Rufus Griswold: Poe’s Petty Stalker

I'm Maria, I'm Holly Fry, And as we did in the first season, we planned a look at some of history's transgressions to get a better understanding of what really went down, and in doing so, we're hoping that we'll get some perspective on whether any of these alleged perpetrators emerge instead as sympathetic characters, and also how these crimes look through today's eyes, because, as they say, a little

distance goes a long way. So our first season was all about women poisoners, and frankly it was all about ours neck too. But now in season two we'll see far less arsenic, but we will see a lot more stalkers. Today we're going to talk about Rufus Griswold, who was the arch nemesis of Edgar Allan Poe. And while the cause of post death is a mystery still today, we do know one thing, actually we know two things. One

Griswold did not kill him too. Everything we thought we knew about Poe is actually really wrong and it's Grizzwald's doing. But we're here to talk about the man Griswold was not, to solve the mystery of post death. First, we need to lay a little groundwork and talk a little bit about stalking and stalkers. Right, So, stalking by definition is simple, Like, the definition just says it is the unwanted pursuit of

another person. That's it. That's all. So it's a pretty wide net that could involve things like following someone or unexpectedly appearing at a person's home or a place of employment, or making harassing phone calls, leaving written messages or objects, or vandalizing a person's property. We've seen a lot of this in the modern era, little different in the history, not all the same technology available, and it could involve a little bit or a few of these things and

still be defined as stalking. But it is also a crime, right, whether it's one or six, still a crime. So who becomes a stalker? You might wonder, Well, we wondered. So the demographics related to stalkers are actually quite diverse and as you're going to see this season. Virtually anyone can become a stalker. They come from all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds. But despite the diversity, research shows that

there are actually some common characteristics that they have. In the United States, according to the FBI, as many as eight seven percent of stalkers are male and are white. Half fall between the ages of eighteen and thirty five. Most stalkers, again, according to the FBI, are of above average and tell agents, and most earn above average incomes. But now let's take a look at the victims. So just as anyone could become a stalker, anyone could become

a victim. Of all stalking victims, about three quarters, according to the FBI, again are women, and they are between the ages of eighteen and thirty nine, and eighty three percent of them are white. Also, a little more than half of them are married. And indeed, as Maria said, anyone can become a stalker. Take Rufus Wilmot Griswold for example. Griswold was by all accounts successful. He was a journalist,

a literary critic, an anthologist, and an editor. That is a really impressive resume, and it looks really good on paper, but what he's best known for is his character assassination of Edgar Ellan Poe. His hatred was palpable during the years of rivalry between the two authors, and that was a rivalry that didn't end until Griswold's death, which was

well after Poe was long So. Griswald was born on February eighteen fifteen in Vermont, in a really small town outside of Rutland, and he was the twelfth of fourteen children. His father was a farmer and a shoemaker, and he raised his family strict Calvinist. And it was said that

Griswald was intelligent looking. He had a high, broad forehead and large gray eyes, a sharp nose, and an expression of smug defiance, which when I read that I thought was fantastic because as you learn a little bit more about him, you're going to envision that what he looked like as a kid manifested his entire life. Um it's also been sad quote that he has a glib tongue, and I think that did carry with him his entire life.

So he left home when he was fifteen, and he called himself and we quote here again a solitary soul, wandering through the world, a homeless joy, this outcast. My god, he was like an eighteen thirties emo kid. He totally wast man. And although Griswold would like people to believe that he spent his teenage years voyaging the world, modern biographers disagree with that claim because actually, at fift TV

was not out traveling the world by himself. He was in Troy, New York, attending the Rensseller School that is now Rensseller Polytechnic Institute. And this was all thanks to his brother, who was a well known businessman in that town. Griswold was, however, kicked out of the school shortly after he started his studies there because apparently he had a

little problem with playing pranks. So we went to live with his brother who was in Troy, and it said that during that time Griswold became acquainted with the writer George G. Foster, who's famous for writing the book New York by Gaslights. He moved of Troy and moved in with Foster, who lived in Albany, New York. Now, if you're unfamiliar with New York state, Albany is about eight miles away from Troy World Traveler. He bridging the state.

