page_title: Eliza Poe
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Eliza Poe / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Playbill for The Curfew: or The Danish Banditti, May 22, 1807. Performers included David Poe and Eliza Poe, parents of Edgar Allan Poe. The playbill notes the performance is "For the Benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Poe". Early American playbills (Folder 13), Houghton Library, Harvard University
context_page_description: Elizabeth "Eliza" Arnold Hopkins Poe was an English actress and the mother of the American author Edgar Allan Poe.
context_section_description: Elizabeth Arnold was born to Henry and Elizabeth Arnold in London in the spring of 1787. Her mother was a stage actress in London from 1791 to 1795. Henry died in 1789 and, in November 1795, only mother and daughter sailed from England to the United States, arriving in Boston, Massachusetts on January 3, 1796.
  Arnold debuted on the Boston stage at the age of nine, only three months after her arrival in the United States. She played a character named Biddy Blair in David Garrick's farce Miss in Her Teens and was praised in the Portland Herald: "Miss Arnold, in Miss Biddy, exceeded all praise.. Although a miss of only nine years old, her powers as an Actress will do credit to any of her sex of maturer age". Later that year, Elizabeth married musician Charles Tubbs, who had sailed with the Arnolds from England. The small family joined with a manager Mr. Edgar to form a theater troupe called the Charleston Comedians. Elizabeth, Eliza's mother, died sometime while this troupe was traveling through North Carolina. Little is known about her death but she disappears from theatrical records in 1798 and it is presumed she died shortly after.
  After her mother's death, Eliza stayed with the theater troupe. She followed the tradition at the time for actors to travel from city to city to perform for as long as several months before moving on. The actors, theaters, and audiences had a wide range of sophistication. One of the most impressive venues at which she performed was the Chestnut Street Theater near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which seated two thousand. Over the course of her career she played some 300 parts, as well as choral and dancing roles, including William Shakespeare characters Juliet Capulet and Ophelia.
  In the summer of 1802, at the age of fifteen, Eliza married Charles Hopkins. Hopkins died three years later in October 1805, possibly of yellow fever, leaving Eliza an eighteen-year-old widow. The Baltimore-born David Poe, Jr. saw Eliza performing in Norfolk, Virginia, and decided to join her acting troupe, abandoning his family's plans for him to study law. Poe married Eliza only six months after Hopkins's death in 1806.
  The couple traveled throughout New England and the rest of the northeast, playing in various towns such as Richmond, Philadelphia, and at an outdoor summer theater in New York City before finally settling in Boston. They stayed in Boston for three consecutive seasons of thirty weeks each in a theater that fit an audience of about one thousand. Reviews at the time often remarked on Eliza's "interesting figure" and "sweetly melodious voice". Though times were difficult, the couple had two sons; William Henry Leonard was born in January 1807 (nine months after their wedding) and Edgar was born on January 19, 1809, at a boarding-house near Boston Common, close to where their troupe was performing. Eliza performed until 10 days before Edgar's birth and may have named her second son after the Mr. Edgar who led the Charleston Comedians.
  The family relocated to New York City in the summer of 1809. Eliza had often been praised for her acting ability while David's performances were routinely criticized harshly, possibly due to his own stage fright. David, an ill-tempered alcoholic, abandoned the stage and his family about six weeks after moving to New York. Though David's fate is unknown, there is some evidence to suggest he died in Norfolk on December 11, 1811. In his absence, Eliza gave birth to a third child, a daughter she called Rosalie, in December 1810. Rosalie was later described as "backward" and she may have been mentally retarded. Eliza continued traveling as she performed.
caption: Playbill for The Curfew, May 27, 1807, presented "For the Benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Poe"
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