Best children's books. Or (a personal favorite) the 10 Most Frequently Banned books of 2012. But somehow, most of these lists all seem drearily similar; their purpose is usually not to attract interest in the extraordinary, but to anoint the significant, and as a result most of them are filled with the usual suspects.

I'll confess here and now that I don't read a great number of new books in any year. As a professor of English, my annual reading contains much more of the familiar -- the books I'm teaching, often for the fifth, or tenth, or twentieth time. I'm not interested in following (or breaking with) literary canons as such; what I require are durable books, books that can take constant repeating and still disclose unexpected treats: Hamlet, Our Mutual Friend, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, The Haunting of Hill House, Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. But of course I have every opportunity to talk about these, and to a  (relatively) captive audience.  In between teaching and grading papers and my own writing, there's only a narrow space for the new, and I tend to be picky -- I hate disappointment, and don't want to spend any more time than I must with mixed bags and mediocrities.  Why, I often wonder, would someone write at all, if not to finely hone every sentence, and tell a tale whose urgency is equal to the art?

So my list of favorites from 2012 is a rather odd one -- new editions of the classics amplified by the editor's and printer's craft, unexpected posthumous memoirs, and nonfiction which illuminates something little-known or unjustly forgotten.  That's about it in a nutshell.

And so, in no particular order (I hate ranking things as though a book's good qualities could be gauged along the lines of a "Nutrition Facts" sticker -- they can't) here are my top ten. I'll put them in pairs, because quite often it's how books speak to each other that's most vital to their virtues.

My Friend Dahmer and Harvey Pekar's Cleveland. Yes, I'm from Cleveland -- and therefore I am entitled to love it and grouse about it at the same time. And, I like to point out, it's the home of two darkly brilliant figures: Pekar and Derf. Pekar's posthumous production, brilliantly brought to life by Joseph Remnant, aims to do for Cleveland what Joyce did for Dublin. Of course, being Pekar, he never quite gets there, and you realize somewhere along the way that one story will just always lead to another, blotting out the larger picture like a blizzard's worth of 'lake effect' snow. And that's, so very -- well, so very Cleveland. Derf, always a personal favorite, first told the tale of his high-school acquaintance with Dahmer n a 20-page B&W comic format book in 2002; I still love that version, though it's wonderfully extended and complicated by this new, far more substantial meditation on the origins of Dahmer's madness, and the mad mix of naiveté, angst, and long-haired buzzards that was the 1970's in northeast Ohio.

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure and The Annotated Frankenstein That Arthur Conan Doyle's first experience abroad was as a ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaling voyage would seem at first to be as fantastical as one of his wilder tales, but here we have the facts in the case: a beautifully produced facsimile of the diary he wrote and illustrated on the voyage (I've reviewed this book more fully in The Arctic Book Review). And, remarkably, this diary, which opens with drafts of letters home, is particularly reminiscent of that of the fictional Captain Walton of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, now made available in a gorgeous new annotated edition from Harvard University Press. Remarkably reasonable in price ($29.95, but around $20 at many online sites), this handsome volume puts Frankenstein back in the rich historical contexts of its origins, from Arctic sea-voyages to half-abandoned Swiss chateaux, to the intense and fiery relationship between Mary and Percy, and includes numerous fine-reproduced full-color illustrations.

Col. William N. Selig, The Man Who Invented Hollywood and John Walker's Passage These two books stand at opposite ends of film history, but are complementary nevertheless. Erish's study of Selig is, in my view, the most significant and exciting new book on early US film history in many years. Selig was the first to move his studios to Hollywood, the first to create his own stable of animals for use in films, the producer of the first multi-reel blockbuster (The Spoilers), and the man who managed to convince the Pope himself to lift the church's ban on movies. He also shot the first all-Inuit-cast, Inuit-written film ever made, 1910's "The Way of the Eskimo."  Ninety-eight years later, Canadian filmmaker John Walker travelled to the Arctic to shoot his fascinating part-documentary, part-dramatic film Passage, highlighting the efforts of Dr. John Rae in bringing the difficult Inuit testimony of cannibalism among the last survivors of Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to England; Varga's study gives an succinct account of Walker's career, as well as illuminating the details of the production and reception of his film.

Cairns: Messengers in Stone and In Search of the South Pole David Williams's remarkable little book, which I've reviewed in full here, was the best surprise of the year for me: a book about little piles of stones that managed at once to be philosophically engaging and historically detailed, quite literally reading in those stones histories untold anywhere else. And, in a season of books about Amundsen and Scott, there was no better and more visually engaging treatment than Lewis-Jones and Herbert's sturdy volume, which combines beautifully-reproduced photographs of the expeditions and their gear (as well as illustrated ephemera from the era) with  compelling blend or original testimony and engaging historical commentary.

