As this print on demand book is reprinted from a very old book, there could be some missing or flawed pages, but we always try to make the book as complete as possible. Each page is checked manually before printing. Illustrations, Index, if any, are included in black and white. This is NOT a retyped or an ocr'd reprint. NO changes have been made to the original text.

Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden leaf printing on spine. The show runs until August 30 in the Poe Museum’s Exhibits Building.LeatherBound. The Poe Museum’s new exhibit, “The Pit and the Pendulum: Fact and Fiction,” recreates a scene from Poe’s story and brings together a rare first printing of the tale, illustrations by Harry Clarke, Mark Summers, and others, as well as translations of the work into other languages. Any of these could have been Poe’s sources for research while writing “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The Spanish Inquisition finally ended in 1834, just eight years before Poe wrote his story, so reports of the terrors of that time would still have been fresh in the minds of the public. By 1826, two English translations were published. When the Spanish drove out the French, Llorente moved to Paris where he issued a French translation of his history of the Inquisition. Through a combination of luck and intelligence, the prisoner is able to narrowly escape each challenge set before him.Īfter the French invasion of Spain in 1808, Joseph Bonaparte briefly suppressed the Inquisition and appointed Llorente to take over the Inquisitions archives and to write its history. In another room, the man is tied to a table over which a sharp blade swings, gradually lowering until it almost chops him in half. In one room, for example, the victim is placed in a dark room with a seemingly bottomless pit and burning walls that close in on him. In composing his story, Poe describes tortures that differ from those actually used by the Inquisition. Poe imagines a series of terrifying events leading up to that conclusion. The great number of instruments of torture, especially the instruments to stretch the limbs, and the drop baths, which cause a lingering death, excited horror, even in the minds of soldiers hardened in the field of battle.” Poe’s story ends with Lasalle entering the Palace of the Inquisition and rescuing one of the prisoners. He may have been inspired by a paragraph in Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of Religion (1825): “On entry of the French into Toldeo during the late Peninsular War, General Lasalle visited the Palace of the Inquisition. Poe sets this story in a torture chamber during the Spanish Inquisition. One example is “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which tells of the story of a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, an infamous program of trials in which the judges were allowed to use torture to extract confessions from the accused. Some of Poe’s most popular tales of terror were inspired by true events.

Harry clarke edgar allan poe