Visiting with Poe

During our one full day in Philadelphia, my husband had planned that we would visit the Edgar Allan Poe House where Poe lived for about a year in the 1840s and penned "The Black Cat," my very favorite of his short stories.

My beloved husband, who often surprises me with these wonderfully thoughtful plans, had done all the research himself and had told me of them before we left on Tuesday so I would have something fun to look forward to before my panel. We awoke early, took a cab and were at the door of the Poe house minutes before it opened at 9 a.m.

The site, run by the National Park Service, is sparse, with no furniture or re-creations of scenes, but the rangers proved to be downright scholarly in their knowledge of Poe's life and works, and listening to their stories and walking through the largely empty house was a wonderful treat, especially the large painting of "The Raven" and the very chilly and spooky cellar, which likely helped inspire Poe's own descriptions of cellars in many of his stories.

The site also has its own Raven statue and I was happy to find a fake raven for myself at the tiny gift store (more like a few shelves in an ante-chamber to the actual house). I spent almost $100 at the store in teaching aides and books, including a fascinating biography that I started reading immediately.

The visit with Poe seemed to set the tone for a very good visit to Philadelphia where my MLA panel was excellent, and well attended, and my presentation well received. This good recpetion includes the possibility that I may be asked to contribute my paper on Sophia Hawthorne (the topic of the panel) to a special edition of a journal.

I also got to meet Sophia Hawthorne's main biographer, who was one of the panelists and who happens to have lived in Puerto Rico during her childhood. Her work has paved the way for others like me to produce new scholarship on this most intriguing nineteenth-century American woman.

All in all, and except for the heartbreak of having lost one of the brand-new, gold hoop earrings that my husband gave me for Christmas, the visit to Philadelphia was well worth it and a good way to spend one of the last days of 2009.