Correspondence.
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THE SOURCE OF POE'S “SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY.”
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
SIR: A dozen or more of Poe's tales have been traced to their sources Griswold a good many years ago made it clear that the original of “The Pit and the Pendulum” was to be found in a tale in Blackwood's. Professor Woodberry, collaborating with Stedman in their well-known edition of Poe's works, pointed out the sources of “King Pest,” “Hop Frog,” “Metzengerstein,” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” and indicated partial sources for some four or five other stories; and Stedman, in same volumes, touched [page626:] upon Poe's indebtedness to the German E. T. A. Hoffman. Within the last few years Professor Palmer Cobb of the University of North Carolina has examined more minutely the problem of Poe's indebtedness to Hoffmann. And there have been other notes in the magazines. But no one appears have suggested a source for Poe's extravagant tale “Some Words With a Mummy.” The original of this tale be found, I believe, in R. M Bird novel “Sheppard Lee.” This novel was published anonymously at Philadelphia in
1836, and was reviewed by Poe in September of the same year in the Southern Literary Messenger (see “Poe's Works,” Virginia Edition, IX, pp. 126-139). “Some Words With a Mummy” first appeared in the American Whig Review for April, 1845.
The chief incident in Poe's tale, it will be recalled, is the restoration to life of an Egyptian mummy by means of a galvanic battery. Bird's novel recounts a series of transmigrations of the soul of its hero, Sheppard Lee, who had met death by accident while digging one night for the treasure of Captain Kidd. His spirit betakes itself first the body of asthmatic old squire of the neighborhood, then into the body of a Philadelphia dandy, and after other such feats of metempsychosis brings up finally in the person of a slave, nigg*r Tom on a Virginia plantation.
As nigg*r Tom, the hero of the story is suspected of having taken part in a slave insurrection, and is hanged and buried. Shortly after burial, his body is taken up by some medical students, who wish to test their skill with the dissecting knife. But before beginning operations, one of their number suggests that they first experiment on the body with an electric battery, and, this suggestion being adopted, the experiment is made as in Poe's tale and with like results. The spirit of Sheppard Lee then takes possession of the body of one of the students who had engaged the experiment and had been frightened to death by its outcome; and the guise of this young man it soon the good fortune to come across the which it had originally occupied, however, reduced to a state of complete mummification and on exhibition in a collection of curiosities displayed by an old doctor who had lived in the neighborhood of Sheppard Lee's searches after hidden treasure. The spirit, acting in the person of this student, manages to break open the glass case in which the mummy is enclosed and to make its way back into its body, and at the same time Sheppard Lee is fully restored to life again, and the story comes to an end.
It was out of the last two of these episodes, if my theory be correct, that Poe compounded his tale. One furnished the idea of restoring a body to life through the agency of electricity, the other supplied the notion of the resurrection of a mummy. The two episodes are juxtaposed in Bird's novel, and are summarized in the same paragraph in Poe's review. By combining the two, Poe obtained the necessary unity of action, and also increased the absurdity of his story — evidently meant as an extravaganza.
Besides these episodes, there are in Bird's romance two minor details which may have suggested to Poe similar situations in his story. These are, first, the [column2:] snapping, or batting, of the subject's eyes as it begins to show signs of restored animation; and, secondly, the bestowing by the half-resuscitated body of a prodigious blow upon the stomach of the ring-leader of the experimenters. But these minor similarities may be mere coincidences, and of no significance for my purpose — what is almost surely the case with a further coincidence, in that the improbabilities of both stories are explained away on the theory that all had happened in a dream.
I may add that certain parallels between Bird's novel and Poe's more famous story, “The Gold Bug,” are also, in my judgment, accidental; though we find in Bird's story not only the digging for Captain Kidd's gold under a large tree in the depths of a forest, but also in Jim Jumble, with his fears to his master's sanity, and in Sheppard Lee, with his attempts to give the faithful old darkey the slip on the occasion of his excursions in search of gold, faint suggestions both Jupiter and Legrand in Poe's story.
KILLIS CAMPBELL.
University of Texas, Austin, June 10.
