This he hung above his desk, so Grip could look down on him as he wrote. Gauguin’s Nevermore can be seen at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, but sadly the whereabouts of the original manuscript of The Raven is as much of a mystery as the circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s death.įollowing the raven’s demise, Charles Dickens hired a taxidermist to stuff Grip and mount him in an impressive case of wood and glass. In a letter to his friend Daniel de Monfreid, written in 1897, Gauguin commented, “The title is Nevermore it is not Edgar Poe's raven keeping watch, but the Devil's bird.” He also wrote that he saw the painting as suggestive of “a certain savage luxuriousness of a bygone age.” Gauguin’s comment on the raven had an undercurrent that he, as a non-English speaker, would not have known: the word ‘dickens’ has been in use as a synonym for ‘devil’ since at least the 16th Century Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The picture features a perched bird that watches over the figures below and in the top left-hand corner of the canvas, the word NEVERMORE is painted. Although Gauguin denied he had been inspired by the poem, he called one of his 1897 paintings Nevermore – the word repeated by the bird throughout the poem.
On the eve of his departure, his friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Café Voltaire, at which Poe’s The Raven was read aloud.
In 1891, the disillusioned Paul Gauguin was preparing to leave France – and his wife and children – for the island of Tahiti.
Poe’s poem and Dickens’s pet raven would go on to inspire one of the most famous paintings of the late 19th Century. Poe’s lines “In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore / Not the least obeisance made he not a minute stopped or stayed he / But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door” are suggestive of the description of Barnaby’s raven in Chapter 6 of Barnaby Rudge who “After a short survey of the ground, and a few sidelong looks at the ceiling and at everybody present in turn… fluttered to the floor, and went to Barnaby – not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles.” Poe had described Grip in his review of the novel as “intensely amusing.”Īlthough there is no concrete proof, most Poe scholars are in agreement that the poet’s fascination with Grip was the inspiration for his 1845 poem The Raven. Poe had enjoyed Dickens’s descriptions of the raven in Barnaby Rudge and was enchanted to discover he was based on Dickens’s own bird. Few of their letters have survived, but it seems that Dickens offered to help Poe find a British publisher (he was unsuccessful). In recent years, Poe had published several favourable reviews of Dickens’s work, so when Poe requested a meeting in Philadelphia, Dickens was happy to agree. It was during Charles and Catherine Dickens’s six-month trip to the United States in 1842 – on which voyage Maclise’s portrait of the Dickens children and Grip also travelled – that Charles Dickens met Edgar Allan Poe. The second Grip, was, Dickens’s eldest daughter Mamie wrote in her memoirs, “mischievous and impudent”, and was succeeded by a third Grip, who Henry Dickens (son of the novelist) recorded as being so able to “dominate” the family’s large mastiff, Turk, so that the dog would stand back from his bowl and allow the raven to steal all the tastiest morsels of meat from his dinner. But that was play.”įollowing Grip’s death, Dickens replaced him with two new birds: a second raven, also called Grip, and an eagle. He behaved throughout with a decent fortitude, equanimity, and self-possession, which cannot be too much admired. The following morning, Grip was able to eat “some warm gruel”, but his recovery was short lived.Īs Dickens wrote to Maclise, “On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but soon recovered, walking twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed ‘Halloa old girl’ (his favourite expression) and died. Initially this seemed to have a positive effect and the author was thrilled to see Grip restored to his usual personality when he bit the coachman (who was used to the raven and took it in good humour). He related how, when Grip began to show signs of ailing, the vet was called and “administered a powerful dose of castor oil”.