The Heinous Henry Harrington (Part Two)

"To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness."
-Edgar Allan Poe

Although certain of Poe's more unpleasant biographers show obvious reluctance in discarding this alleged attempt to make Osgood his partner in sin--they clearly would like such a sordid story to be true--(one wonders, incidentally, how Mrs. Clemm would figure in this purported elopement)--discard it they must. Aside from the sheer delirious insanity of the tale, any glance at the timeline renders it an impossibility. Harrington had left Albany, where he was a Unitarian minister--one shudders to imagine his sermons--by the beginning of April 1847. From Virginia Poe's death in January of that year until the time Harrington left his Albany flock, Osgood was still in Philadelphia, and Poe living in seclusion at Fordham, battling grief and serious illness. It is also curious that, if this shocking incident truly took place, Osgood would make such an effort, in the reminiscences she published after Poe's death, to depict a close friendship with him. Or that anyone else Osgood treated to her "raillery" about this attempted seduction never came forward with such a sensational piece of gossip. Or that the many other women who knew Poe never thought him even remotely capable of such indecency. In fact, it was from his female acquaintances--including Osgood--that we get the most emphatic accounts of Poe's innate chivalry and gentleness, which would hardly be the case if he had been the brazen satyr of Harrington's dreams.

And, amazingly, Harrington managed to make this the most credible story in his repertoire. Harrington's other allegations are so demonstrably and embarrassingly false that even Poe's most hostile chroniclers avoid so much as mentioning them--probably because those tales utterly destroy the credibility of anything the man ever said. Harrington tried forcing upon the world a pack of unprecedentedly ugly tales that lacked even the faintest shadow of corroboration and were, by his own admission, based solely on hearsay he claimed to have heard about a man who was a complete stranger to him. He also failed to explain why he, as well as all the other people who must have been aware of Poe's scandalous, if not criminal, behavior managed to keep it to themselves that long. In short, Superintendent Harrington lied like a dog.

That he wished to give all the publicity in his power to vicious stories that he must have known were false is patent. The mystery here is what Charles Fort would call "the whyness of it." What were Harrington's motives for making a public spectacle of himself--not to mention dragging through the mud the name of his late sister-in-law? To Stoddard, he claimed to be motivated by a desire to correct any suggestion that Osgood had harbored a tendresse for Poe. To "The Critic," he claimed to be coming forward out of disgust with current efforts to vindicate Poe's character.

If all this was true, why did it take him so long? If he was so concerned with Osgood's reputation, why didn't he come forward in 1860, when Mrs. Whitman published the source of the passage in Stoddard's article that Harrington claimed to find so offensive? Or in the 1870s, when Whitman began peddling the claim that a great scandal erupted when Elizabeth Ellet saw a (presumably compromising) letter written to Poe by Osgood? Certainly, Whitman's nutty and uncorroborated story, which was widely disseminated (and, unfortunately, treated as fact,) by John Ingram, William Gill, and Whitman herself, put Osgood's relations with Poe in a more scurrilous light than anything Stoddard had written.

And as for his second reason for unburdening himself--many people had rushed to Poe's defense ever since Griswold's obituary of him first appeared. If tributes to Poe so infuriated Harrington, how did he manage to hold his tongue through nearly forty years of them? (Curiously, he admitted that Griswold's memoir--which was certainly milder than anything Harrington himself wrote--was "saturated with malignity.")

It all looks very like he was simply grabbing at any feeble excuse he could to suddenly come forward with his stories. Harrington must have had a particular reason for circulating his slanders at that particular time. But what?

The only clue we are given lies in a particularly odd passage in his letter to "The Critic." He claimed there was "a studious effort to brand the writers who have set forth the honest truth about Poe as a band of conspirators, consciously devoted to the task of damaging his fair and honorable reputation." Harrington, of course, frantically denied there was any truth to the allegation--which, so far as we know, was never actually made by anyone. Publicly, at least. It comes off as "protesting too much."

Compare that statement with one of his letters to Stoddard. He pushed his correspondent to "vindicate yourself most surely" by circulating "a simple array" of stories--to be provided by Harrington--"attested by responsible persons, providing instances of Poe's reckless criminality and of moral degradation." As an example of the fine, rich dirt he could offer Stoddard--rather like a salesman offering samples of his wares--Harrington then presented, with an obvious and quite disturbing relish, his salacious story about the young wife Poe had deliberately seduced and "ruined."

