Abstract
In early January 1832, the British survey vessel H.M.S. Beagle, carrying twenty-two-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin on the first stage of a five-year circumnavigation of the globe, was turned away from the port of Santa Cruz on Tenerife out of fear that the ship might be carrying cholera. European governments had been trying for months to stem the progress of the pandemic as it moved out of Asia, across Hungary, Poland, and Germany, toward England and France. Newspapers in London and in the port cities of North America kept track of the successive outbreaks of sickness as they moved steadily and fatally to the west. In the English press, conservatives and radicals alike came to view the relentless approach of the disease as an ominous symbol for the social and political upheaval associated with months of acrimonious debate over the first Reform Bill.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Sources
The single indispensable study of nineteenth-century cholera epidemics in the United States is Charles E. Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962).
R. J. Morris, in Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976)
François Delaporte does the same for France in Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
William H. McNeill’s vivid description of cholera’s symptoms is from Plagues and Peoples (1977, rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 267.
Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999)
Catherine J. Kudlick does the same for France in Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996).
Sherry H. Olsen’s general history Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980)
Darwin mentions being turned away from Tenerife by quarantine authorities in the first paragraph of The Voyage of the Beagle. Janet Browne’s account of this formative field experience in Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995)
John Ostrom’s first volume of The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Gordian Press, 1966)
Michael J. S. Williams in A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Durham, NC, and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1988)
David Halliburton in Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973)
Copyright information
© 2009 Douglas Anderson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderson, D. (2009). Problems of Disposal. In: Pictures of Ascent in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100824_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100824_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38223-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10082-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)