John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection
The John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection (MSS 38-135) at the University of Virginia is one of four collections that formed the basis of the newly-established Manuscripts Division in the 1930s. The other collections were the Thomas Jefferson Papers, the Lee Family Papers, and the Joseph Cabell Papers. John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia, edited by John Carl Miller, was first published in 1960 as a calendar and index of letters and other manuscripts, photographs, printed matter, and biographical source materials concerning Edgar Allan Poe assembled by John Henry Ingram. A second edition was published in 1994 and edited by John E. Reilly who took Mr. Miller's work to conclusion. John Carl Miller's preface to the first edition is available here.
The complete guide to the Ingram-Poe collection is available online
John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia
by John E. Reilly
Introduction to the Second Edition
In 1922 the University of Virginia paid the heirs of John Henry Ingram the munificent sum of $800 for the materials Ingram had assembled for his work as biographer, editor, and stalwart (i.e., feisty) champion of Edgar Allan Poe. What the University acquired is an unparalleled collection of letters and other manuscripts, of photographs and daguerreotypes, and of newspaper clippings and various other printed materials totaling altogether more than a thousand items. Although the University made the Collection available to serious students of Poe, the contents remained uncatalogued at the Alderman Library until, in the late 1940's, John Carl Miller, then a graduate student, undertook the chore of sorting and classifying the mass of material. As it happened, the chore proved to be even more than a labor of love: it marked for Miller the beginning of a life-long interest both in Ingram and in the materials Ingram had compiled. The first fruit of Miller's interest was his 1954 doctoral dissertation, Poe's English Biographer, John Henry Ingram: A Biographical Account and a Study of His Contributions to Poe Scholarship. Six years later the University published the first edition of Professor Miller's John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia. This little book was a "calendar" or chronological checklist of the Collection providing a brief description of the content of each item. Professor Miller prefaced the calendar with his essay on Ingram as "Editor, Biographer, and Collector of Poe Materials" and furnished access to the calendar through an index. In the mid-1960's Professor Miller served as an advisor to the University's project of making the entire Collection available on nine reels of microfilm. At the same time, however, Professor Miller was laying his own plans to make "the more important primary source materials" used by Ingram even more available in a multi-volume annotated edition. The first of these volumes, Building Poe Biography, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1977, and the second volume, Poe's Helen Remembers, appeared two years later from the University Press of Virginia. In declining health for a number of years, Professor Miller died in October 1979, before any other volumes could be prepared.
At the time of his death, Professor Miller was at work not only on his annotated edition of materials in the Collection but also on the second edition of the calendar published by the University of Virginia almost two decades earlier.