Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Women in Poe’s Life

Happy Women’s History Month! Although the Poe Museum celebrates Edgar Allan Poe, there were many women in his life that supported him, inspired him, and helped him find success and fame. Let’s take a look at the influential women in Poe’s life. Eliza Poe was a renowned traveling actress and mother of Edgar Allan Poe….

The Poe Museum + Mending Walls RVA

In honor of Black History Month, we are sharing an Activity Guide dedicated to the temporary exhibit that is currently on display outside of the Poe Museum. This exhibit was created by Mending Walls RVA and is intended to encourage people to start having difficult yet necessary conversations about race and equality. This Activity Guide…

Moldavia: 219 Years Later

At an auction held on June 28, 1825, merchant John Allan purchased a Richmond estate. Actually, he purchased parts of three lots from the late Joseph Gallego and the late John Richard. One of those lots included the mansion nicknamed “Moldavia.” The name was granted by earlier owners, Molly and David Randolph. The brick house included a…

Poe’s Tales of Detective Fiction

MURRAY ELLISON–Urban crime was an area of acute interest in the nineteenth century in America and Europe because the public feared that it was rampant and out of the control of the police. To respond to this concern, Poe demonstrates increasingly complex aspects of ratiocination in each of his three Auguste C. Dupin detective-based tales….

Mellonta Tauta: An Imaginary Journey

Extracted from Dr. Murray Ellison’s MA Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015© In Poe’s Imaginary Journey, “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), the narrator, Pundit, embarks on a balloon trip to outer space in the year of 2848 and writes a letter narrating the details of his journey. The name that Poe gives…

Poe Museum Acquires New Letter

Poe Writes on Illness and Poverty in Poe Museum’s Newest Acquisition RICHMOND–For the first time in 15 years, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia has added an original Edgar Allan Poe letter to its collection. There will be a special viewing of the letter on April 25 from 6-9 p.m. during the first…

“The captain’s gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron clasped folios, moldering instruments of science and obsolete long-forgotten charts”– “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe (1833) Poe illustrated his concerns about the uncertainties and…

Poe’s Balloon Hoax – Part II

Written by Murray Ellison, 2015 As noted in Part I of this column, J. Harris was one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s April 1844 New York Sun columns on the “Balloon Hoax.” As Eric Carlson comments, “In the considerable rush for copies” for the “Balloon Hoax,” they “were sold…

A New Poe Museum Talk

Black Cats & REDRUM The Horrors of Intemperance from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King As part of our Summer Sunday Reading Series the Poe Museum presents a new lecture on the influence of Poe’s intemperance narratives on the horror author, Stephen King. This lecture will be presented by Dr. David Pratt, Ph.D on September…

Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax – Part 1

This article is an excerpt from Murray Ellison’s VCU MA Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science, ©2015 Near the end of his journalistic career, Poe was likely running out of actual science reports to write about that would excite the public’s interest in science as spectacularly as his fictional stories did. Perhaps, by that time,…