Although Edgar Allan Poe might seem like a strange choice for “surrogate man of science,” he had retained a fascination with (and training in) various branches of applied and theoretical science throughout his impressive schooling in England and Richmond, and later at the University of Virginia and West Point. Indeed, just before Poe arrived in Philadelphia, he had published a novel that provided its own unique blend of timely scientific speculation and (similarly plagiarized) primary source material: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). It wasn’t unusual for Poe to review recent books of interest in natural history for the many journals he was associated with during his lifetime. For example, like many of his fellow Americans, Poe was intrigued by John Cleves Symmes Jr.’s theory that the earth was hollow at both its poles; and in a lengthy Messenger article of 1837 he wrote in support of funding an expedition to be led by J. V. Reynolds that would explore these and many other mysteries surrounding the polar extremes of the globe. When Poe composed his only novel the following year, he drew on some of these same polar fantasies while imagining Pym’s own bizarre expedition to the South Seas, and he incorporated (sometimes verbatim) reports from explorers such as Benjamin Morrell who had recently returned from these same alluring aqueous spaces.
Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention. Indeed, what the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood by the term “natural history” incorporated a remarkably heterogenous array of enterprises and obsessions. In addition to Symmes’ hollow Earth theory that inspired the topography of his only novel, Poe’s fiction is filled with references to—and engagements with—an array of what today would be called both “scientific” and “pseudo-scientific” knowledge. For example, while Poe relied on (and footnoted) Archimedes when describing the fluid dynamics of the whirlpool swallowing up his protagonist’s ship at the conclusion of “A Descent Into the Maelström” (1841), his tales were also inspired by contemporaneous “pseudo-scientific” debates concerning mesmerism (animal magnetism) and phrenology (the study of skull shapes). Indeed, Poe even extended the central logic of phrenology in order to advance his own unique and playful “science”: published in a popular series of articles in Graham’s Magazine, Poe’s work on “Autography” interprets and analyzes the peaks and valleys found in the signatures of famous nineteenth-century literary figures, drawing cheeky conclusions about the character of the person behind the script. Viewed from our twenty-first century perspective, then, Poe’s fiction finds its home in the nebulous middle ground between hoax and official truth that existed before modern science could emerge as its own respectable and distinct discipline of knowledge.