The Sun, the Moon, and Two Balloons: Edgar Allan Poe, Literary Hoaxes, and Penny-Press Journalism Paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention New Orleans, Louisiana December 2001

Karen S. H. Roggenkamp
Department of English
University of Minnesota
rogg0020@tc.umn.edu
http://roggenkamp.com/karen.html

Do not cite without permission of author.

Literary scholarship has traditionally recognized a significant division between the worlds of journalism and literarture in nineteenth-century America.  Scholars have long envisioned the journalistic work of major authors--particularly work that appeared in newspapers--as secondary to work published in high-toned magazines under separate book cover, thus reinforcing a dichotomy between the world of newspaper journalism and the world of literature.  But emerging research has suggested we need to take a closer look at how closely major American writers engaged the periodical press, particularly newspapers, in the development of their careers.  It is as continued investigation into a more intimate relationship between newspapers and literary authorship that this paper takes its cue, focusing on one author--Edgar Allan Poe--and his relationship with the important penny paper, the New York Sun, as each worked within the genre of the literary hoax.

Antebellum America witnessed an unprecedented explosion of the periodical press, and an increasingly commercial marketplace for authors.  Most notably, would-be newspaper editors recognized the untapped market of an urban mass readership and catered to this audience's needs by offering penny newspapers to compete with the older, staider, six-cent newspapers.  Egalitarian in nature where the sixpenny papers had been exclusive, and catering to human interest stories where the sixpenny papers focused on politics and economics, newspapers like Benjamin Day's New York Sun, established in 1833, and James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, established in 1835 soon enjoyed large reading audiences and tidy profits, as well as the ire of the more established New York papers.

Poe's relationship with these urban penny papers was complicated, at best.  He publicly rejected the literary value of newspaper work on one hand, yet he craved the mass audience potential of the press on the other.  Poe was, as Amy Gilman Srebnick argues, "at the center of the expanding publishing industry and more attuned than many of his fellow writers to the vagaries of the marketplace and its effect on the entire panorama of literary production" (122).  Though he railed against the pervasive nature of the periodical press, and particularly against newspapers like Day's Sun, he nevertheless recognized the power newspapers held.  At once contemptuous and envious of the enormous audiences penny papers were commanding in urban areas, Poe sought ways to benefit from the marketing potential of this new medium.  He yearned, as Bruce Weiner points out, "for the ideal poetic life," yet was "profoundly influenced by the forces of commercialization he tried to resist" (5).  This dual consciousness becomes striking in the investigation of Poe's involvment with the New York Sun--first in his protest against the Sun's hoax of 1835, latter dubed the "Moon Hoax," and then in the publication of his own 1844 "Balloon Hoax" in the Sun.  A study of these cases of hoax provides insight into how one author of the nineteenth century recognized and tried to manipulate the mareging mass narratives of the New York penny press.

Understanding of Poe's relationship with literary hoaxes in the New York Sun must be built upon a sketch of antebellum urban newspapers.  As journalism historian Hazel Dicken-Garcia has pointed out, journalistic practices correspond to particular social structures and contexts.  Thus, the public's understanding of what constitutes "correct" journalistic standards and practices alters through time, as social contexts themselves change.  Antebellum journalism in the newly-formed penny press, in other words, scarcely resembled American journalism of latter years (particularly of twentieth-century years, when journalism became professionalized and standardized).  Rather, penny paper journalism was more closely tied to American literature than scholars have traditionally recognized.  The journalist, a new breed of professional, was "expected to hold the reader's attention with florid writing, suspense-filled stories, and dramatic beginnings and endings" (Stovall 309).  The newspaper provided a space for literary experimentation and entertainment, not for the propagation of "truth" in any "objective" form.  And readers recognized--and often delighted in--this fact about penny papers.  Indeed, Andie Tucher maintains that penny papers, in this sense, corresponded to an antebellum American society that was "a jamboree of ballyhoo, exaggeration, chicanery, sham, and flim-flam" (46), a society invested in "humbug" and hoaxes.

