[Posted by Ed Pettit] American Gothic Literature is like a deep, dark river coursing through the American landscape of Democracy and Liberty.  And the mouth of that river is in Philadelphia.

Soon after the Founding Fathers signed the documents that established this country as the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the writers in Philadelphia were penning tales that foresaw our potential for death, murder and the pursuit of destruction.  The American Dream?  How about the American Nightmare.

The European Gothic tradition took its readers into crumbling castles, haunted by spectres of the dead.  Ancient family curses pursued the living.  American authors took this genre and adapted it to their own culture and landscape.   American Gothic is about the criminal element.  European Gothic is haunted by spectres and mad monks.  In America we at the mercy of serial killers.   

This American style of Gothic was founded by Philadelphia writers.  Poe is part of a tradition that gothicized the urban landscape of Philadelphia.  Charles Brockden Brown, at the turn of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, wrote gothic novels set in and around Philadelphia.  In Arthur Mervyn, the title character is caught up in murderous conspiracies in the city while the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 rages through the population (killing between one-fifth and one-fourth of the residents).  In Wieland, a man spontaneously combusts and, years later, his son hears the voice of God telling him to murder his wife and children, a deed he promptly carries out with an axe.   

Poe’s friend, George Lippard, wrote the best-selling novel, The Quaker City or the Monks of Monk Hall, transforming Philadelphia into a gothic horrorshow with deformed hunchbacks pursuing fainting women along the corridors of an old mansion.  Both Poe and Lippard acknowledged their imaginative debts to Brown.  Both writers adapted gothic conventions in ways similar to Brown.  The past is a burden on the present.  Madness can be a mere blink away.  Axes are sharp and can do great damage when plunged into heads.  

While in Philadelphia, living and writing and publishing in the tradition of Philadelphia Gothic, Poe’s works transformed. An urban nightmare began to infect his tales.      

One story serves the best example of the influence of the urban nightmare landscape on Poe’s works, “The Man of the Crowd,” written and published in 1840.  In it, the narrator pursues a mysterious character through the streets of London.  However, the Philadelphia of the 1840s, not London, is the place described by Poe, a tour through the labyrinthine streets of  the Quaker City at its chaotic worst, a gaslit scene of squalor and decay: “Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.” 

Poe had found the city of his nightmares, resting next to the river of Philadelphia Gothic.   

For more on this hitherto ignored Philadelphia literary tradition, check out the Library Company of Philadelphia’s online exhibition: Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters and Mayhem Inspire American Fiction 1798-1854

There are also two podcasts, one by me and the other Professor Christopher Looby, of lectures given in conjunction with the exhibition.