ABSTRACT
Reprinted in Poe’s The Literati (New York, 1850), 464–82. Poe (1809–49) had been writing stories since 1833. He was early in welcoming Boz (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1836; see Dickensian, xxxvi (1940), 163–9), and in 1842 they met. Dickens tried to find an English publisher for him; see G. G. Grubb’s series of articles on their relationship, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1950–1. Poe’s review of The Old Curiosity Shop in Graham’s Magazine (May 1841) is reprinted in The Dickens Critics, 19–24, and his review of the early numbers of Barnaby Rudge (Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, 1 May 1841) in Dickensian, ix (1913), 274–8. For discussion of the latter, see William Robertson Nicoll, Dickens’s Own Story (1923), 221–44. Barnaby Rudge helped to inspire his poem ‘The Raven’ (1844). His review in Graham’s Magazine, of which he was literary editor, opens with a summary of the plot.
