The Purloined Letter (1844) marks the third and final appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s master-detective, the Parisian‘ gentleman’ Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. He first appeared in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and then again in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842). He is also quite clearly the original inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Allan Poe

The story first appeared in the Christmas literary annual The Gift published in Philadelphia in December 1845. Poe received a payment of only $12.00 for its first printing, but the story was reprinted in many newspapers and magazines in the years that followed.

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The Purloined Letter – critical comment

The short story

Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories are generally collected under the title of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In them, Poe explored a wide range of topics and themes. He is most famous for his tales of Gothic horror – such as The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Ligeia. But he also invented the detective story; he wrote tales of science fiction (The Balloon Hoax); spoofs and satires (The Man Who was Used Up); and puzzles or cryptograms such as The Gold Bug.

He wrote prolifically for newspapers and magazines. As a result of his engagement with the shorter literary forms he developed a theory of short stories which is still relevant today. He claimed that a successful short story should follow a set of rules.

• It should be read at one sitting
• It should create a ‘unity of effect’
• It should contain nothing superfluous
• It should strike its note in the first sentence
• It should be imaginative and original

The Purloined Letter is successful because it meets all these requirements. The mystery is focussed on one topic – the missing letter. There are no digressions. All parts of the tale relate to its discovery, and the story begins and ends ‘on topic’ – with the loss of the letter and its discovery.

The story has a perfectly reasonable premise. A potentially compromising letter has been stolen and cannot be located by the police. The problems this raises are then explored, and the letter is located by Dupin. The story ends with an explanation of how he found it.

Its aesthetic superiority is evident when compared with the other two Dupin stories. The Murders in the Rue Morgue depends upon a rather improbable premise – an escaped Orang-Outang armed with a cut-throat razor. The Mystery of Marie Roget offers an exhaustive analysis of evidence for a puzzling murder, but it is technically unresolved. The Purloined Letter has neither of these weaknesses.

Structure

The success of this story is principally explained by its sound structure. The narrative is in three distinct parts:

• the problem and how it came about
• the efforts that were made to solve it
• Dupin’s explanation of his strategic success

The story also has an interesting structural feature. The missing letter does not suddenly appear at the end of the story as a coup de theatre, thus providing a resolution to the tale. It is unexpectedly produced half way through the story, when Dupin raffishly claims the 50,000 Francs reward for its discovery. This is a mark of Poe’s genius as a story teller.

The essence of the story is not about the social value of the letter to its addressee (the Queen) or someone else who might read it (the King). There is a suggestion that the compromising contents of the letter will reveal the fact that the Queen has been sexually unfaithful to the King. But Poe’s principal interest is about how the letter is discovered.

The ‘twist’ in the tale is that the letter was in full view of the police all the time. It was not, as the police suspected, concealed in any secret drawer, in the stuffing of a chair seat, or behind the wallpaper of D—’s room. It was fully on view – but it had been disguised as a letter of no importance addressed to someone else.

The French connection

Poe’s literary reputation has always been high in France, and there has been a great deal of literary analysis of The Purloined Letter by modernist critics of the 1960s and 1970s. This debate is summarised in the story’s Wikipedia entry.

This debate mainly centres on the symbolic significance of the letter in relation to the Queen who has received it and her husband the King who apparently is being deceived. However, this discussion ignores the fact that Poe is quite clearly more interested in how Dupin discovers the letter than in the social ramifications of its contents – which are not known anyway.

These approaches to literary of analysis flow from the various schools of criticism which were fashionable in France around that time. These took a stance that literary texts could have more or less any meaning that could be read into them, irrespective of the author’s intention or even an intelligent reader’s understanding of ‘the story’.

The two best known of these theories – structuralism and deconstruction – were popular and influential in Europe and America until the end of the twentieth century. But in recent years they have fallen out of favour, largely because they are now considered elitist and woefully obscure. They also have the weakness that they frequently lack common sense.

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The Purloined Letter – study resources

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon UK

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon US

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon UK

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon US

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The Purloined Letter – story synopsis

Auguste Dupin and the narrator are joined by G— the chief of the Prefecture of the Paris Police. He reports the theft of a compromising letter by the minister D— in full view of its royal recipient and her husband.

D— has not yet acted on the content of the letter but the police chief has failed in all his attempts to recover it. He has even taken apart the furniture in D—’s rooms and searched adjacent houses. Dupin advises him to look more carefully.

A month later G— returns, still unsuccessful. A reward for the recovery of the letter has been doubled to 50,000 Francs. Dupin asks for a cheque to that amount, and in exchange he hands over the letter.

When G-— has gone, Dupin explains to the narrator that G—’s methods are indeed very thorough, but they are limited because he fails to put himself into the mindset of his antagonist. Dupin criticises mathematical logic because it is a self-enclosed system which cannot be applied in the moral universe.

He then describes his visit to minister D— in his office where he spots the letter, distressed, torn, and disguised, in a letter rack on the mantelpiece. Dupin deliberately leaves a snuff box behind, and returns next day to collect it. Whilst D—’s attention is distracted he takes the letter and replaces it with a dummy copy he has made.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

William Wilson was first published in the October 1839 issue of Burton Gentleman’s Magazine. Later in 1844 it was translated into French and published in the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne. This marked the first introduction of Poe’s work into France, where it has been highly regarded ever since.

