Richmond, the capital of Virginia is a dynamic, creative city. There is elaborately conceived art on public walls, and scores of museums.
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, for instance, houses the largest public collection of Fabergé eggs outside Russia. And there’s a museum dedicated to one of the city’s most famous sons, the writer Edgar Allan Poe.
The master of Gothic fiction and macabre poetry is credited with creating the world’s first fictional detective, C Auguste Dupin (in Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1841). He inspired Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King; battled alcoholism and a gambling addiction that left him in debt; tended towards melancholia; and died in 1849, aged only 40.
Poe’s troubled childhood — he had an absentee father and a mother who died when he was two; the Allan in his name is the last name of the family that raised but never officially adopted him — and his legacy are mined at the Poe Museum, a cluster of buildings ensconced in an atmospheric garden.
It was opened, incidentally, in 1922, by a group of fans who struggled for over a decade to set it up. The museum now houses the most comprehensive collection of Poe manuscripts, letters, memorabilia and personal items. Old Stone House is a piece of history itself. It is Richmond’s oldest surviving residential structure, dating to the 1740s. Poe would have known the landmark, having lived, with his wealthy adopted family, only a few blocks away.
In it, now, are the writer’s childhood bed, a desk he wrote at as an adult, and the watch that reportedly ticked in his pocket as he penned The Tell-Tale Heart (1843).
Outside, the Enchanted Garden, inspired by Poe’s poem, To One in Paradise (Thou wast that all to me, love, / For which my soul did pine— / A green isle in the sea, love, / A fountain and a shrine) holds stone benches transplanted from the Yarrington boarding house where he married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm. She would die in 1847, at the age of 24; he, two years later.
A small memorial to him sits towards the back of the garden. It is built with bricks from the Southern Literary Messenger building, where Poe began his journalistic journey. Inside the shrine sits a bust that is said to have been visited by the likes of Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein.
Two black cats — named Edgar for the writer and Pluto for the rather cursed cat in his 1843 story The Black Cat — have been adopted by the museum, and slink around, adding to the atmosphere.
Visitors can add to the atmospherics too. A burial casket allows people to climb in and pose as if dead, gruesomely murdered, or buried alive. In Poe’s day, a note nearby adds, newspapers carried dramatic accounts of cries emerging from fresh graves as such errors were discovered. Poe seemed haunted, himself, by what was called “premature burial”. He described it as “too awful to be real”, and the idea made its way into his fiction, in stories such as The Premature Burial, Berenice, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
When he died, in 1849, it wasn’t clear what had killed him. The official cause of death was phrenitis; swelling of the brain. Theories, the museum reminds visitors, ranged from murder and epilepsy to mercury poisoning.
The tale at its end, one departs through the gift shop, where souvenirs range from tiny ravens and skulls to copies of his books. And bookmarks, in suitable greys, bearing lines drawn from his work: “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”.
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