*Edward Davidson, Poe, A Critical Study (1957), p. 207.
* ‘The Literati of New York’, Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1846.
† For a rather different view, of Poe perversely sabotaging his own success, see Doris V. Falk, ‘Thomas Low Nichols, Poe, and the “Balloon Hoax” ’, Poe Studies vol. 5 (1972), pp. 48–9.
‡ ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’, p. 30.
*Which is precisely what he planned. On 20 December 1843, in fact, John Wise petitioned the United States Congress for permission to cross the Atlantic by balloon. A few months after ‘The Balloon-Hoax’ he even published a notice in the Lancaster Intelligence advertising the attempt, requesting help from seamen of all nations.
*Maunsell B. Field, Memories of Many Men (New York, 1874), p. 224.
† R. E. Shapley in a Philadelphia newspaper, quoted by George E. Woodberry (1894).
‡As he wrily informed Charles Astor Bristed, grandson of John Jacob (Fordham : 7 June 1848).
*See letter to Charles Fenno Hoffman (Fordham : 20 September 1848).
‡To George E. Isbell (New York: 29 February 1848).
* The description is Stephen Toulmin’s.
*Since Einstein a wholly new vocabulary of astronomical collapse has entered the language: white dwarf, quasar, pulsar, supernova, neutron star, black hole. The concept of a ‘black hole’ – an assemblage of matter shrunk to a state so dense as to become invisible – would have particularly appealed to Poe. As early as 1926 R. H. Fowler proposed that a star, which has burned all its fuel, collapses upon itself to form one gigantic, dense super-molecule, or ‘white dwarf’.
*See ‘Lionizing’ (1835) and ‘The Landscape Garden’ (1842).