The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (54 page)

150
“I think I have already had”:
Ostrum, 1:24.

150
“My determination is at length taken”:
Ostrum, 1:7.

150
“After such a list”:
Silverman, 37.

150
“I am in the greatest necessity”:
Ostrum, 1:9.

150
“Pretty Letter”:
Ostrum, 1:9.

151
“For my little son Edgar”:
Silverman, 38.

151
“I have no energy left”:
Ostrum, 1:42.

152
Sixty-six misconduct citations:
Silverman, 66.

152
“He did not drink as an epicure”:
Baudelaire, 63.

153
Agate lamp:
Allen, 105.

153
Installed a powerful telescope:
Woodberry, 25.

153
“Old wine and good cigars”:
Latrobe, 58.

154
“Capital!”:
Latrobe, 58.

155
Recent scholarship has decisively shown:
See, for example, William H.

Gravely Jr., “A Note on the Composition of Poe’s ‘Hans Pfaal,’” which addresses this question directly. As Gravely points out, Latrobe indicated elsewhere that he and Poe actually met several times while Poe was living in Baltimore. Gravely, 3.

155
He avidly read the literary journals:
Campbell, 168.

155
Use of a test pigeon:
See the discussion of “Hans Phaall” and “Leaves from an Aeronaut” in Pollin, 370–371.

155
“The focus of ten thousand eyes”:
“Leaves,” 64.

156
Latin word for bellows:
Reiss (1957), 307.

156
“Unparalleled adventure”:
In the manuscript Poe prepared in 1842 for the second edition of
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,
the story is entitled

“The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.” In fact, Poe spelled the character’s surname three different ways: Phaall (in the magazine version of the tale and its first book publication), Phaal (in several written references to it), and Pfaall (in the later book publications). Pollin, 457.

158
A lengthy appendix:
This appeared at the end of volume 2 of the 1839
Tales
of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
Poe would enlarge the appendix slightly for a subsequent edition of
Tales,
adding two paragraphs at the end. His

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comments on Cyrano and Tucker, and his assertion of the originality of his story’s “design,” come from that version.

158
“Somewhat ingenious”:
This and Poe’s other comments on the earlier lunar voyages can be found in Pollin, 430–432.

158
“The Flight of Thomas O’Rourke”:
Poe does not cite an author; it was the Irish writer William Maginn. Pollin, 502.

159
“
Verisimilitude
, in the application”:
Pollin, 433.

159
One of the important sources:
See Pollin, 502; Posey, 501. In an earlier essay, J. O. Bailey had suggested that Poe used Tucker’s book itself, not merely the review of it. See Bailey (1942), 522–525.

159
“Much interested in what is there said”:
Harrison (1902), 15:127.

160
“Cotopaxi”:
Cotopaxi is a volcano in Ecuador with an elevation of 19,347 feet.

161
As many as a dozen passages:
Posey, 502.

161
“The two cusps”:
Posey, 505.

161
“Design is original”:
Pollin, 433.

161
Important elements of his critique:
Burton Pollin has pointed out that in his 1839 critique of Locke’s moon series, “Poe directly paraphrased or incorporated material, unacknowledged, from Dr. Dick’s works.” Pollin, 494.

162
“Extraordinary production”:
Pollin, 372.

162
“I will take care”:
Pollin, 375.

162
“Hairbreadth ’scapes and stirring incidents”:
Pollin, 372.

162
“The chief design”:
Harrison (1902), 15:134.

163
He discussed his idea:
Harrison (1902), 15:128.

163
“To give what interest I could”:
Harrison (1902), 15:128.

C HAPTE R 10: “I F TH I S AC C O U NT I S TR U E, IT I S M O ST E N O R M O U S LY

WO N D E R F U L”

167
It was a rainy day:
The August 26, 1835, diary entry of Michael Floy, a nurseryman living on Broadway at Eleventh Street, contains this notation:

“Rainy.” Floy, 177.