The Last Holiday and Waging Heavy Peace I've been a fan of Mr. Gil Scott-Heron since I saw him perform "Johannesberg"on Saturday Night Live in 1975. His strident but always elegant political messages and personal tales were muted in the 1990's and early 2000's due to personal problems of many kinds, but when he surfaced, as in 1994's Spirits and 2010's I'm New Here, he still had all the verve and sharpness of old.  Both these qualities are richly displayed in his posthumous memoir, The Last Holiday, most of which details a national tour he was on with Stevie Wonder, with tantalizing snippets of what came before and after.  It's a shame he didn't live to complete a fuller and more continuous story, but I'm grateful for what he managed and only wish there were more. And then, from another eclectic soul, we have Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace -- Young, of course, was around to look over the final version of this volume, though you might not know it -- it's a rambling, scrambling, twisting, turning series of hideaways in which the author always seems to have moved on before you get there -- but immensely entertaining and fun along the way.

Bradley Headstones

In the past decade, the movement for education “assessment” has reached a fevered pitch, moving from public elementary and high schools into higher education, at least at most state colleges and universities.  This has been done, ostensibly, in response to a public demand for “accountability,” another loaded word, and this demand has been translated into the most absolute of terms. At my own college, every department and program was, in essence, ordered to develop an assessment plan.  The buzzwords of these plans – rubrics, targets, educational outcomes, and so forth – came along with the orders, though each department was ostensibly free to decide what they would describe as their “outcomes,” and how they would say they would meet them, and measure their success in doing so.

The next step in this utilitarian, quality-control notion of education, of course, was to make sure that these "outcomes," elaborately measured and assessed, were used to reform -- or more precisely, to penalize -- the educators and pupils who failed to meet the chosen benchmarks. It's a notion so forward-looking that it takes one right back to the 1860's, when Lord Palmerston's government promulgated regulations stipulating the each pupil failing their exams on a prescribed subject would result in the school losing 2s. 8d. in the next year's funds. As the eminent Victorianist Richard Altick describes it, "a new premium was put upon rote memory, for throughout the year every effort was bent toward grinding into the child the sentences or the facts the inspector might demand of him." Bradley Headstone, Dickens's dark schoolmaster in Our Mutual Friend, could hardly have been more pleased.

The word "education" comes from the Latin ex-ductere, “to lead forth" and shares a root with “Duke.”  But it can also mean “to draw forth,” and shares this sense with ductile, meaning stretchable or pliable, as with ducts, and duct tape.  On the difference between these two senses a whole worldview depends: if to educate is to lead, to command, to instill by and with authority, then doubtless it makes sense to see how good one’s pupils are at following instructions, mastering principles, and learning protocols.  But if it means more to “draw forth” -- and this is the shade of its meaning I would emphasize -- then it is not a matter of commanding, but of encouraging students to stretch and bend their minds, making pliable the rigid postures into which authority, and life, have pressed us.   The first sense can be measured, up to a point: I’m sure many baby-boomers such as myself remember the 20-item quiz, which began with with “read all questions before you start” and ended with item 20 being “put down your pencil and don’t answer any of the questions.”  But mental ductility, unlike that of physical materials, is almost impossible to quantify, since some part of it necessarily involves breaking the rules, thinking outside of one’s ideological confines, and questioning presuppositions.

There has been, I will admit, an attempt to take cognisance of this vital quality -- the phrase that is usually used is “critical thinking.”  English professors such as myself generally like this phrase; to us it suggests a complex array of thought and capability.  But what is it, and how might we measure it? One current test defines it as “analyzing problems, generating logical and reasonable approaches to solve and implement solutions, reflecting consistent value orientations” (CTAB). Another assessment rubric recently discussed in my department speaks cryptically of “breaking down informational materials,” “using previously learned information in new and concrete situations” and “creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge.” Such definitions offer little encouragement; to me, they sound more like a plan for recycling than a definition of innovative or genuine analysis. But it matters not: in essence, all these plans are, at their foundations, anti-intellectual assaults on genuine learning.  For true learning is not a plan, not a fixed process, and very rarely a readily-measurable thing. As Albert Einstein -- a famously slow learner - observed, "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom."

I've been teaching at the college level since 1986 -- twenty-six years and counting. If this new regime of supposed "assessment" has its day, then higher education as we've known it will soon be coming to a close, to be replaced by a utilitarian yardstick that knows no value other than, or beyond, mere functionality.  Would the last person in the university please turn out the lights?