"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

"Letters on Natural Magic addressed to Sir Walter Scott" / "Woodberry (1909) I, 178"

David Brewster

Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Maureen Cobb Mabbott, editorial assistants

Photocopy of book, typewritten note

Photocopy of pages 24 and 25 from Sir David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic (1832). As Mabbott points out in note 30 of his version of "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Dupin's assertion that indirect vision allows for keener perception than direct vision was supported by early nineteenth-century optic science, specifically by John Herschel and James South, whose 1824 Royal Society of London lecture on optics David Brewster quoted in his Treatise on Optics (1833) and echoed (but did not quote) even eariler in his Optics (1828) and Letters on Natural Magic (1832).
     Mabbott made double lines next to the relevant passage in the margins of the photocopied pages from Letters. The marginalia added to the photocopy is in Maureen Mabbott's handwriting. The attached typed note relates to Poe's famous essay "Maelzel's Chess Player," which first appeared in the April 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. It quotes a passage about the essay from G.E. Woodberry's 1909 biography of Poe.
     The penciled marginalia below the typed passage relates to Poe's "critical notice" of William Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers in the December 1835 issue of SLM and also to William K. Wimsatt, "Poe and the Chess Automaton" American Literature 11.2 (May 1939): 138-151.

Thomas Ollive Mabbott's Research Files for the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe