The Raven Illustrations of James Carling: Poe's Classic in Vivid View

By Christopher P. Semtner

The fascinating story behind the nineteenth-century artist who illustrated Poe’s classic poem—and the rediscovery of the drawings decades later.

One of the most popular poems in the English language, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” has thrilled generations of readers. In 1882, the Anglo-American artist James Carling decided to produce the definitive series of illustrations for the poem. Carling’s bizarre images explore the darkest recesses of Poe’s masterpiece, its hidden symbolism, and its strange beauty. Although the series remained unpublished at the time of the artist’s early death in 1887, the drawings reemerged fifty years later, when they entered the collection of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond. There they lined the blood-red walls of a Raven Room dedicated to their display.

For the first time, Poe historian Christopher P. Semtner reproduces the entire series—and tells the story behind these haunting works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625852045

Christopher P. Semtner

Visual artist, author and curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Christopher P. Semtner has curated and designed critically acclaimed exhibits for museums and galleries across the country. Semtner has also written several books and chapters on topics including Poe, visual art and crime fiction in addition to contributing articles to Biography.com, Crime Writers' Chronicle and other publications. He has been interviewed for BBC4, PBS and NPR and featured in publications including the New York Times and Forbes. He regularly speaks about strange and macabre subjects at various venues from the Steampunk World's Fair to the Library of Congress and as far away as Kyoto, Japan.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Wooden steps creak as the visitor ascends a narrow staircase to a windowless chamber. As his eyes adjust to the room’s dim light, he can discern dozens of drawings lining the blood-red walls. Delicately rendered in ink and opaque watercolor, the images draw the viewer into a dark universe where the imagination of a unique artist meets the mind of a literary genius. This is the Raven Room.

From 1937 until the first decade of the present century, this installation was the highlight of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond. Created around 1882, this series is the masterpiece of the short-lived Anglo-American artist James William Carling (1857–1887). Their subject is Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) most famous poem, The Raven.

No other poem is so popular it has a National Football League team named after it. The Raven has been dramatized for an episode of the animated series The Simpsons and adapted into no fewer than fifteen different films. It has inspired songs, a ballet and at least fourteen comic book versions. The work has lent its name to both a professional wrestler and a brand of beer, the slogan of which is The Taste Is Poetic. If Edgar Allan Poe had written nothing else, his fame would rest securely on the popularity of The Raven.

The world’s leading artists, including Édouard Manet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Hopper, have produced acclaimed artwork based on the poem; but arguably the greatest body of visual art inspired by The Raven is the work of the relatively unknown James Carling, who died in obscurity at the age of twenty-nine. The artist described his Raven drawings as stormier, wilder, and more weird than the illustrations for the same poem by his celebrated contemporary Gustave Doré. Unpublished during the artist’s lifetime and forgotten for decades after his death, these images have lost little of their power to alternately entrance and disturb viewers 130 years after their creation. They abound with arcane symbolism and surreal imagery without precedent in other artists’ visualizations of the poem.

In this unusual self-portrait, James Carling depicts himself in the garb of a bard in tribute to his ancestor Turlough Carling, the most famous of the Irish bards. Carling would later describe himself as the last of the Bards.

Seventy years after Carling’s death, the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, purchased the entire set of Carling’s illustrations and displayed them in what became known as the Raven Room. The exhibit was a feature attraction at the museum for over six decades. In addition to fascinating countless visitors, the room may have even inspired a television series. What follows is the story of a poet, an artist and how their shared vision became the Raven Room.

Chapter 1

RATHER EXQUISITE NONSENSE

The author of The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston. Over the course of the next forty years, his life would be a quest to be recognized as a great poet. As he wrote in the preface to his 1845 collection, The Raven and Other Poems:

Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

The son of traveling actors, Poe began his life in poverty. By the time he was two, his father had abandoned his family. Within a year, tuberculosis would claim his mother in Richmond, and Edgar would be taken into the home of wealthy foster parents John and Frances Allan. His brother William Henry and sister Rosalie both went to live with other families.

It was in the Allan home that the future poet first developed his love for verse. According to an account, his doting foster mother would dress the three-year-old in a velvet suit and cape in order to have him recite poetry to her dinner guests. Mr. Allan, who had once aspired to become a poet himself, had an extensive library. This may be where Poe first read the work of his early idol, the British Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). The flamboyant Byron was both internationally famous and plagued by scandal. He was involved in numerous love affairs, and one spurned lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, referred to him as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. After making a name for himself as a poet, Byron joined the Greeks in their war for independence from the Turks, but he died before seeing combat. The poet’s body was returned to Westminster Abbey for burial, but the Abbey refused to accept it on the grounds of Byron’s questionable morality.

Beginning in his teens, Poe would model not only his poetry but also his appearance after Byron. In imitation of Byron’s famed swimming of the Hellespont Strait, the fifteen-year-old Poe swam six miles against the tidal current in the James River. Since Byron had joined the Greek War of Independence, Poe fabricated an account of himself traveling to Europe to join the same war, and the story appeared in articles written about him during his lifetime—because he invariably supplied this information to journalists and biographers himself. Some of Poe’s friends even referred to him as the American Byron.

Poe also paid tribute to Byron by modeling the main character after him in the short story The Visionary, the first of Poe’s tales to be published in a national monthly magazine. In writing about Byron for the December 1844 issue of Columbian Magazine, Poe states that Byron’s poem The Dream has never been excelled (certainly never excelled by him) in the blended fervor, delicacy, truthfulness and ethereality which sublimate and adorn it. For this reason, it may well be doubted if he has written anything so universally popular. A copy of this poem in Poe’s handwriting transcribed when he was about fifteen survives as additional evidence of Poe’s early admiration for the author.

While under the influence of Byron, the young Poe began writing his own poetry. By the time he was thirteen, Poe had already composed a portfolio of poems, which his classmate John T.L. Preston showed to his mother, whom Preston recalled did not hesitate to praise the verses very highly. Poe soon considered publishing the collection, but his headmaster advised Allan not to allow the boy to issue a book at such an early age for fear it would be unhealthy and feed the young poet’s ego.

Undeterred by this setback, Poe continued to write poetry, among which were some addressed to Richmond schoolgirls. Poe’s devoted but mentally challenged sister, Rosalie, acted as a courier to sneak her brother’s verses to the girls in her school. The girls were apparently flattered until they realized they had all received the same poem. Poe also wrote a farewell ode to his headmaster, as well as a comic poem that so mercilessly ridiculed a rival that the latter left Richmond in disgrace.

It was about this time that Poe met the woman who would inspire one of his greatest poems. He was only fourteen when he first saw Jane Stith Craig Stanard, and the sight was reportedly so overwhelming that he almost fainted at her feet. Years later, he would refer to her as the first, purely ideal love of my soul. His friend Susan Talley’s description of a lost portrait of