Twin Beaks

Nathan: You may remember the image of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. Haunting the poem’s narrator, refusing to leave him in peace. Well it turns out that raven might still be with us.

Brian: Nathan if you’re trying to scare us, I’ll remind you that we’ve already done our Halloween show.

Nathan: No Brian, you could actually go see The Raven today in Philadelphia. And I promise it’s as real as a cheese steak or the Liberty Bell. As real, but maybe a bit creepier.

Brian: And that’s why I will go see this raven nevermore. Well, let me take a wild guess, I’m guessing that it’s a taxidermied raven Nathan?

Nathan: It absolutely is.

Brian: What makes it Poe’s Raven? There are a lot of Raven’s out there. If it’s just some dead bird replica, I’m gonna lose interest pretty quickly.

Nathan: That’s a fair question. And being from Baltimore, I have to be sensitive to it as well. But I can assure you, that this is not just some dead bird. Before inspiring Poe, it was actually another celebrated author’s pet.

Robert Peck: Dickens was quite interested in ravens. And actually during his lifetime he had at least three live ravens. Grip was the first one, and Grip served as a character in his mystery novel, Barnaby Rudge.

Nathan: That’s Robert McCracken Peck from the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University joining us again. And he helped bring Grip back to life.

Robert Peck: In 1991, the bird had some signs of domes ted beetle damage. This is a very insect pest that will get into a mounted specimen and eat away at the base of a feather for example in a bird. Fortunately the people who have mounted Grip originally, the taxidermist who worked for Charles Dickens to do this work had applied a lot of arsenic and this was common in the 19th century and so the domes ted beetles, as soon as they hit the arsenic they died.
Nevertheless there were some skins of the insects around the base of the bird and I think the library was quite right in having us double check it’s health and safety.

Brian: Lemme get this right, the raven that’s now in Philadelphia was once Charles Dickens’ pet raven?

Nathan: It was. And apparently, the fact that Dickens loved his raven Grip so much motivated him to taxidermy his raven after he died. Listen to how Dickens describes his attachment to his pet raven in the preface of Barnaby Rudge.

Dickens: It may have been that he was too bright a genius to live long. Or it may have been that he took some pernicious substance into his bill and vents into his maw, which is not improbable. Seeing that he tore up and swallowed in splinters, the greater part of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing. But after some three years he too was taken ill and died before the kitchen fire. He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted. And suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of cuckoo! Since then I have been raven less.

Nathan: In Barnaby Rudge revives Grip by turning him into a character in the novel, and making him Barnaby’s mischievous companion.

Matthew: Well it’s a funny thing in fact he is the sort of figure with whom we are left at the very end of the novel, we have sort of the penultimate paragraph of the whole book describing how the bird advanced with fantastic steps to the very door of the bar and there cried I’m a devil, I’m a devil, I’m a devil with extraordinary rapture. And then, in the very last paragraph and indeed the last line of the last paragraph we’re told that quote, from that period he constantly practiced and improved himself in the vulgar tongue.
And as he was a mere infant for a raven, when Barnaby was gray; he has very probably gone on talking to the present time.

Nathan: That’s Matthew Redmond, he’s a doctoral student in English at Stanford University, and he recently wrote an article about Dickens, Poe, and the raven.

Matthew: I think it’s a quite an interesting thing in that Dickens appears to be doing on a literary level with this final paragraph what he also then does in his own life he’s sort of preserving the raven in a permanent state that will enable him to survive decades into the futures. The sense that Dickens wants this raven preserved, he has him stuffed first, and the raven’s presence, indeed the figure of the raven sort of broods over him in his study, in it’s taxidermied state while he writes.
And I think Dickens perhaps looks upon Grip as a kind of representative figure for himself.

Nathan: So it was in the works he created and could carefully control from his books, to his bird, that he associated most closely with himself and how he wanted to be remembered.

Matthew: Indeed he was so conscious of his own image all through his life and with sort of distilling his character into this sort of ideal form, and I think he sees his works as sort of maintaining that form and sort of preserving it perhaps in almost in a taxidermied state into the future. And that this becomes a great focus of his life, sort of curating his works in just the right way and preparing them for that after life that he intends for them.

