James Kenney’s Opportunistic, Reformative, and Imitative Chameleons

Abstract

On October 14, 1843, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences” appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. In this satirical jeu d’esprit, Poe explains that “the verb to diddle” derives from Jeremy Diddler, a theatrical character whose name had become synonymous with petty swindling: “Since the world began there have been two Jeremys. One wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He … was a great man in a small way. The other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was entitled Jeremy Diddler. He was a great man in a great way—I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of ways.” Poe defines “Man [as] an animal that diddles”: “‘Man was made to mourn,’ says the poet. But not so:—he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end.—And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say that he’s ‘done.’”¹ The satire concludes with a description of “a very decent, but rather elaborate diddle” featuring “A middle-aged gentleman” who “has the whole air … of your well-to-do, sober-sided, exact, and respectable ‘man of business,’ par excellence—one of the stern and outwardly hard, internally soft, sort of people that we see in the crack high comedies.” The middle-aged gentleman advertises for young men of impeccable integrity who possess “the most satisfactory testimonials of morality” and are “piously inclined.”