While he was in his twenties, though, Griswold moved to Syracuse, New York again not so far afield, and he started a newspaper there called The Porcupine, which is terribly charming his names go, it is, except for when you learn what he did with it, and you're right. So this publication was later remembered as a spiteful critique that targeted locals, and mostly it was all written by Griswold under the pseudonym Toby Trinculo. Basically, it was just his next door

that he had a printing press for. Yes, I also laughed because I know what comes ahead, and I apologized for that. But this won't be the first time that we see Griswold using a pseudonym. But I really have a love hate relationship that he uses now and writes

an entire newspaper on one. So anyway, he continued working as a journalist after Syracuse and Uh he was journalist and a critic in Philadelphia, New York City, and a few other northern cities at the time when he began editing for the Chautauqua Wig that officially established him as an editor, and he held editorships of both The Western Democrat and the Literary Inquirer in and then in eighteen

thirty six he edited an Olian Advocate. Much of his work at this time was again still in Western New York. So I'm actually going to change the topic quite a ways right now. Let's talk about Griswold's marriages for just a minute. And I bring this up because Griswold met his wife right before he began working at the Olian Advocate. The relationship he had with her is really interesting because it's unlike any other we see him have throughout his

entire life. Watching it develop and watching them as a couple helps us see the complexity of Griswold and not just his hot streak. He was actually married three times during his life. Shortly after marrying his first wife, Caroline,

Griswold actually became a reverend at her encouragement. Caroline unfortunately died young while she was giving birth to their third child, the son that also died during childbirth, and they had two daughters, and all accounts suggest that Griswold was deeply in love with Caroline from the moment he met her.

As One story goes he threw himself on her grave during her funeral, and another tells about how a month after she died, he actually snuck into the crypt where she was buried, just so he could spend the night near her. Sorry, my my pause was just because I don't know if I want someone to sneak into my crypt or not. I've I'm torn on that. So, while his marriage to Caroline made him feel saved, he has

said his other marriages were not so deep. He eventually remarried, as we said, to a woman named Charlotte Myers, who was many years his senior. But when Griswold became interested not in his wife but in the poetus Alice Carr and asked for a divorce, Charlotte refused him. This turned into quite an ongoing conflict, and that marriage ultimately ended in a public and very controversial divorce. Griswold's third wife, Harriet Macrillis, left him after the previous divorce was almost repealed.

Basically after Caroline, he never got it right again, No, he didn't, you know, he never should have tried. He should have just stuck with being a widower. Um. But enough now, though about Griswold marriages. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and when we returned, we're going to talk about how and when Griswold met Edgar Allan Poe. Welcome back to Criminalia. Now we're going to talk about

how Poe and Griswold met. So Rufus, Griswold and Edgar Allan Poe met right around eighteen forty, and that's when Griswold was planning a poetry anthology. So at this time in his career, Poe was working as a literary critic and he was a budding poet. He was interested in Griswold and the work that Griswold was doing, and the

two of them met and ended up talking for hours. Poe, presumably trying to be helpful, provided self or works of his own for the anthology, and he also recommended poets for Grizzold to consider, but Griswold ultimately ignored all of post suggestions, although he did include some of Poe's works. Once that book was published, Griswold paid Poe to write a review of the anthology for the Boston Miscellany. A little awkward, right, there's some journalistic standards to be examined.

They're not so cool. Moving on, like, yeah, oh did take that job. And he wrote what was mostly a positive review except oh, yes, there is an exception. There's always He criticized some of the poets that had been selected, possibly as many as twenty four, including Longfellow, who po accused of plagiarizing Alfred Lord Tennyson. I mean, who among us hasn't done a little light Lord Tennys in plagiarism

here time to time comes off. Po stated that many of the poets who were selected were and we're quoting him here to mediocre to entitle them to particular notice o whammo. So Poe was known to be a really harsh literary critic. No way was a lamb. Everybody's doing their best. He wrote, I love your high kup. So basically when he reviewed your poem, your book, your anthology, whatever it was, his reviews generally stung, and he offended many of his peers and his colleagues with his writing.

Um But among the most offended was Rufus Griswald, who at the time was a rival editor, anthologist, and two po at least a failed poet. Griswald had once said about po that quote, the tales of Mr Poe are peculiar and impressive. He has a great deal of imagination and fancy, and his mind is in the highest degree analytical. The reader of Mr Poe's tales is compelled, almost at the outset, to surrender his mind to the author's control.

