Margaret Alterton, "An Additional Source for Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum," Modern Language Notes, vol. 47 (June 1933), pp. 349-356.

From time to time investigators have shown that, for his story The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe drew material from the terror cult of his day, namely, from certain tales in Blackwood's Magazine, and from Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly. No one, however, has satisfactorily accounted for the source of the Inquisition material in the story or, what is of more interest to the student of Poe's artistry, for Poe's method of handling it. In the hope of meeting these two deficiencies, I wish to present an additional source - that of Juan Antonio Llorente's History of the Spanish Inquisition.

Llorente's work aided Poe in two ways - in matter and manner. It supplied him with subject-matter for the opening and closing scenes of his story, and furnished the graphic incident of the swinging pendulum; it furthermore provided him with a means of unifying all the elements in the structure of his plot. The sources already ascribed to Poe as background material for the story in question, it will subsequently be shown, concern themselves exclusively with the type of terror which had nothing to do with the Inquisition but which, on the contrary, arose from chance occurrences, such as accidents, or adventure, or with terror produced by some act of personal vengeance. Through these, it will be made manifest, Poe ran and re-ran unifying threads of interest drawn from Llorente's History until the whole fabric became one presentation of terror that springs solely from the Inquisition.

Poe could easily have come in contact with this Llorente material. In this article the term Llorente material will signify both Llorente's History and critical reviews of it. In the periodical press of both Europe and America, The History of the Inquisition attracted considerable attention; and since it is well known that in the offices of editor, critic, and contributor Poe suffered little in the magazine literature of his day to escape his notice, it is highly probable that he joined in with the public interest in respect to Llorente's work. After the History was published in Paris in 1817, it was translated and printed in London in 1826, and in the same year, it appeared in America in a New York edition, and again in Philadelphia in 1843. Time and again Llorente's book was reviewed. In 1826 Blackwood's Magazine published a nineteen-page article on it; and in 1827 The British Critic, Theological Review and Ecclesiastical Record, one of twenty pages. This latter review was reprinted, also in 1827, in The Museum, a magazine published in Philadelphia. An interesting point that may be of some significance in establishing Poe's acquaintance with Llorente's work rests in the fact that the issuing in 1843 of the Philadelphia edition coincides in time and place with the appearing of The Pit and the Pendulum.

More conclusive evidence of Poe's knowledge of this Llorente material centers about similarities in ideas that exist between it and the content of his story, and above all, involves the fact that certain of these similarities include a chain of events of such extraordinary horror that one can hardly question a dependence on Poe's part. The opening scene of The Pit and the Pendulum, in a chamber where the officers of the Inquisition were assembled, bears in detail a striking resemblance to a passage found in the Blackwood review of Llorente's work. In both instances, black cloth drapes the walls of a chamber dimly lighted with candles where a prisoner of the Inquisition faces his judges. The Llorente material reads thus:

It was a large apartment underground, vaulted, hung round with black cloth, and dimly lighted by candles placed in candle-sticks fastened to the wall. At one end was a closed place, like a closet, where the Inquisitor in :attendance and the notary sat at a table; so that the place seemed . . . the very mansion of death, everything being calculated to inspire terror . . .

Poe at the beginning of his story recreates this scene. The black cloth, draping the walls, becomes "sable draperies, inwrapping the walls of the apartment softly and imperceptibly waving;" the candles dimly burning become seven tall candles, that to the fainting prisoner change from "white slender angels who would save him" first to "meaningless spectres with heads of flame" and finally to "tall candles that sank into nothingness" their light gone out utterly.

The closing scene in the story connects itself with certain events that surrounded the overthrow of the Inquisition. According to Llorente, in 1808 Napoleon's army invaded Spain, and the same year the Inquisition was suppressed. Poe may be employing these details at the close of his story when he causes his prisoner in the Inquisitorial dungeon to be rescued by a French officer. The story ends on the note - "The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies."

In the case of the incident dealing with the pendulum Poe's following of Llorente is even more exact. In both, a prisoner of the Inquisition lies, tightly bound, in the path of a slowly descending pendulum. In both, the prisoner endures mental agony, as he eyes the keen-cutting edge, coming nearer and nearer. Both descriptions dwell on a threatened slow-cutting process. In Llorente, the pendulum was to cut " the skin of the nose and gradually" to cut on "until life is extinct." In Poe the pendulum is to cut through the region of the heart. In both, the prisoner is rescued from this particular torture. Poe has here strictly adhered to the outline of horrors found in the Llorente material. He, however, vivifies the bare outline by adding to it painful sensations of sound, smell, taste, and color. For example, he points the rod of the pendulum with a flashing steel crescent and thus describes its descent as it "hisses through the air." "Inch by inch down and still down it came. It swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils . . . I grew frantically mad and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the mighty cimeter. And then I fell suddenly calm and lay smiling at the glittering death."