The penny press itself took part in frequent humbug and hoaxing, for editors understood that readers would readily and literarly buy "a spectactular story, preferably one slow to unfold, in which a mere germ of plausibility and a great deal of excitement stood substitute for any amount of fact" (Tucher 52).  Perpetuating a literary hoax was but one way of creating a spectacular story--and spectacular sales.  Gilbert Highet defines hoaxes as satiric parodies put into action, "lies or exaggerations intended to deceive," with a result of "hearty laughter" on the part of both hoaxer and hoaxee (92).  Marie-Louise Nickerson Matthew extends this definition and applies it to Poe, who, like the penny paper editors, delighted in publishing works with "a pattern of delusion, a seemingly solid system that offers its victims tenets of belief which . . . seems to be a comprehensible structure" (2)  Significantly, Poe's hoaxing in his literature coincided and even collided with hoaxes perpetuated by the New York Sun on at least two occasions, suggesting an entertwined relationship between antebellum literature and journalism; and it is to these cases of the "Moon Hoax" and the "Balloon Hoax" that I now turn.

Possibly the first and most definitive hoax in the annals of American penny papers was the so-called "Moon Hoax" written by Richard Adams Locke and published in the New York Sun from 21 August through 30 August 1835.  Locke was already making a name for himself within journalistic circles, having covered earlier in 1835 the sensational trial of Matthias the Prophet for the Courier and Enquirer.  Editor Day of the Sun recognized Locke's ability to craft sensationally readable text and hired him away for the Sun; he was not to be disappointed in his new hire, for just months later Locke produced the most fantastical hoax to grace the pages of New York papers.  Having casually announced an upcoming "special" from the Edinburgh Courant four days earlier, the Sun on 25 August began reprinting on its front pages the latest "news" from world-famous astronomer James Herschel.  The "scientific reports" were supposedly taken from the Edinburgh Journal of Science (once a real journal, but one which had actually suspended publication several years earlier), and they were strikingly technical and official in tone--eminently believable, in other words.  At first other papers disregarded the Sun's "scoop," but as fabulous details from "Herschel" emerged each day, more and more readers descended on the Sun offices, and more and more penny and sixpenny papers found themselves crediting their competition and reprinting the moon reports as well.

The "Moon Hoax" told of Herschel's latest powerful telescope used at the Cape of Good Hope, where the astronomer had honed in first on lunar mountains and forests, replete with vivid vegetation, and then, amazingly, on "herds of brown quadrupeds" sporting "a remarkably fleshly appendage over the eyes" to protect from the "extremes of light and darkness" (26 August 1835, 2).  More and more geographical and animal wonders appeared within the lense of the telescope, sprinkled among a lush lunar landscape, but none as wondrous as those revealed in the 28 August edition of the Sun, where the text revealed the presence of strange bat-humans, looking rather like "the large orang outang" deep in conversation (28 August 1835, 1).  Naming the man-bats "Verspertilio homo," the reports provided titillating details of their conduct (the most sexualized of which the Sun supposedly "deleted" from its "ever-moral" pages) and observed evident rationality, social hierarchy, and communal order.

Readers were left gasping for more information on these fabulous lunar discoveries, and in the few days that the moon story ran, the Sun became the talk of the New York public and beyond.  Contemporary accounts assert that the Sun office was "positively beseigned with crowds of people of the very first class, vehemently applying for copies of the issue containing the wonderful details" (Barnum 194).  Presses ran ten hours a day to meet the demands of a hungry reading public sucked in by the elaborate hoax.  The Sun rushed to print pamphlet versions of Herschel's text, with the "more technical" sections conveniently edited out, along with a series of lithographs also copied supposedly from the original Edinburgh Journal of Science article (Day, 28 August 1835, 2).  P. T. Barnum calculated the Sun made at least $25,000 off Moon Hoax paraphernalia (202), in addition to the circulation records they announced--on 28 August Benjamin Day asserted his paper's circulation had topped out at 19,360 (28 August 1835, 2),  some four times higher than the nearest sixpenny competitor (Tucher 52).

