Before I return it to the library, here are two further snippets from The Sun And The Moon : The Remarkable True Account Of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, And Lunar Man-Bats In Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman:

Lewis Gaylord Clark on Edgar Allan Poe : “a mortified but impotent littérateur… an ambitious ‘authorling’ perhaps of a small volume of effete and lamentable trash”.

I am minded to conduct enquiries into Dr Henry Hall Sherwood of New York, a man with “controversial electromagnetic theories” who “would become known for his ‘savage rotary magnetic machine’ which he claimed could cure all manner of diseases from rheumatism to herpes and tuberculosis”. Gosh!