House in Stoke Newington in which Edgar Allan Poe Lived, by Joseph Pennell (1857-1926)

House in Stoke Newington in which Edgar Allan Poe Lived

Joseph Pennell (1857-1926)

1899

Illustration for Walter Besant's East London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), p. 262.

Scanned image and text by Jacqueline Banerjee

[This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Perhaps the only hint of Pennell's American nationality comes in one of his illustrations for Chapter X ("Memories of the Past") of Besant's book. Besant mentions that Poe was at school in Stoke Newington (as a small boy he attended the Manor House School there from 1817 to 1820). "Let us hope the eccentricities of this wayward poet were not due to the influences of Nonconformist Newington," Besant adds amusingly. The building itself has now gone.

In those days, according to Poe, Stoke Newington was "a venerable old town" filled with tree-lined avenues and "a thousand shrubberies" (qtd. in "Edgar Allan Poe"). As Besant suggests, it was known as a Dissenters' stronghold. Now a part of Hackney, it still has some a character of its own, partly because of its open spaces — one of which is the Abney Park Cemetery, where many Dissenters were buried.

Bibliography

Besant, Walter. East London. London: Chatto & Windus, 1901.

"Edgar Allan Poe" (a "Hackney Plaques and Local History" site).

Last modified 21 April 2008