All classes of readers were fooled by the hoax, not just the (supposedly) lower class regular readership of the penny papers.  Sixpenny papers were forced to make comment on the "reprints" from the Journal of Science, and they did so with varying degrees of credulity.  Other notable figures jumped on the public bandwagon to the moon.  Edward Everett proclaimed that the discovery of humanoid life on the moon was going to change the world; Harriet Martinueau remarked on the special story; and a group of Massachusetts ladies opened a fund "to send missionaries to the benighted luminary" (O'Brien 86).¹  Even members of a highly-educated scientific community found themselves wondering if Herschel had not, in fact, discovered something really incredible.  Yale University sent a delegation of scientists to view the "original" edition of the Journal of Science from which the Sun had taken its reprints; and Day and Locke sent the visitors on an ingenious wild goose chase across the city to various printers to prevent the scientists from discovering the Journal of Science did not in fact exist (Seavey xiii).

The Sun never did admit outright that it had pulled off an elaborate hoax.  Locke himself reputedly admitted his authorship of the hoax to a fellow journalist after that reporter came to obtain a full copy of the text for his own paper.  Locke, wanting to save his friend some later embarrassment, warned that the moon stories were a hoax, and the next day the competing newspaper announced the "great astronomical discoveries" as authored wholly by Locke (O'Brien 87).  Even after more competing newspapers accused the Sun of making the story up, Day wryly asserted that, accusations or not, almost all American newspapers "congratulate us on having afforded the world much intellectual amusement, if not, indeed, much theoretical instruction" (16 September 1835).  Even those newspapers which now adamantly regarded the moon stories as hoax nevertheless praised it for "its ingenuity and talent" (Day, 16 September 1835).

It was precisely this publicly-proclaimed ingenuity and talent that Poe observed and felt envious of, and his involvement in the "Moon Hoax" of 1835 becomes an entry point into examining how this case travels beyond any narrow annals of journalism history to reveal a chiasma between literature and journalism.  Beginning in June 1835, the Southern Literary Messenger had begun publishing Poe's story "Hans Phaall--A Tale,"² calling the work an imaginative parody fit for "these ballooning days . . . when we hear so much of the benefits which science is to derive from the art of aerostation" and a propos of a near future when "a journey to the moon may not be considered a matter of mere moonshine" (Thomas 160).

The text of "Hans Pfaall" involves a Dutch bellows-maker who, seeking to flee an unhappy life on earth and the harrassment of creditors, secretly constructs a balloon that can carry him to the moon.  The tale recounts the technical construction of the balloon, facts about the moon, and descriptions of traveling in the upper layers of the atmosphere.  After a series of adventures in breathing and close calls with meteors, Pfaall's balloon approaches the moon, and he describes not only volcanic mountains and vegetation, but a fantastic city filled with "a vast crowd of ugly little people" (Poe, "Hans Pfaall" 425).  Poe disrupts his descriptive narrative here and concludes with a messenger--one of the ugly little lunar people--who has been sent back to Rotterdam (via a newspaper-covered balloon) to negotiate Pfaall's return to earth.

Despite the inclusion of pages of technical detail--and despite Poe's claims to the contrary in subsequent years--"Hans Pfaall" was not clearly intended to stand alone as a widespread hoax, as Locke's "Moon Hoax" in the Sun was.³  Rather, Poe's hoax, as originally constructed for the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger, operated on more sublte levels, as Ketterer has suggested.  Poe's hoax functions not as a trick transparently intended to hoodwink readers, but as a philosophical statement on the ultimate unknowability of reality, the "inevitable state of deception" in which humankind is trapped (Ketterer, New Worlds 53).⁴  Whatever level of hoaxing Poe originally intended, a few Southern periodicals took notice of "Hans Pfaall" by July 1835, calling it "a capital burlesque upon ballooning" and moon speculation, and "one of the most exquisite specimens of blended humor and science that we have ever perused" (Thomas 161-62).  Poe might have been  assured by such praise that he had written a successful tale, if not a wholly convincing one.