Brian: Okay I understand why this raven meant so much to Charles Dickens now, but I don’t understand where Poe fits into all of this.

Nathan: Ah-ha, see Poe was intrigued and influenced by the character Grip in Barnaby Rudge. But ultimately as he wrote in a review at the time, he found Grip wanting.

Speaker 19: The Raven too, intensely amusing as it is, might have been made more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby, it’s croakings have might have been prophetically heard in the coarse of the drama. It’s character might have performed in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does in music the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each might have been distinct, each might have differed remarkably from the other.
Yet between them, there might have been wrought an analogical resemblance. And although each might have existed apart, they might have formed together a whole which would have been in perfect in the absence of either.

Nathan: For Poe, Dickens is carefully constructed, neatly put together Raven seemed to miss the mark and so Poe becomes convinced that he can create a better Raven and sets out to write his now famous poem.

Robert Peck: The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. While I nodded, nearly napping. Suddenly there came a tapping, as if someone gently rapping. Rapping at my chamber door.
Tis some visitor I muttered, tapping at my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.

Matthew: I think that the Raven in some ways is a kind of allegory of poetic process. In that Poe is sort of taking Dickens raven and writing a poem in which he sort of mediates on the very act of taking someone else’s literary device. And what it means to do that and the speaker of that poem is sort of perhaps buried underneath all of the books and the vast volumes of forgotten lore in his study.
I mean [inaudible 01:00:07] famously observed that the poem begins among books and papers and letters. And thus does not begin at all. I think he would’ve been keenly aware in the ways in which literature and taxidermy have a number of things in common. This desire to sort of reanimate the past and make it sort of present in some way and sort of bring about some resurrection that in some ways is quite fearful and confusing perhaps.

Nathan: Dickens loved his Raven so much, that he did all this work to keep him alive through his writing and by having him taxidermied. But most people know the Raven, thanks to the poetic version Poe imagines from the other side of the Atlantic.
Never even having set his eyes on the real bird. But ultimately, whether it’s through Dickens or Poe. Whether it’s in physical or literary form, the raven seems determined to last. To persevere through time to maintain it’s grip on us. And so years later, long after they both had died, the Raven followed Poe. His deceased popularizer home to Philadelphia where he remains today.

Robert Peck: Grip is standing in a very sort of Regal raven like pose and is mounted in a rustic shadow box that apparently Charles Dickens embellished himself with branches from his own estate. It gives it a very kind of a natural appearance. But the bird shows no signs of activity. His wings are not extended or anything. He simply standing the way he would have in life.
I think Grip is in very stable condition right now. We opened up the shadow box he was housed in, cleaned all of that out. The dust is removed, any other particulate matter, the insects are all gone. And it’s all been carefully sealed up.
The free library keeps it under wonderful conditions with temperature and humidity control. And we’re fairly confident that given the arsenic load in the skin, it’s unlikely to get any infestation of cigarette beetles or domes ted beetles any time soon.

Speaker 20: The sort of feathery figure of this taxidermied raven still sort of expresses an essential tension in Poe’s writing. This tension that’s expressed with the question, who is controlling whom? On the one hand we have these very ingenious and meticulous efforts to preserve the raven, it seems that we are keeping him under glass and controlling it in a manner of speaking.
And yet ultimately is not the raven sort of controlling us and compelling us to preserve him. There’s this kind of ambiguity that I think Poe would thoroughly enjoy. I think he would be delighted by the whole thing, precisely fascinated by this strangeness of it all and the [inaudible 01:02:43] quality in the way that it sort of beggars easy answers.

Robert Peck: And to the raven, never flitting still is sitting, still is sitting on the palide bust of Palace just above my chamber door. And his eyes have all the seeming of a demons that is dreaming. And the lamplight or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore.

Nathan: Robert McCraken Peck is a senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and a curator of art and artifacts. He’s also the author of the upcoming book Specimens of Hair. The Curious Collection of Peter A. Brown.
Matthew Redmon is a doctoral student at Stanford University. His article if bird or devil was recently published in the Edgar Allan Poe review.

Brian: Nathan, Ed, I don’t know if you saw the email just came in but they’ve proposed stuffing the co hosts at Back Story. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I’m not up for it.
We can laugh about this, but I gotta admit as we did the show I recognize there are actual some pretty serious historical questions entailed to stuff or not.