Now, what do we have here but an effort to enlist Stoddard into a "conspiracy" "consciously devoted to the task of damaging Poe's fair and honorable reputation?"

There is no question that there was an organized effort to destroy Poe professionally and personally during his life, and that these efforts continued, or even intensified, after his death. Sidney P. Moss, who wrote extensively about Poe's literary wars, even described the forces against him as acting in "collusion" and "collaborating"--conspiring, to put it plainly--although Moss always shrank from exploring the full implications of this observation. Moss noted that Poe's antagonists first tried merely to freeze him out of the literary world; his obvious genius making that impossible, they then sought to annul the impact of his work by destroying him as a man. "The truth," Moss wrote, "is that Poe as a critic was successful to the point of his own undoing. Having allowed his enemies no ground on which to stand, he drove them to discredit his criticism by discrediting him as a human being. In this they succeeded, and so well, that it may be forever impossible to deflate the Poe myth to its proper proportions." (Indeed, Harrington repeatedly insisted that Poe's alleged moral failings made it impossible to honor him, no matter what his literary accomplishments may have been.) What set Harrington apart from Poe's other defamers is that he was too stupid to play the game with any finesse. He over-egged the pudding, peddling lies that were so revolting and so blatantly fictional that they only backfired on him.

Henry Harrington--on the surface, a mere filthy-minded, half-mad creep--was clearly part of something far more insidious.


(Image: NYPL Digital Gallery)

The Heinous Henry Harrington (Part One)

"...the magnitude of a slander is usually in the direct ratio of the littleness of the slanderer, but, above all things, of the impunity with which he fancies it may be uttered."
-Edgar Allan Poe

May 4, 1885 marked the launch of the strangest, vilest, and most incomprehensible attack on Poe's personal character--Rufus Griswold's not excepted. On that date, Henry F. Harrington, Superintendant of Public Schools in New Bedford, MA, and the widower of Frances S. Osgood's sister Elizabeth, wrote an unsolicited letter to writer Richard Henry Stoddard.Stoddard was a stranger to Harrington, but he wished to discuss a highly negative newspaper article Stoddard recently wrote about Poe. Harrington claimed that Stoddard had spoken "rather lightly" of his late sister-in-law. He feared that readers of this article would get the impression that Mrs. Osgood's feelings for Poe had been in some way improper. (It is odd that Harrington would express this fear. Stoddard's descriptions of the Poe/Osgood relationship--which he largely plagiarized from Sarah Helen Whitman's "Edgar Poe and His Critics"--were actually quite innocuous, and accompanied by references to Poe's undeniable devotion to his wife.)

"I know very well the peculiar circumstances of her life in New York," Harrington commented cryptically. "I know a good deal about the literati who circled around her." However, Harrington expressed himself as determined to impress upon Stoddard the utter impossibility that Osgood may have been enamored of Poe. "In fact," he wrote, "it was from Mrs. Osgood herself that I received the impression of his character which led me to loathe him as one of the basest of mankind." (Elsewhere, however, he contradicted himself by declaring that Poe's reputation for "sensual excesses" was widely known during his life, making him a pariah wherever he lived.)

Mr. Harrington then proceeded to descend into insanity. He described Mrs. Osgood's many visits to Fordham in 1847, in order to provide the dying Virginia Poe with "the barest necessities of life," which "her profligate husband" denied her, preferring to spend his time and money on dissolute pleasures in the city. (Harrington was evidently unaware of several difficulties with this story: Virginia died at the very beginning of that year, plus, at the time these missions of mercy supposedly took place, Osgood and her family were living in Philadelphia. Osgood never visited Fordham in her life--in fact, she and Poe never spoke to or wrote to each other again after early 1846.)

Some time after Virginia's death, Harrington continued, Mrs. Osgood visited his home in Albany--he himself being away at the time. Upon his return, he declared, his sister-in-law told him, with "sparkling humor," that Poe showed up at the Harrington residence in order to beg Osgood to elope with him--a proposal she described with such "raillery," that proved, Harrington assured Stoddard, she never would have dreamed of submitting to Poe's indecent advances.Harrington concluded his letter somewhat confusedly, by asking Stoddard "whether you are aware of any circumstances in connection with Poe which compromised Mrs. Osgood's good name. I trust not."