The foregoing evidence shows Poe's manifest dependence on the Llorente material for the opening and closing scenes in his story, as well as for the horrible incident dealing with the pendulum.

This dependence in the question of subject-matter leads to a discussion of Poe's use of the same material for the purpose of unifying all the sources that he wove into his story. It must of course be admitted that Poe overloaded his narrative with events. In employing the number of sources that he did, he may have been challenging his skill as a literary craftsman to reduce a multiplicity of elements into a harmonious uniformity. On this point it is significant to note that he published The Pit and the Pendulum in the midst of his most critical and creative interest in plot development. Two years before the publication of the story (that is, in 1841) Poe had penetrated into Aristotle's explanation of plot structure where he found that the main feature of an excellent plot lies in its parts being organically dependent one upon another. Poe philosophized upon the idea of this relationship; later, in 1848, in his work Eureka, he endeavored to confirm the truth of the idea by scientific demonstration; and consistently during his literary work of these years, he used the idea as a standard in criticism. This theory of plot structure, in its application to the writing of The Pit and the Pendulum, can be seen to good advantage if all the known sources for the story are viewed in their reactions one upon another, that is, if the parts dealing with accidents, adventure, and personal vengeance are considered. under the dominating influence of terror resulting from the Inquisition. In order that Poe's procedure may be thus brought into the foreground, it will be necessary for one to have before him all the known materials with which Poe worked.

At this juncture it should be said that, to my knowledge, no attempt has as yet been made to account for the rôle played by the rats, either in their infesting the dungeon, particularly the pit, or in their being the gruesome means whereby the prisoner freed himself from his bonds as he lay under the sweep of the deadly pendulum. The known materials, however, consist of a medley of passages found in short stories, books, and critical reviews. "The Iron Shroud," a tale of personal revenge, in Blackwood's, for example, described the crushing of a victim by the iron walls and ceiling of his dungeon drawing together by means of secret machinery. This account unquestionably furnished Poe with the particulars of his decreasing dungeon. Another tale from the same periodical, " The Man in the Bell," a story of a terrorizing accident, detailed the experience of a man, who, through miscalculated plans, lay prostrate under a ponderous iron bell as it swung back and forth an inch above his face. Maddened by the clanging noise, the man imagined that he saw in the cavern of the bell, hideous faces with terrifying frowns and the devil with "hoof, horn, and eyes of infernal lustre;" and he raved in a panic of frenzied terror. This account suggested to Poe the hideous pictures of demons that the prisoner saw on the walls of his dungeon, and also gave him content for the raving of the prisoner as he lay under the swinging pendulum. Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly told of a man, in total darkness, arms outstretched, immured in a rocky cave, who wandered around the walls of his prison counting one hundred paces and fainted at the brink of a yawning pit. This story of adventure and accident gave Poe material for the efforts of his prisoner to explore the dungeon and for the existence of the pit in the story. The materials from the critical reviews and Llorente's History itself have already been presented. Poe's task was to adapt these sources to each other. The tying together of these various sources may now be considered. Although conscious of one effect produced by the story - that of the horror of the Inquisition - the reader can, if he reads the story in the light of the sources that have just been detailed, easily assign the component parts to their originals. The only obstacle he will encounter will be in the case of the unknown source involving the rats, to which reference has been made. For example, he will assign:

the opening scene to the Llorente material (Blackwood review)

the pit to Edgar Huntly

the pendulum to the Llorente material

the hideous pictures which the prisoner sees on the walls of his
dungeon to "The Man in the Bell" (Blackwood tale)

the raving of the prisoner lying under the sweeping pendulum to " The Man in the Bell " (Blackwood tale)

the decreasing dungeon to "The Iron Shroud" (Blackwood tale)

the closing scene to the Llorente material

Plainly, Poe intended the Inquisition to stand as the centerpoint in his story. To this end, he used the Llorente material to give shape to what was doubtless an unwieldy mass of selected passages, for, as has been shown, he placed parts of it at the beginning and end of his piece. Moreover, into the terrors assailing the victim of accident and adventure in the pit, of miscalculated plans under the swinging bell, and of revenge in the decreasing dungeon, Poe insinuated the terror peculiar to the Inquisition. He thus caused this type of terror to permeate these horrors and so unite the multiplicity of parts into one experience of a most unhappy prisoner who suffered at the hands of the Secret Tribunal. This study has, I hope, enlarged the notion of what comprised Poe's source materials for the composition of "The Pit and the Pendulum." It has added to the sources already brought forward as background reading for his story certain selections that had as their central interest Juan Antonio Llorente's History of the Spanish Inquisition. Of most importance in the study, however, has been the attempt to show how clearly this additional source permits a demonstration of Poe's effort to identify his critical theory with his conscious practice.