But Poe's comfort in his own moon tale was short lived--the Sun's celebrated "Moon Hoax" captured the attention of the reading public by the end of August and essentially diverted attention away from Poe's own creation (attention which had, nevertheless, been limited to a Southern audience).  If Poe had created a story of life on the moon, the Sun seemed to be revealing the reality of that life--the invented world simply could not compete with the (apparently) real thing.  Poe's immediate reaction was one of outrage and distrust.  He was less concerned about the satiric or artful effect of his tale than in the fact that Locke had written a tale for a newspaper that was garnering a huge readership and notable financial success, and he felt the nagging urge to justify his own position vis-à-vis the mass market moon story.  "Have you seen [Locke's] 'Discoveries in the Moon'?" he asked one companion.  "Do you not think it altogether suggested by Hans Phall?  It is very singular,--but when I first purposed writing a Tale concerning the Moon, the idea of Telescopic discoveries suggested itself to me--but I afterwards abandoned it.  I had however spoken of it freely, & from many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those Discoveries I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself" (Ostrom 74).  Poe, who had essentially cribbed notes from Herschel and other authorities on lunar travel in constructing his own tale quickly turned to one of his favorite accusations:  the Sun had obviously plagiarized his work.⁵

Poe's sense of victimization grew when the only mention Northern papers gave his work in comparison to Locke's and the Sun's was oblique, at best.  Apparently in an attempt to launch their own lunar hoax, or possibly in an effort to parody the Sun, the New York Transcript reprinted "Hans Pfaall"--having first deleted Poe's name as author--in early September under the title "Lunar Discoveries.  Extraordinary Aerial Voyage by Baron Hans Phall, the Celebrated Dutch Astronomer and Aeronaut" (Thomas 167).  If, as Bruce Weiner maintains, in the increasingly commercialized marketplace of antebellum letters writers like Poe understood that "the reputation of the author rather than his literary merit sells the work" (13), the anonymous publication of his work on a major urban stage must have been galling.⁶  Despite his posturing of himself as an artist--a man above the tumult of journalistic writing--Poe thirsted for a reputation that, increasingly, could only be captured through the penny papers.  He realized that "the reputation of the author rather than his literary merit sells the work" (Weiner 13).  Reputation--or lack of it--could either sell his name and work in the literary marketplace, or quash it irreparably.  The moon story episode was so frustrating because Poe had been usurped at his own lunar games.  Where he had attempted to craft a story burlesquing hoaxes and aeronautical experimentation, the Sun, which already enjoyed more readers and financial stability than Poe could ever hope to achieve, had enraptured readers with an entirely different kind of hoax, one that had fooled the public more widely than Poe could have dreamed of with his own tale.

Significantly, Poe licked his wounds by downplaying the Sun's success with the "Moon Hoax" and reinforcing the artistic and scientific superiority of his own tale.  Though he later retracted his statement that Locke had plagiarized his work, Poe nevertheless kept insisting--rather defensively--that his work was superior to that found in the newspaper, and that it deserved at least as much attention as the "Moon Hoax."  He presented himself as the "correct" reader of the hoax, the one who finally could not be deceived, unlike the public rabble that had purchased the Sun rather than the Southern Literary Messenger.  In the 1839 edition of "Hans Pfaall," for instance, Poe added an appendix that placed his story head to head with Locke's creation:  "The author of 'Hans Pfaall' thinks it necessarily to say, in self-defense, that his own jeu d'esprit was published . . . about three weeks before the commencement of Mr. L.'s . . ." (Rpt. in Seavey 69, emphasis original).  Having established the precedence of his own hoax tale, Poe proceeds for several pages to educate his reader on "why no one should have been deceived" by the inferior nature of Locke's scientification (Rpt. in Seavey 70).  Furthermore, Poe continued to defend the superior quality of his hoax in his article on Locke in The Literati.  He once again maintains that his ideas for a lunar hoax had been brewing for quite some time before 1835, and that he in fact wisely rejected the telescope idea which forms the centerpiece of the Sun articles before falling "back upon a style half plausible, half bantering . . . to give interest . . . to an actual passage from the earth to the moon" (Literati 121).  The works, taken together, were an amazing public achievement, Poe maintains, given than "nothing of a similar nature had ever been attempted before these two hoaxes, the one of which followed immediately upon the heels of the other" (Literati 122, emphasis added).  After establishing his own precedence and importance, then, Poe complains that though he had written "an examination of [Locke's] claims to credit, showing distinctly its fictitious character," he "could obtain few listeners, so really eager were all to be deceived" (Literati 122).  The "Moon Hoax" was, finally only the "greatest hit . . . of merely popular sensation--ever made by any similar fiction either in America or in Europe" (Literati 126, emphasis original).

