Another Source for 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjq025
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoIN ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), Edgar Allan Poe names the titles of several books in Roderick Usher’s library. Some are so obscure that it seems highly unlikely that Poe ever encountered actual copies of them. The story’s narrator explains: ‘One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne’. Further describing Usher’s literary tastes, the narrator continues: ‘His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae’. In the first printing of the story, Poe had written ‘Vigilae’, which he later corrected to ‘Vigiliae’.1 Nicolau Eimeric (1320–99) wrote his Directorium inquisitorum as a guidebook for fellow inquisitors. The Rev. Cyrus Mason, a contemporary of Poe, describes the work as follows: ‘This famous book of Eymeric was written about the middle of the fourteenth century. The author was a Dominican, and chief inquisitor to the crown of Arragon, and his work has served as a model for all the regulations which have been in force in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and as authority for all who have written on the subject’.2 Literally translated, the title of the second book means, ‘Vigils for the dead according to the use of the church at Mainz’. Regarding this book, editor Thomas Ollive Mabbott admits, ‘I have not found even printed descriptions accessible in Poe’s day.’3 Actually, references to the two books can be found in a single source, a magazine article that appeared the year before ‘Usher’. Poe took both references from ‘The Bibliophilist’, a short story by Thomas Raikes, which editor Charles Dickens included in the June 1838 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany.4 The American edition of this issue of Bentley’s appeared before the month was out.
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