The story has surprisingly autobiographical elements. During his youth Poe spent some time at Manor House School in Stoke Newington in north London, on which the ‘academy’ in the story is based. However, he did not go on to either Eton or Oxford University – which he describes in the tale as ‘the most dissolute university in Europe’.

Edgar Allan Poe

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William Wilson – critical summary

The double

This is an early and now-famous example of the double in literature – sometimes known by its German term the ‘Doppelganger’. The elements of a double in the story should be quite clear from the start. William Wilson is confronted by another schoolboy at the academy who has the same name as himself. They have the same birthday; they are the same height; they wear the same clothes; and they both join the academy and leave it on exactly the same day.

Wilson is exasperated by the appearances of what he perceives as a ‘rival’, and yet the double gives him ‘advice’ which Wilson, writing in retrospect, now wishes he had heeded. It is also significant that nobody else in the story seems to be aware of the double; he ‘appears’ only to Wilson himself.

“Yet this superiority — even this equality — was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it.”

It is one of the common features of the double in literature that it appears only to the protagonist of the story or the novel. The double figure acts as ‘another self’ to the protagonist which acts as the embodiment of good, evil, or ‘otherness’. It is for this reason that stories featuring a double are often seen as studies in psychological aberration or what is often called ‘the divided self’.

It should be fairly clear that William Wilson’s double is a manifestation of his conscience. The double appears at crucial moments when Wilson is about to commit a morally dubious act. Because the story is narrated from Wilson’s point of view, there is a strong tendency for the reader to be sympathetic to the account of events he gives us. He sees the double as a source of irritation and interference. But the double, the conscience, is merely giving him advice, and warnings – always in a low tone of voice.

The epitaph to this story provides an unmistakable clue to Poe’s intended meaning.

What say of it? what say Conscience grim,
That spectre in my path?

The essential conflict is between Wilson who wishes to do wrong, and his conscience which is warning him against himself. The two finally clash at the Roman ball, where Wilson finally kills off his double, only to discover that he is killing himself. The double tells him – no longer in a whisper – “In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see … how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

An extended tutorial on The Double

Structure

William Wilson follows all of Poe’s own rules for the constituents of a successful short story. It strikes its distinctive tone from the opening sentence – ‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson’. And the story deals with that one topic alone – the inner identity (and conflict) of the protagonist.

Poe also claimed that a story should have a ‘unity of effect’. That is, all the elements of the story should be directed towards the point it is trying to make. This means in its turn that there should not be any digressions or the inclusion of unrelated material. William Wilson certainly does follow this rule. The story begins with Wilson’s anguish over his personal identity, and the focus of attention remains on that topic until the story’s dramatic finale.

Oscar Wilde

The striking image of ‘self’ destruction at the conclusion of the story was echoed famously by Oscar Wilde in the conclusion to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s is another story of moral decline, in which the protagonist becomes progressively degenerate yet remains amazingly youthful in appearance. He finally confronts a portrait painting of himself which has aged in an attic to reveal his corruption. In a rage he stabs the painting with a knife and is found dead with the knife in his own heart – and the portrait has become young once again.

The idea of a portrait hidden in an attic which reveals the unpleasant truth about someone’s behaviour and age has become a commonplace image and figure of speech – often humorously applied. It is rightly attributed to Wilde, but it has its origins in Edgar Allan Poe.

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William Wilson – study resources

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon UK

Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon US

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – UK

Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – US

William Wilson at Wikipedia

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William Wilson – plot summary

William Wilson’s reputation has been ruined, and as death approaches him he wishes to make a record of his descent into wickedness.

Believing that he has inherited a ‘remarkable’ nature, he recalls his youth as a schoolboy in England. His academy school is like a Gothic prison, and its ethos is disciplinarian. Another boy with the same name becomes a competitor and a rival.

Wilson is worried by the other boy’s easy superiority, but it is not noticed by anybody else. The two boys have the same birthday, they are the same height, and they join the school on the same day.

They become inseparable companions. The rival can only speak in a very low voice, but he dresses in the same clothes as Wilson. He also takes pleasure in his superiority – though this is noticed only by Wilson himself.

The rival patronises Wilson and gives him advice, which Wilson now wishes he had heeded. Wilson visits the rival’s bedroom at night whilst he is asleep – but he does not look the same.

Wilson leaves the academy and goes to Eton where he plunges himself into a life of folly and vice. One drunken night he is visited by the rival who raises a warning finger then disappears.

Wilson moves on to Oxford University where he uses his wealth to gamble and take advantage of others. On the occasion of completely ruining a young nobleman he is visited again by the rival, who reveals to the company that Wilson has been cheating at cards. Next morning he leaves the university in disgrace and flees to the Continent.

The double figure pursues him throughout Europe, thwarting his plans for ‘bitter mischief’. Finally at a masked ball in Rome, the figure appears when Wilson is about to seduce a young married woman. Wilson draws a rapier to kill the figure, but finds himself confronting his own image in a full length mirror, spattered with blood, and saying ‘thou hast murdered thyself’.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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