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

98 страница из 136

And yet the hoax, Poe admits, “was, upon the whole, the greatest hit in the way of sensation—of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.” Whether Locke intended it as satire or not—a debatable point—it was a hoax of the first water. It deceived more persons, and for a longer time, than any other fake ever written: and, as the Sun pointed out, it hurt nobody—except, perhaps, the feelings of Dr. Dick, of Dundee—and it took the public mind away from less agreeable matters. Some of the wounded scientists roared, but the public, particularly the New York public, took the exposure of Locke’s literary villainy just as Sir John Herschel accepted it—with a grin.

As for the inspiration of the moon story, the record is nebulous. If Poe was really grieved at his first thought that Locke had taken from him the main imaginative idea—that the moon was inhabited—then Poe was oversensitive or uninformed, for that idea was at least two centuries old.

Francis Godwin, an English bishop and author, who was born in 1562, and who died just two centuries before the Sun was first printed, wrote “The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.” This was published in London in 1638, five years after the author’s death.