Now that should have been the bio, and he should have done wrote the end, right, I mean, that's beautiful, praise, that's that's lovely. But um times change. So after pose assessment of the anthology, Griswold believed that Poe thought too much of himself and he was really displeased by the review. So this is the moment that sparked a rivalry that lasted beyond pose death and might be one of the

longest standing smear campaigns of literary history. At the end of the day, experts on this rivalry put it pretty simply. Griswold was the kind of person who made enemies everywhere he went, and he and Poe may have just been a pair that provoked and infuriated each other. It happens, right, Sometimes people just rubbed you the wrong way. But wow, this went much further than that. So a nightmare to

many who knew him, both socially and or professionally. Griswold was really actually pretty good at what he did, and he had built a strong literary reputation when his eighteen forty two collection called The Poets and Poetry of America was released. In fact, Griswold and Poe had both worked on a publication called Graham's Magazine, but to pose disappointment

when Griswold succeeded him as assistant editor. Griswold also took home a bigger paycheck, and Poe may have felt short changed, but Griswald had come to utterly low's Poe because Poe had criticized Griswold's poetry collections. How dare he he was obsessed with this bad review. The owner of Graham's Magazine later commented that Poe quote gave Mr Griswold some raps over the knuckles, a force sufficient to be remembered. I

suppose that is a way to say it. Yes, I mean again, this is the kid who thinks he left home and paints himself as like this lonely, penniless joy live of the world, and then someone's like, you're kind of a crap poet like, He's like, fine, then I'll just write under pseudonym as you'll never know to his entire identity was undermined by this thing. So really, at this point in their story, this is when things went

kind of truly weird. Alright. So Poe died on October seven, forty nine, and the po Griswald situation moved beyond rivalry between two editors. Um Speculations about the cause of post death abound even today. They ranged from alcohol poisoning to an undiagnosed illness such as maybe tuberculosis, and they even speculated that it could have been rabies, which actually at that time wouldn't have been a weird thing like today.

But what we do know is that he was found lying on a street in Baltimore, incoherent and dressed in someone else's clothing. He was admitted to the Washington College Hospital, where he spent last days, and reportedly while there he kept repeating the name Reynolds. A local newspaper reported his cause of death as congestion of the brain, and today we would call that frenitis or swelling of the brain, but it was at the time often used as a

euphemism for alcohol poisoning. The circumstances surrounding pose untimely death remain one of the great mysteries about the author even today, and it has long fueled the perception that he lived a life of debauchery. With Pose death, Griswold saw an opportunity, and he went on and on to defame po for many years. We are going to take a break, and then when we come back, we will talk about how and when Griswold began this campaign of defamation. Welcome back

to Criminalia. So it all started with the obituary. That character assassination we mentioned before the break began immediately upon Poe's death. Griswald penned pose obituary for the New York Daily Tribune, which actually was so libelous, and he knew that that he wrote it under the pseudonym Ludwig More pseudonyms. Come on, rufus, stand up for your own words. So that obituary began. I'm going to quote it. Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday.

This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. He went on that Poe was morally bankrupt and a drunken womanizer, and today we know that none of that is actually true. In this obituary, along with any information about Poe that came from Griswold Old, we're all an attempt at revenge for some of the offensive and provoking things that Poe had written about Griswold and

his work over the years. But there's a beautiful sort of irony here, which is that the attacks that Griswold mounted, which he intended to turn people off of reading Pose works, actually had the opposite effects. People became very fascinated and started reading Poe even more after his death than when he was alive. I love it. The obituary was just at the beginning. With Po's death, Griswold became the well spring of pretty much all the misinformation about pose life

from the eight hundred still today. And next, in his toxic campaign, he decided that he would write Pose memoirs. I always think about this in the selfish lens, and go who that hates me would write my And how badly would that go? Well? Would it sound like exactly? And it said that Poe had appointed his now literary rival, Griz Wald to be his literary executor. And that sounds weird, correct,

but it also might have happened. Uh. It often seems when you read about their story that Griswold was really fuming all the time and Poe was kind of like, you're crabby, Like he didn't have the same iron return at all. I feel the same way. I feel like for Poe, he kind of like came and went out of the rivalry, and like Griswold was just in it all the time. Yes, because he was obsessed. Yes, So, like we said, this may have actually happened, that Poe

chose Griswold to be his literary executor. It is actually likely that one of the following two things happened. So some historians think that yes, Poe did name Griswold to be his literary executor, probably during a time when the two were in a more civil relationship, um, which you know, possible. However,

others believe it was more likely this scenario. Griswold probably convinced Poe's mother in law, a woman named Maria Clem after post death to sign away the rights to the author's works, promising her profits from the sales of the memoir, but Maria was never actually paid well. She was paid, but not as she expected to be. She received six sets of the two volumes of the memoir with a card that said that she could sell them and that would be her profits. What a peach it's come on now.

