Beetlemania – Frank McNally on Edgar Allan Poe, Cavan stereotypes and the storytelling insects of Fishamble Street

One of the spookier coincidences of literary Dublin is that James Clarence Mangan – a new book about whom we were discussing here of late – was born in a House of Usher.
As Bridget Hourican notes in Finding Mangan, his birthplace at No 3 Fishamble Street bore the carved coat of arms of an earlier and distinguished family, the Ushers, who also have a city quay and a Trinity College library named after them.
The coincidence used to cause “huge excitement” among American scholars, noting as they had the uncanny similarities between Mangan and Edgar Allan Poe.
Born in Boston – but the grandson of an Irish emigrant, David Poe from Dring (not to be confused with Drung), Co Cavan – Poe shared Mangan’s tendencies towards literature, alcohol and opium, among other things.
Like Mangan too, as Hourican summarises, he “was also a writer of poems and stories full of dead brides, petrification, exotic travels, storms, clouds, outcast heroes and ‘insufferable gloom’”.
Then there were the similarly foreshortened lifespans of the two men, who died within months of each other in 1849.
But one of the quintessential Poe stories was The Fall of the House of Usher: a Gothic tale of two, cadaverously wan siblings in whom the accumulated mental frailties of their forebears reach a crescendo that eventually brings the house down (and not just metaphorically).
Alas, the Dublin House of Usher is long gone too, and with it the old coat of arms. What was the top of Fishamble Street is these days Christchurch Place. And a plaque marking Mangan’s home now stands on a pub with the English-style name of the Bull and Castle.
Only the nature of the business remains unchanged since the poet’s time. The Mangans ran a grocer’s shop, a term then interchangeable with “public house”, on the site. It has continued in that trade ever since, under various names including even a period as “McNally’s”, no relation to the diarist.
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Speaking of coincidences, no sooner had I read the Mangan biography recently than I found myself at the launch of a book entitled Dirt, Dwellings, and Culture: Living Conditions in Early Medieval Dublin.
There was no obvious overlap, I thought. But on closer inspection, this too turned out to be about former residents of Fishamble Street, albeit that many of them had six legs.
Yes, it featured the lives of humans as well: the Vikings who lived there more than 1,000 years ago. The unwitting heroes of the tale, however, are beetles: a species that – via the study known as archaeoentology – can tell us much about how people lived back then.
The book began as a labour of love for the late Eileen Reilly, a pioneering archaeoentolgist who died too young in 2018. The affection in which she is held by friends and colleagues helped fill a large amphitheatre at UCD last week for a memorial lecture in her honour, which doubled as the launch.
Belatedly introducing the book, having helped finish it, her husband Ronan O’Brien notes in a preface that Eileen’s interest in beetles “was driven primarily by what they could tell us about the human experience. But she thought they were beautiful too.”
This shows up in the writing. Hence for example, her still palpable excitement at discovering Hylotrupes bajules “a longhorn beetle known to bore into wood used in construction” among deposits gathered from archaeological digs in the area.
“Its presence in Fishamble Street is a fascinating,” she comments, “as it is highly likely to have been imported into Dublin at this time in timber … The reuse of ship’s timbers in house construction and furniture making is one possible explanation. Indeed, a possible ship’s prow was recovered … nearby”.
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Long-term readers of this column, familiar with the diarist’s eccentricities, may be wondering by now if Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote a classic short story about long-horned beetles. And it’s funny you should ask. But yes, indeed he did.
In The Gold-Bug (1843) Poe tells the tale of a man down on his fortunes who finds an unusual, gold-coloured beetle, with mysterious markings. This leads him on an unlikely quest involving cryptograms, pirates and buried treasure.
The insect of the title was inspired in part by a real-life beetle found in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, where the story is set (and which is named after a Captain Florence O’Sullivan, who emigrated from 17th century Kinsale).
Poe originally sold the story to a magazine for $52. Then, hearing of a competition for which it was suitable, he asked for it back and entered it, winning the $100 prize.
It was later translated into French by Baudelaire and became Poe’s most read story during his lifetime, in the process inspiring Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
As mentioned earlier, Poe’s paternal roots were in Cavan. He may or may not be a legitimate subject for specialists in Breffniology (the study of negative Cavan stereotypes, very popular in my native Monaghan). But of possible interest is the economic efficiency with which he traded the story. In withdrawing it from the magazine for more profitable use elsewhere, he never refunded the $52.