Animal Figure. Avian muse of authors Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. The most beloved of several pet birds owned by Charles Dickens, Grip was the namesake and model for the raven in his 1841 novel "Baranaby Rudge". When Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the work, he regretted that Dickens had not made greater use of Barnaby's talking, shutter-tapping raven in the plot - a criticism which certainly could not be made of Poe's poem "The Raven", published four years later. As a result, literary scholars have cited Grip as an inspiration to both authors. Dickens' delight in the antics of the real-life Grip occupied so much of his conversation that one friend called him "raven mad", and the loquacious young bird was also a great favorite of the author's children. A superb mimic, he buried coins and cheese in the garden, pecked at carriage linings and visitors' ankles, but the renovation of a room in the Dickens residence at 1 Devonshire Terrace proved to be his undoing. He sickened and died after ingesting chips of lead paint that had been scraped from the walls, despite being dosed with castor oil and gruel by a local veterinarian. Saddened by his loss, Dickens penned a eulogy to Grip in a letter to the illustrator Daniel Maclise, and had the raven's remains mounted by a taxidermist. Preserved with arsenic and mounted in a shadow box, Grip was sold at auction after Dickens' death, and eventually came into the possession of Col. Richard Gimbel, a Philadelphia collector of Poe memorabilia. In 1971 Gimbel's Poe collection was donated to the Philadelphia Free Library on Logan Circle, where Grip is prominently displayed in the Rare Books Collection on the third floor.
Animal Figure. Avian muse of authors Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. The most beloved of several pet birds owned by Charles Dickens, Grip was the namesake and model for the raven in his 1841 novel "Baranaby Rudge". When Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the work, he regretted that Dickens had not made greater use of Barnaby's talking, shutter-tapping raven in the plot - a criticism which certainly could not be made of Poe's poem "The Raven", published four years later. As a result, literary scholars have cited Grip as an inspiration to both authors. Dickens' delight in the antics of the real-life Grip occupied so much of his conversation that one friend called him "raven mad", and the loquacious young bird was also a great favorite of the author's children. A superb mimic, he buried coins and cheese in the garden, pecked at carriage linings and visitors' ankles, but the renovation of a room in the Dickens residence at 1 Devonshire Terrace proved to be his undoing. He sickened and died after ingesting chips of lead paint that had been scraped from the walls, despite being dosed with castor oil and gruel by a local veterinarian. Saddened by his loss, Dickens penned a eulogy to Grip in a letter to the illustrator Daniel Maclise, and had the raven's remains mounted by a taxidermist. Preserved with arsenic and mounted in a shadow box, Grip was sold at auction after Dickens' death, and eventually came into the possession of Col. Richard Gimbel, a Philadelphia collector of Poe memorabilia. In 1971 Gimbel's Poe collection was donated to the Philadelphia Free Library on Logan Circle, where Grip is prominently displayed in the Rare Books Collection on the third floor.
Bio by: Nikita Barlow
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