Poe's interaction with the penny paper world, then, became one of defense, then aloof attack in the case of "Hans Pfaall" and the "Moon Hoax."  What is even more interesting, given these postures, is how Poe attempted, with his "Balloon Hoax" some nine years later, to mimic and manipulate the very public success he criticized in 1835.  Early in 1844, Poe, finding himself in dire financial straits once more, moved from Philadelphia to New York to seek new fortunes.  Hoping to make a public splash and gather the wide reading audience and public reputation that he at once disparaged and craved, Poe attempted a large scale hoax modeled on Locke's "Moon Hoax."  For fifty dollars (Falk 48) he sold to the New York Sun--the very paper made famous by its earlier hoax--not a hoax about the moon, but a factual-sounding story about an unexpected and unprecedented crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon.  Like Locke, Poe chose "real life" characters for his story, including Monck Mason, a well-known experimental balloonist, and Harrison Ainsworth, a British novelist.

As ballooning and moon exploration had been hot topics in 1835, so they continued to be in 1844.  Mason, for example, published a popular account of a balloon voyage in 1836, and then published a pamphlet describing his new dirigible balloon and its potentials in 1843 (Scudder 179-80).⁷  To open his hoax, which attempted to capitalize on that interest, Poe made sure the 13 April 1844 Sun advertised a special "Extra" edition to run later that day.  This extra would detail the "astounding intelligence" of how "the Atlantic Ocean [was] crossed in three days!!" (Rpt. in Wimsatt 492).  Later that afternoon, the Sun's extra appeared, as promised, complete with an engraving of the balloon that had supposedly completed the fantastic voyage across the ocean.  Poe's work seamlessly adapted the breathy tone of an exciting news scoop, and it brimmed with the kind of technical description a reader might find in a regular news article about ballooning and aeronautics.  Poe used the technical and "journalistic," then, to introduce the most dramatic portion of the hoax:  hour-by-hour journal accounts, "copied verbatim from the joint diaries" of Mason and Ainsworth (Poe, "Balloon Hoax" 111).

Poe's "Balloon Hoax" may have been crafted with the utmost tone of veracity and just the right amount of drama, and it may have attempted to model itself consciously on the Sun's earlier "Moon Hoax."  But by most accounts the "Balloon Hoax" was an immediate failure.  A crowd did apparently gather to purchase the Sun's Extra on the afternoon of April 13, but apparently no other New York newspapers were fooled this time, and few even referred to the hoax "except in derision" (Brigham 7).  Backtracking in a fashion they had never done with Locke's work, Sun editors were forced to admit the very next day that the story was imaginary, though, the paper insisted, it did give "great pleasure and satisfaction" with its veracity (Rpt. in Brigham 7).

Intriguingly, Poe himself may have escorted his hoax to its early grave.  One contemporary account suggests Poe, crazed by a glass of wine, stood on the walk before the publisher's door, and told the assembled crowd that the extra was a hoax, as he personally knew, for he had written it himself.  The crowd scattered, the sales fell off, and the publisher, on going to the door, to ascertain the cause of failure, saw his author making what he conceived to be the necessary explanations (Rpt. in Falk 48).
This account, if true, is suggestive of the way Poe felt a need both to be a part of and to stand apart from the penny paper industry.  Poe apparently wanted to observe the sensational effect of his balloon hoax, to bask in the popular success unfolding before his eyes.  But simultaneously, he needed to distance himself from a pass-produced text by taking the role of the "superior creator," the hoaxer made uncommon "because of his mind, his ingenious intellect, . . . keen perception and creativity" (Matthew 23).  Here, I think, we see Poe within a literary marketplace commercialized by the penny press, acting out a compulsion to present himself as a "specially endowed" person, a genius "who create[s] rather than tradesm[a]n who manufacture[s]" (Weinter 5).

Once again, however, what is perhaps even more intriguing than Poe's immediate reaction to the literary hoax within a newspaper is his later revisioning of the hoax's reception and his insistence that the work was just as remarkable--and marketable--as the "Moon Hoax" had been a decade earlier.  By the summer of 1844, Poe was doing correspondence work for a small Pennsylvania newspaper, the Columbia Spy, and one of his letters to the paper tried to renew interest in what had been a flat failure.  He boldly proclaimed that the "Balloon Hoax" had "made a far more intense sensation than anything of that character since the 'Moon Story' of Locke," and that when the Sun announced its extra, the "whole square" surrounding the building "was literally beseiged, blocked up, ingress and egress being alike impassible" (Doings 33).  Poe paints a duped crowd frenzied with excitement, ready to pay any price to read the hottest new writing off the press:  "I saw a half-dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper," the correspondent tells his readership, and "I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy" (Doings 33).

