Poe’s pearls of wisdom
QUESTION Was Edgar Allan Poe, writer of macabre tales, a seashells expert?
In 1839 The Conchologist’s First Book, Or A System Of Testaceous Malacology — a study of mollusc shells — was published with the author listed as Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
It was one of the first such works to feature colourised plates. At the time, Poe was an established journalist. It was also the year he wrote The Fall Of the House Of Usher, one of his most famous tales.
Despite the credit, Poe had been given the job of editing a much longer work by Thomas Wyatt, an Englishman. He was also asked to provide a preface, an introduction and some translation. The idea was to take the larger book, written in French, and shorten it for an American audience of school children.
It was very successful; the only book under Poe’s name to get a second printing in his lifetime, despite writing some classics of horror.
Poe’s name was the main reason he was given the job because copyright issues made it problematic to use the original author’s name.
Subsequently, charges of plagiarism erupted, charges Poe vehemently denied: ‘I wrote it in conjunction with Professor Thomas Wyatt, and Professor McMultrie…my name being put to the work, as best known and most likely to aid its circulation. I wrote the Preface and Introduction, and translated from Cuvier, the accounts of the animals, etc. All School-books are necessarily made in a similar way.’
It brought Poe some desperately needed income, but also resulted in him having difficulty for a time finding a publisher for his own work. The fact that Wyatt had personally asked Poe to accept authorship suggests that Poe was a credible authority on science.
It has been speculated that Poe was acquainted with a noted Charleston conchologist and medical doctor, Dr Edmund Ravenel, when he was doing army service on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, ten years earlier.
It’s clear that Wyatt himself bore Poe no malice as the pair continued to correspond amicably following the book’s publication. By the time of the 3rd edition the copyright issues were resolved, and the book bore Wyatt’s name as author with introduction by Poe.
Paul Whitehead, Brighton, East Sussex.
QUESTION What was the first National Trust property?
THE national Trust for Places of Historic Interest or natural Beauty was formed on January 12, 1895, to: ‘promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest’.
Its founders were the social reformer Octavia Hill (1838-1912), solicitor and civil servant Robert Hunter (1844-1913) and clergyman, poet and hymn writer Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851-1920).
Its formation was based on the earlier successes of Charles Eliot’s Trustees of Reservations in 1891, an American organisation whose aims were to ‘acquire, hold, protect and administer, for the benefit of the public, beautiful and historical places’, and on the Kyrle Society founded by Miranda Hill (Octavia’a sister) to provide art, books and open spaces to the working-class poor.
The first national Trust property was the Alfriston Clergy House, a medieval thatched cottage and garden at Alfriston, Polegate, East Sussex. It dates from the 14th century and has an idyllic setting next to Alfriston Parish Church, with views across the River Cuckmere. The national Trust paid £10 for it in 1896. It was originally built as a farmer’s house and is still open to the public.
In 1899, the national Trust purchased its first nature reserve, Wicken Fen, a wetland nature reserve situated near the village of Wicken in Cambridgeshire. It is one of only four wild fens which still survive in the enormous Great Fen Basin of East Anglia.
Victoria Franklin, Melbourne, Derbys.
QUESTION Has a piece of classical music been censored?
A HOST of composers were banned by the nazis, including all works by classical Jewish composers including Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, contemporary composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler, as well as adversaries such as Paul Hindemith. They particularly disliked Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, which had the 1525 German peasants’ revolt as its backdrop.
All Western classical music was banned following Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, including Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Handel and Mozart. In 1978, the Central Conservatory in Beijing reopened, and allowed western music to re-emerge so that China is now a virtuoso powerhouse.
In 1688, Pope Sixtus V banned women from singing on stage in all theatres or opera houses in Rome. In 1703, Opera was banned in Rome by Clement XI for reasons of public morality. That ban wasn’t lifted until 1709.
Practically every Soviet composer felt the heavy hand of the censors from Shostakovich (whose Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was banned) to Igor Stravinsky who left the country. Credo (1968), a work by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, was banned for religious content. Its opening line of ‘I believe in Jesus Christ’ sung in Latin was too much for the authorities.
Zoltan Kodaly’s Peacock Variations (1939), based on a folk song about a peacock — a flightless bird — taking flight, was banned by the Miklos Horthy dictatorship between the two world wars as a symbol of aspirations for Hungarian democracy.
In 1990s, Afghanistan the Taliban banned all instrumental music.
Beth Overton, Frome, Somerset.
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