Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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I fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering, and resolved to give what interest I could to an actual passage from the earth to the moon, describing the lunar scenery as if surveyed and personally examined by the narrator.

Poe wrote the first part of “Hans Pfaall,” and published it in the Southern Literary Messenger, of which he was then editor, at Richmond, Virginia. Three weeks afterward the first instalment of Locke’s moon story appeared in the Sun. At the moment Poe believed that his idea had been kidnapped:

No sooner had I seen the paper than I understood the jest, which not for a moment could I doubt had been suggested by my own jeu d’esprit. Some of the New York journals—the Transcript, among others—saw the matter in the same light, and published the moon story side by side with “Hans Pfaall,” thinking that the author of the one had been detected in the author of the other.

Although the details are, with some exceptions, very dissimilar, still I maintain that the general features of the two compositions are nearly identical. Both are hoaxes—although one is in a tone of mere banter, the other of down-right earnest; both hoaxes are on one subject, astronomy; both on the same point of that subject, the moon; both professed to have derived exclusive information from a foreign country; and both attempt to give plausibility by minuteness of scientific detail. Add to all this, that nothing of a similar nature had even been attempted before these two hoaxes, the one of which followed immediately upon the heels of the other.