Two days later, Harrington wrote again, in response to a note from Stoddard, in which the writer--who had only two brief meetings with Poe in his life (where the poet accused him of plagiarism,) but who had been acquainted with Osgood--evidently strongly asserted the innocence of her relations with Poe. In this second and final letter to Stoddard, Harrington launched into a hysterical tirade against those who sought to defend the character of Poe, a man guilty of "the reckless violation of the fundamental laws of God and man." He urged Stoddard to launch a campaign to enlighten the public about Poe's "moral degradation." As an example, he proposed that Stoddard "make use" of another of his Poe anecdotes. In 1846, Harrington claimed, he was friends with a New York family--whom he never identified--where "love, confidence, and happiness prevailed." Into this Eden, Harrington claimed to have later learned from unnamed sources, the snake Poe appeared. He made the acquaintance of the beautiful young wife of this household and "resolved to make her his victim." The woman was soon "beguiled" into an affair, which soon left her ruined in reputation, abandoned by both husband and lover, and with her once blissful home destroyed. Poe had "added another to the guilty triumphs of his despicable life."

Incidentally, if this woman and her sad tale had actually existed, there is something particularly diseased about Harrington attempting to exploit the shame and misery of a female "friend" of his in order to pursue his bizarre vendetta against Poe--even to the point of offering to provide her name. His eagerness to openly bandy the name of his late sister-in-law is even more appalling. Harrington had evidently disliked Mrs. Osgood and thought little of her probity (see Osgood's 1849 letter complaining about Elizabeth and Henry Harrington's distrust of her word in connection with some scandal that was circulating about her and Rufus Griswold,) but for him to publicly name her in connection with such a suggestive story was, especially in those times, unimaginably ungentlemanly.

Stoddard evidently failed to respond to Harrington's call to arms. Although he claimed to hold a dismal view of Poe's character--hardly surprising, as Stoddard had been a Griswold protege--he certainly never gave any sign that he saw the dead poet as the monster of depravity Harrington described. That avenue having gone nowhere, Harrington then went public himself. A few months later, he wrote a lengthy, rambling letter to "The Critic" magazine ("Poe Not to Be Apotheosized," Oct. 3, 1885.)

This time, Harrington claimed that the impetus for breaking his long silence about Poe was his indignation at the latest edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica," and its laudatory entry on Poe. This letter repeated the same three stories he told Stoddard--Poe's cruel desertion of his sick wife, his heartless seduction and ruin of a married woman, and his attempts to similarly degrade Mrs. Osgood, all presented in a tone bordering on mania.

Harrington's lurid screed certainly brought him the attention he craved--albeit not the sort he must have expected. Contemporary opinion scarcely knew whether Harrington should be condemned more for his bad taste or his mendacity. One New York paper, the "Daily Telegraph," even devoted most of one Sunday edition to columns expressing disgust with the New Bedford pedagogue. Literary critic and Poe scholar Edmund Clarence Stedman summarized popular reaction to the man he described as "the harrowing Harrington" by noting, "Poe, with all his faults, was not 'a libertine,' and I see not the slightest cause to change my opinion. In fact, he was the least 'sensual' of men and authors..." Harrington made a serious error by allowing his evident obsession with sex to define his charges against Poe. He might have gotten away with painting the author of "The Raven" as a drunk, a liar, a sponger, and a fraud--many others, including Stoddard, had built handsome careers by doing so--but not even Poe's most vigorous detractors could picture him in the role of Don Giovanni.

Harrington abruptly retreated back into well-deserved obscurity, never even trying to defend stories he had claimed were both well-documented and extensively known. Before his outbursts to Stoddard and "The Critic," there is no record of him ever so much as speaking the name of Poe--a man he had never even met--and so far as we know, he never did so again.

...Coming up in Part Two: More sleaze! Conspiracy! Slander! Fun for the whole family!

(Image: Albany, New York during Poe's era via NYPL Digital Gallery.)