Ed: Yeah, you know and for me who is a little bit squeamish about such things. The idea of stuffing animals was alluring on its surface but there’s also historical issues for us to think a little bit about. You know when Charlie and Keith Gibson at VMI were talking about the horse and then when I was talking with Nicole Maurantonio you hear sort of different perspectives on what this might means.
You know Colonel Gibson sees it as basically an introduction to letting people think about the Civil War who might not otherwise. Nicole wonders if the whole idea of having attractive horse there doesn’t kind of domesticate the confederacy a little bit and obscure the issues over which the war was fought.
So it’s interesting that problems that you would never think of as being associated with taxidermy are there when you look a little bit closer.

Nathan: Well I think too, it’s also about conjuring peoples imagination. You know if you imagine the 18th century cabinets of curiosities with all these objects taken from the new world or the world Columbian exposition in the 1890s and you know living exhibits with you know stuffed animals effectively.
So much of this is meant to help people who can’t may be get to a place. Imagine what that place might be like on the other side of the world. And I wonder even when we’re talking about stuffing the founding fathers some of that is about imagining what the founders would really think in the hear and now if he can just look them in the eye and kind of pose a question.
So it’s different obviously in many respects from what we do as historians but there’s also an element there of trying to help people connect with something they might not necessarily experience first hand at a past place or distant place.

Ed: Yeah, people seem very interested today in going to Madame Tussaud’s wax figure museum. There’s something about somebody being there in three dimensions of human scale that makes them more approachable. I think the other thing Brian that reminds us that in the 18th and 19th centuries people were a lot closer to death and a lot less squeamish about remains than we are today.
Where the goal seems to be-

Brian: Make it disappear as quickly as possible. You know there’s a tendency toward cremation and not having sort of people displayed in their caskets nearly as much and so forth.

Ed: But you know it was common in the 19th century for loved ones, children, spouses to basically be put on display in the home. People preserve hair and things like that that seem to us inappropriate. Since maybe the stuffing of animals is not unrelated to that is that people think about the body in a different way whether its humans or animals.

Brian: So answer me this Nathan, if Ed is right and he makes a compelling case. Why is taxidermy coming back? I understand their hipster taxidermist, that its cool among young people.

Nathan: Well, there are ways in which I think people are still looking to these old forms. Some hipsters wanna make horse shoes or blacksmiths. There’s something about old style craftsmanship of one kind or another and so if you think about 19th century creativity right? I mean taxidermy and the making of barrels and craft beer?
I mean all this stuff is part of a certain kind of [crosstalk 01:07:46]

Brian: It’s real.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s real. No exactly. [crosstalk 01:07:48]

Brian: It’s tangible, it’s not digital.

Nathan: Exactly, it’s more authentic. But I think there’s also a question here that gets raised even from the point that Ed had made about you know the deeply historical nature of our relationship to the real right? And particularly now, thinking about like zoos for instance. We take it as totally acceptable to have animals that are confined in spaces that we can then observe. And we imagine, we hope that they’re being handled in a somewhat humane way. Even if sometimes we know that they’re not.
And I wonder if 50 or 100 years from now folks will look back on our generation and wonder about that zoo thing that we seem so committed to observing animals who are locked up in these different pens and cages and such. So in a way it’s very humbling to think that we have the luxury of looking at you know living animals in places now that you know formerly would just simply be these dioramas effectively.

Ed: And to just underscore your point Nathan, those hipster taxidermist, at least some of them insist that no animals were harmed during the process. They actually stuff animals that either died by natural causes or died in one way or another, they didn’t kill ’em in order to mount them over their roaring fire.

Brian: Yeah, I think there’s a quest for honesty as well as authenticity in this you know? We eat animals in the forms of filets and patties and that sort of thing. But don’t think very much of the animal for which it came. You could argue that sort of having sort of look your dinner in the eye even if it’s a glass eye is a good reminder of our connections to the world.
That’s gonna do it for us today, do get in touch. You’ll find us at Backstory Radio dot org. Or send us an email, at Backstory at Virginia dot edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. At Backstory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan: Back story’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 21: Brian Ballow is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joann Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.
Backstory was created by Andrew Windom for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 22: Panably.