168
He worked furiously:
Locke’s friend William Griggs later noted, “The author was compelled to write the greater number of the successive portions as a daily task, amid the distracting avocations and interruptions of an editorial office.” Griggs, 21.

168
The Peterloo Massacre:
The political journal Locke had contributed to in London—the
Republican
—had taken its name from the one founded by radical printer Richard Carlile in the wake of the massacre.

168
“Clear, bold, and forcible”:
Harrison (1902), 15:260.

169
The crater called Endymion:
In fact, Endymion is located on the northeastern limb of the moon, not the western. As Edgar Allan Poe pointed out in his critique of Locke’s moon series, Locke had apparently been misreading Blunt’s lunar map, reversing east and west. Pollin, 429. Burton Pollin, by the way, misidentifies Charles Blunt as Edmund March Blunt, the prominent
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New England mapmaker, and as a result characterizes the Blunt lunar map as

“Locke’s joke.” Pollin, 495.

170
The Cleomedes crater:
Like Endymion, the Cleomedes crater is on the moon’s northeastern, not western, limb.

173
“Ice! Rockland ice!”:
For descriptions of this and other street cries, see the 1834 volume
The New-York Cries in Rhyme,
published anonymously; and Francis S. Osgood’s
The Cries of New-York
(1845).

174
“Besieged by thousands of applicants”:
Griggs, 23.

174
“A fine broadcloth Quaker suit”:
Griggs, 23.

174
“A look of mingled astonishment and contempt”:
Griggs, 23.

175
Twenty thousand copies sold almost instantly:
Griggs, 26.

175
More than forty thousand copies:
Griggs, 4.

175
Sixty thousand:
Benjamin Day gave that figure in his 1883 interview with the
Sun.
This was also the number cited by P. T. Barnum in his earlier
Humbugs
of the World.
Barnum (1866), 202.

175
Looking glasses and mourning pictures:
See Larkin, 144.

175
Day himself was occupied:
O’Brien, 53.

175
“The most talented lithographic artist”:
The
Sun’
s praise notwithstanding, Mr. Baker’s first name is no longer known. In
America on Stone,
the defini-tive history of American lithography, Harry Twyford Peters was unable to establish the identity of either Norris or Baker, though he did cite their Wall Street firm as the producer of the
Lunar Temples
lithograph.

177
No less than fifty thousand dollars:
Barnum (1866), 202.

177
A circulation of more than a few thousand:
For circulation figures of the time, see O’Brien, 11.

177
A daily circulation no greater than 17,000:
Thompson, 26.

178
“As these discoveries were gradually spread”:
Harrison (1902), 15:127.

178
“Not one person in ten”:
Harrison (1902), 15:134.

178
“The construction of the telescope”:
Lossing, 361.

178
“Unquestionable plausibility and verisimilitude”:
Greeley wrote a long, thoughtful reflection on the moon series on the front page of the September 2, 1835, issue of the
New-Yorker.

178
“The majestic, yet subdued, dignity”:
Barnum (1866), 195.

179
“A great talk”:
Floy, 179.

179
“An exceedingly well written article”: The Diary of Philip Hone,
collection of the New-York Historical Society, microfilm reel 3.

180
“Ferdinand Mendez Pinto”:
Mendez Pinto was a sixteenth-century Por-tuguese explorer; the veracity of his adventures, as recounted in his memoirs, was widely questioned.

180
To the
Edinburgh Journal of Science: On the front page of its issue of August 29, 1835, the New Haven
Daily Herald
stated: “According to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, we are likely soon to be made familiarly acquainted with the Man in the Moon, his habits and character, as well as with the Geography and Natural History of the beautiful place of his residence.”

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180
“Yale College was alive”:
“Locke Among the Moonlings,” 502.

181
The tower of its Atheneum:
Musto, 8.

181
“I suppose the magazine is somewhere upstairs”:
Day recalled the incident in the interview he gave to the
Sun
on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, September 1, 1883.