With all of post literary papers, Griswold was able to take real events in post life and twist them to fit the character of Poe that he was creating. And he ended up creating what you've probably heard of before, kind of a mad genius version of po One where he became this poor, wandering madman with alcohol and opioid problems who talked to himself on the streets. And Griswold backed up his claims about Poe with quote unquote evidence, although most of that so called evidence has also been

completely debunked. I would love to see that evidence. So when gris Wald edited and published an inaccurate collection of Poe's writings, in which he included a biographical piece entitled Memoir of the Author, as you men guess, it did not paint a good picture of Poe. Griswold made false claims about pose character, and it was this piece that would go on to seal the negative reputation. Griswold was trying to develop a Poe within the community, and it

was starting to become how people thought of Poe. In the biography that Griswold wrote of Edgar Allan Poe, he also portrayed Poe is basically a conniving jerk who had conned a woman out of money and who spent most of his time drunk. But then Griswold actually took things to a new level. He made up passages and quotes from Pope posthumously. They were all quotes that gave high praise to Rufus. Griswald surprised, and they were. They were all attributed to Poe, so he claimed after the man's death,

and in fact he was very complimentary of him. Right, he's a terrible person, but he loved me. Poe at this point was becoming a legend in the community. But his life still to this day is widely mischaracterized and his character has been distorted this whole time because of this one book. And while Poe was an obsessive rivalry for Griswald, that was not the only person that Rufus had some controversy with. You don't say he had a

personality type. There were a lot of people that he had conflict with, but there are two that came up in the research that are really worth noting. Reverend Jule Healey and Griswald were working on books about George Washington at the same time, and through their interactions, he was angry and swore revenge. We don't know exactly what went down,

but this is Grizzwald. He began calling grizz Wald and we quote such a liar that even his friends replied to his statements with the query, is that a grizz Wald or a fact? Which I would really like to make a comeback, Holly, I think we can do it day to day life. I'll have to explain it the first few times and then people will start to get it. Yeah. So, unlike Griswold's life longs talking of po this rivalry lasted only about a month, and unfortunately no one today says

is that a griz Wald or is it a fact? Anyway? So nothing about this rival We're really stuck. It's kind of another like twist of the dagger that even an insult about him did not persist his story. Glee like You're not less in anyway, dude, right, I can't even stick. And Heatley was not the first person who butted heads

with Griswold that year. A young woman named Elizabeth Ellett, who was well known among the high circles of literary society, proposed to Griswold that she could write a book about American revolutionary women, and he really liked the idea, so he agreed, and he also agreed that she can have access to his private library. But she committed the terrible, terrible faux pa of never thanking him for letting her

have that research access. Bless her soul. This bruised Griswold zego, and he found the oversight completely insulting, and Elizabeth Ellett essentially became dead to him at that point. Rufus just can't. Rufus just can't. It's gonna be my reaction to anything that I don't want to deal with. I'm sorry, Rufus just can't. Good So okay. During the years between Poe's death and his own, gris Wald published numerous poems and anthologies, as well as sermons and editorial pieces, and none of

them had anything to do with Poe. Among His most notable works are the Poets and Poetry of America, which we talked about earlier, the Poets and Poetry of England, and a poem that was called Five Days, which was written for his first wife Caroline. After her death, Griswold continued to work on anthologies right up until his death by tuberculosis on August seven. And when Griswold died, there are stories that there was a portrait of Poe hanging on the wall in his hallway. This was the only

portrait that Poever sat for, and Griswold had stolen it. Listen, you might maybe use the word con as a more appropriate discussion, but basically he had gotten met somehow from Poe, his mother in law, the same exact woman who he had kind of conned into signing away the rights to pose works. Yeah, she should stop talking to him, But I love the idea that it was a portrait on the wall in the hallway. Um, he hated him so much,

