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... tenderness, feeling, religious sensibility, moral purity and the beautiful impulses of genius. (141) Have the annals of recorded genius anything to show more remarkable than this? --North American Review 146
This is the first quotation in the advertisement for second edition of the Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (1841), a now little-known American poet of the early nineteenth century. She, like her older sister Lucretia, achieved fame partly by a precocious devotion to poetry, an early death from consumption, and subsequent hagiography composed by such literary luminaries as Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, Washington Irving, and Robert Southey. Theirs was a fame that reached across the great divide of the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the literary motherland, Great Britain. (1) At a time when positive British critical recognition of American writing was rare, the poet laureate Robert Southey's praise of Lucretia in the 1829 Quarterly Review greatly impressed the American literary establishment--apart from the ever-combative Edgar Allan Poe. In his 1841 reviews for Graham's Magazine of both Washington Irving's biography of Margaret and Catherine Sedgwick's of Lucretia, Poe took the opportunity to lambaste the subservient posture adopted by a supposedly fawning American critical community.
Poe did this, as the opening quotation implies, at the expense of one of America's own favoured poets. Ever the iconoclast, he was willing to take figures as important as Washington Irving and Catherine Sedgwick to task over their failure to separate biography from poetic merit, thus driving a wedge in the critical dictum of the Romantic period that art can and should be read through the author's character. What we moderns and post-moderns now know as the authorial fallacy was then assumed to be part of the literary-critical process and, crucially, part of the marketing process. (2) In this paper I will argue that the dispute between Poe and the "Davidson industry" of the time about the literary authority of Britain over America As mediated via the paradoxical disease of consumption. Pulmonary tuberculosis, as it came to be known in this period, was a glamorous wasting disease of poets and beautiful women, despite some of the actual symptoms being consequent on the lungs' disintegration. Epidemic in Europe and America, consumption was thought to kill almost one in four people: almost everyone was touched--if not one of their immediate family, then one friend or another would invariably be affected by this "White Plague" of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
Southey's valorisation of the Davidsons was prompted at least partly, if not mostly, by their early deaths from consumption. An inveterate "collector" of young consumptive poets and an editor of largely posthumous editions, he gathered as proteges Thomas Chatterton (although not a consumptive), the influential Henry Kirke White, the not-so influential Herbert Knowles, and others. Poe's dispute with Southey centered on both literary nationalism and the value of marketing diseased--especially consumptive--poets.
Before we go into the dispute proper, it is worth briefly sketching out the place of consumption--pulmonary phthisis, tuberculosis, or tabes--in the nineteenth century. (3) There was no cure: the dread diagnosis of "consumption" was often thought of as a death sentence, as Keats's famous pronouncement on coughing up a drop of blood on a white handkerchief affirmed. (4) Its symptoms were paradoxical because, on the one hand, the lungs' disintegration caused choking on the often putrid matter the consumptive expectorated, foul-smelling breath, fevered nights: all again recorded in the letters of Keats. On the other hand, because the lungs are not greatly supplied with nerves, the patients often felt little pain as they wasted away, remained compos mentis, and frequently took a long time before the final "decline" (as the disease was euphemistically known) set in. Along with this, the classical idea of the "spes phthisica," or "hope of the consumptive," suggested that consumptives acquired a burst of energy before their deaths that rendered them either more beautiful (if female) or more creative (if male). These apparently positive symptoms helped generate a more idealised mythology of the condition: consumption had long been thought to be the disease for a good Christian death--a phenomenon that was making a comeback in the Victorian period in both America and Britain--and a reflection of beauty and creativity (Lawlor and Suzuki, "Disease"). (5)
Susan Sontag amongst others has detailed the glamorous image that accrued to the condition in the nineteenth century; poets, as Shelley told Keats, were especially prone to being "consumed" by their hyper-sensibilities (Sontag; Shelley 2: 220-21). For a poet to be over a certain weight in Paris in the Romantic period was almost a crime against art. During a large part of the century women aspired to the tubercular look, or "consumptive sublime," as Bram Dijkstra has called it (25-28). The reasons for consumption's popularity are complex and have been discussed elsewhere, (6) but here it suffices to say that the disease's usually chronic wasting of the body dovetailed with medical ideas of nervous refinement and religious asceticism to produce a mythology suited to the times (Lawlor and Suzuki "Disease"). (7)
The youthful Davidsons were not unusual in succumbing to consumption. Their uniqueness came in the fact they were both female poets as well as sisters. Lucretia Maria Davidson (b. 1808), who "died at Plattsburgh N.Y., August 27, 1825, aged 16 years and 11 months" (Morse), wrote in a simple, largely sentimental, and pious mode domestic poems praising her mother, sister, and friends, although a development towards greater depth was discernible as she became increasingly preoccupied by her disease and the prospect of her own death. She was made famous on both sides of the Atlantic by Samuel Finley Breeze Morse in his edition of Amir Khan and Other Poems: The Remains of Lucretia Maria Davidson, published in 1829. Lucretia's poems went through fifteen editions on both sides of the Atlantic in thirty years, with translations into German and Italian as late as 1906. As Cheryl Walker has observed, Lucretia "became a symbol of the frail female poet literally consumed by her own sensibility" (Walker 23) and provided the model for the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a thoughtless poetess who churns out verses--largely concerned with death in great quantities (Walker 23).
To Twain, writing later in the century, this was an object of satire, but to Margaret Miller Davidson (1823-38), her older sister showed her a...
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