181
He directed them to his editor:
This portion of the story was recounted by Frank O’Brien in his article “The Story of ‘The Sun,’ 1833 to 1918,” which appeared in the
Sun
on March 10, 1918.

181
Olmsted and Loomis did claim that honor:
In a letter to the New Haven
Daily
Herald,
published September 12, 1835, Olmsted and Loomis wrote about Halley’s Comet: “Yesterday morning, August 31st, we had the satisfaction of first observing this interesting body, in the field of Clark’s great telescope.”

182
A letter sent to the New Haven
Daily Herald: The letter appeared on September 21, 1835.

182
Authorship has been attributed:
Musto, 9.

182
Not since ancient Greece:
Thomson, 21.

182
A virus found on cows’ udders:
Smith (1987), 92.

182
No more than six months earlier:
See the
Sun
for February 23, 1835.

183
Sir Francis Beaufort:
This anecdote was recounted by the Irish theologian and astronomer Josiah Crampton in his 1863 book
The Lunar World.

Crampton, 84. Crampton referred to Herschel’s correspondent as “Sir Frederick Beaufort,” but in this he was likely mistaken, for Sir Francis Beaufort was a friend of John Herschel’s and corresponded with him while he was working at the Cape of Good Hope. Evans, 5.

183
Purchase Bibles for the unenlightened inhabitants:
This story would subsequently be expanded in the account, much repeated, of the British journalist Harriet Martineau, who wrote that friends of Herschel were claiming that

“the astronomer has received at the Cape, a letter from a large number of Baptist clergymen of the United States, congratulating him on his discovery, informing him that it had been the occasion of much edifying preaching, and of prayer-meetings for the benefit of brethren in the newly explored regions; and beseeching him to inform his correspondents whether science affords any prospects of a method of conveying the Gospel to residents in the moon.”

Martineau, 3:22–23.

C HAPTE R 11: TH E P I CTU R E S Q U E B EAUTY O F TH E M O O N

185
“Now, for what purpose are we to suppose”:
See Crowe, 217. Michael Crowe’s book,
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900,
is the most thorough and valuable work on the subject, and my discussion of it in this chapter is indebted to it.

185
“If there be inhabitants on the moon”:
Herschel (1833), 231.

186
“Nature has ceased to rage”:
Crowe, 71.

186
“Great artificial works on the moon”:
Guiley, 33.

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187
Its origin is actually rather murky:
See the excellent investigation of the issue in Crowe, 205–207.

187
“With 100 separate mirrors”:
Crowe, 207.

187
“I hold it to be very probable”:
Crowe, 206.

187
“An English journal article”:
Crowe, 207.

188
“In all worlds there are living creatures”:
Crowe, 3.

188
An agnostic on the question:
“While belief in lunar life was often attributed to Galileo by the seventeenth century, he himself was one of the few of his period to deny the possibility, though he refused to commit himself on the possibility of life on other planets.” Nicolson (1936), 37.

189
“There is a great chasm”:
Crowe, 13.

189
If these creatures were not human:
See the discussion in Brooke, 255.

189
“Thousands of thousands of Suns”:
Crowe, 60.

189
“A bason of milk or a glass of water”:
Crowe, 62.

189
“Large and lucid planet”:
Crowe, 67.

190
“Its similarity to the other globes”:
Crowe, 67.

190
“A system in every star”:
Crowe, 186.

190
“Magnitude does not overpower him”:
Crowe, 186.

190
“Ran like wild-fire”:
Crowe, 184.

190
“All the world”:
Crowe, 182.

191
Sometime in the midafternoon:
Nine o’clock in the morning is the hour usually attributed to Ussher, but that time was actually determined by Sir John Lightfoot, the vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge; Ussher had dated the creation to several hours later. Thomson, 115.

191
“Raises to sublimer views”:
Paley, 212.

192
“The most varied and comprehensive”:
Dick (1828), 131.

192
Useless splendor:
“They were not intended merely to diversify the void of infinite space with a useless splendor which has no relation to intellectual natures.” Dick (1828), 70.