he looked at him every single day. So we have Griswold, and he has died, And just a few years after his death, a woman named Sarah Helen Whitman, posed former fiance,

published her own biography of Poe. Several other authors, editors, and poets followed with their own written defensive po and these versions, most of them, at least, if not all of them, portrayed Po in a much better light than Griswold ever had, And while they were unable to set the record straight within the community, they did finally almost

successfully dismissed the popular idea that Poe was an opium addict. However, as time passed, it was Griswold's Memoir of an Author that he had written ages ago, when Poe had first died, that became accepted as a true account of post life. In fact, it was actually really the only established biography of Poe for something like twenty five years, and today the largest collection of Griswold's work now belongs to a museum dedicated to his enemy. I love that so much.

I love that his portrait is hanging up in you know, his historical society, and it has nothing to do with him. Yes, And while post legend, of course lives on today, it's huge. Griswold is basically just remembered as Po's first biographer and the man who smeared him after his death now there was a story that came up that we talked about during the research that you loved, and there wasn't quite a correct place to put it here, but I wanted to make sure that you tell it because it's so

incredibly charming. It is so charming, and I think that it is such a good description of who Poe actually was. I just fell in love with it. So it was a time after The Raven. The poem came out, and as a literary critic you're not recognized on the street, but as a poet um at that time you were.

And so The Raven became very popular and so popular that children knew who po was and they would follow him around on the streets calling at him, which I think is fantastic one, but two, he would turn around and sort of raise his hands up in the air and go never more. And the kids would just run off like screaming and laughing and having a really good time with Edgar Allan Poe, which if you were Griswold, those words don't actually make sense. It probably even and

sensed him that children liked to. I know he was like, even the children are calling him no one. I just love that. I mean everything that I've learned about power that hasn't had Griswold's touch to it just suggests he was such a charming man. It didn't fit in the script, and I appreciate you giving me the time to share. It's slightly selfish because I love it, Girl and Poe, I like rufus. Griswold have his portrait in my home, although not so I can spear at it because I

love him. So we um instead of what you're poisoned this season have a little bit different name. So Holly is going to kick that off. Yeah, I mean we still are going to have cocktails. Don't don't mistake my language for no cocktails just mean we're going to call him something out And this one you have to excuse because we're taking a little bit of linguistic license. We are calling these the chaser. Normally, a chaser is actually

non alcoholic. It's what you have after you have a shot, where you then drink down like a soda or a water or something so that it helps balance that out in your system and you don't become a train wrean too quickly. But we're calling them chasers because we're talking about stalkers, and they will, in fact usually have alcohol.

I think it's a brilliant name. And thinking about these two and Rufus Griswold in particular, I wanted to make a dark drink, and I wanted to make something that was just interesting in a little bit outside of where I would normally land, and I created something called the Bitter Rival. Uh So it starts with four ounces of cold coffee, two ounces of rum. I used a spice rum, and ounce of simple syrup. You can use a flavored one.

I used a little bit of my leftover honey syrup from when we did the bees Knees at the end of season. One, three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, and then two to three shakes of angist a bitters. The lemon juice is interesting, gives it a little bit of bite, which is what we want, right. We don't want this to be an overly sweet and cloying thing. We must definitely do not with these men, right, because I want everything to be overly sweet and cloying. But yeah,

you can do other bidders if you prefer them. I had angister on hand. Mix that all up, give it a shake and a shaker if you wish pour it into your glass, and there you have a bitter rival. It's interesting because it doesn't have as much body as I anticipated, and it's not as bity as I thought. And if you really dislike bitey, you can add a little more simple syrup. If you would prefer it to be a little more bitter, you can drop that down

to like a three quarters of an ounce. But that is my my odes to Rufus Grispell, the bitter Rival. I'd like to think that post the kind of guy who would have had a lot of coffee. One would hope it's a coffee time. And it's also a good way if you're like me and you make like a pot of coffee and sometimes you end up with like a cold bit at the end that you don't really want to drink. Put that in a jar or a container and toss it in your fridge and keep it

on hand or something like this. It's a good way to not waste protect So thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us for this kick off to season two of Criminalia. We are so excited. There will be so many more stalkers to come uh and we will see you next week right here. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.