Seventeen year old Edgar Allan Poe was a student only briefly at the University of Virginia (UVa), attending from February 14th to December 15th 1826. The room where he is said to have lived during the latter part of his time at UVa has been preserved for visitors, visible through a fixed glass door. When the visitor presses a button - in a touch Poe himself would have appreciated - a quaint ghostly voice gives a short spiel.
Like other rooms on the original campus, it is an adequate size for one, with plenty of light and a wooden floor. Students today who stay in these rooms enjoy the same kind of living quarters as Poe, with the same conditions: their only source of heating is a log fire and bathroom facilities are in a different building.
The room is furnished as it would have been during Poe's stay, with a washstand, trunk, cupboard, desk, candlestick and a couple of chairs. Although the furniture is not original, it is of the period, and the bed is one in which Poe actually slept at his foster parents' home in nearby Richmond. A figurine of a black raven reminds the visitor of Poe's trademark poem.
The impressive campus at UVa was designed by Thomas Jefferson, third president of the US and accomplished architect, whose dream project in his retirement was the foundation of the university.
When Poe came to UVa the university had barely been open a year. He enrolled in the schools of ancient and modern languages. It was more usual for students to be enrolled in three schools rather than only two, but his time at UVa was marred by his foster father's niggardly financial support. Poe was the son of an actress who died when he was three, having been abandoned early on by Poe's father. The child was taken in by a local merchant, John Allan, who shipped him off to school in England before sending him to UVa.
In his final exam, Poe won a distinction in Latin and French, the highest honour a student could attain at the time. But, in spite of an excellent student record, he had a reputation for drinking and gambling. The latter is excused by biographers on the basis that his foster father refused to give him enough money for his needs (Poe's gambling debts, however, were the reason John Allan removed his foster son from UVa). But many of the students at UVa behaved a good deal more riotously than Poe, apparently drinking heavily, gambling and sometimes carrying guns.
Poe was often to be found in the library, and in the evenings he would entertain guests in his room with ghost stories by the fire. William Wertenbaker, the university's librarian, recalls that one evening Poe had run out of wood for the fire, and broke up a table to keep the blaze going.
In his day he would have had an uninterrupted view of the smoke-coloured spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains from his quarters.
Considered the father of detective fiction and a master of imaginative terrors, Poe was already writing fiction when he was a student. His story "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" is set in terrain near Charlottesville and dates from his time at UVa. Poe's keen interest in the unhinging of the human brain, with all the accompanying symptoms of terror and dislocation, is reflected in this tale of a hypnotist's manipulation of his credulous, highly-strung patient.
Poe's short and difficult life involved four years in the US army after which he was courtmartialled for disobedience, and a busy career as a literary journalist which was plagued by financial stress and bouts of drinking (although he never drank great quantities, only a small amount of alcohol had disastrous effects on him).
At the age of 27 he married his 13-year-old cousin and was shattered when she died 11 years later. He died at the age of 40 after a prolonged drinking session. Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet, but it was his gothic - yet strikingly modern - stories of psychological despair and suspense, such as The Murders on the Rue Morgue (subsequently made into a film) and The Fall of the House of Usher, which earned him his posthumous literary success.