Poe gushes with praise for the "brilliant" hoax and for writing which could enrapture the public so markedly.  But he also presents himself once again as a cultured critic, seizing the opportunity to compare this hoax to Locke's "Moon Hoax."  Once more criticizing the earlier work's technical flaws, Poe proclaims that the "Balloon Hoax" contains "positively" no "internal evidence of falsehood . . . while the more generally accredited fable of Locke would not bear even momentary examination by the scientific.  There is nothing put forth in the Balloon Story which is not in full keeping with the known facts of aeronautic experience--which might not really have occurred" (Doings 34).

Poe's uneasy posturing--both here and in the case of "Hans Pfaall" and the "Moon Hoax," suggests the difficult necessity of renegotiating one's authorial identity in a changing antebellum marketplace.  Poe stressed early in his career that "magazines and journals overall outclassed newspapers and that literary men who became newspapermen pandered to the masses" (Miller 149).  Nevertheless, Poe's involvement in two of the many literary hoaxes that appeared in penny papers suggests a bleeding of textual categories and identities in antebellum America.  Poe, at once craving and despising the mass readership afforded by a New York newspaper audience, discovered himself both catering to that audience and placing himself above it.  His work with hoaxes would imply that the literary hoax as produced by an "artist" was the twin of the literary hoax as produced by a journalist, and that readers of penny papers did not necessarily draw fundamental distinctions between what was "journalistic" and what was "literary."

If penny papers were an experiment in emerging journalistic standards and practices, and if they easily blended the purely factual with the purely imaginative, then perhaps Poe discovered the papers were not, after all, such a far cry from his own work and ideals.  In a letter to Evert Duyckinck, Poe described his interest in a "plausible or verisimilar style" of writing, which "attempts a kind of realism in which the events are supposed to be true" (Carlson 458).  Here was the very style at the center of much penny paper journalism, as well as the style at the center of the literary hoax.

¹The Sun's Moon Hoax even spawned at least two theatrical endeavors, which attempted to capitalize on the newspaper's success.  One New York amusement house show, which replaced another "current events" show, was entitled "The Lunar Discoveries; a Brilliant Illustration of the Scientific Observation of the Surface of the Moon."  Another, entitled "Moonshine, or Lunar Discoveries," was a spoof which included a scene where the man-bats were blown up "with a combustible bundle of Abolition tracts" (O'Brien 90).

²Poe's original spelling for his title was "Hans Phaall" though he spelled it "Phaal" in his letters.  After 1842 he called the story "The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall," and it is this spelling and title which have been adopted by modern editors (Thomas 163).  I will use the modern spelling of "Hans Pfaall" in my own discussion.

³Though contemporary reviews of "Hans Pfaall" clearly recognize it as an imaginative rather than a "factual" tale intended to hoax readers, some critics nevertheless believe (evidence to the contrary) that readers were hoodwinked.  See Weissbuch 295 and Pollin 372.

⁴See also Ketterer's "Poe's Usage of the Hoax" and Matthews 75.

⁵See, for instance, Ketterer's New Worlds, particularly page 52, Bennett, Bravely, and Pollin for more on Poe's "cribbing."  Ironically, then, given Poe's own practical plagiarism of scientific sources, David Ketterer asserts that "undeserved reputation, chicanery, favoritism, and especially plagiarism never failed to provoke Poe's wrath and provided evidence for his belief in human guillibility" (Rationale 56).  See also Meyers and Moss on Poe and plagiarism.

⁶Possibly even more galling to Poe, his next work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was credited by some reviewers as another hoax written by Locke (Thomas 249).

⁷Research suggests Poe was more than influenced by Mason's work.  As he did when writing "Hans Pfaall," Poe closely cribbed the descriptions of actual scientific accounts of ballooning and aeronautics (Wilkinson).

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