The Raven That Wrote Two Masterpieces

Charles Dickens slept facing north. He carried a compass to make sure, rearranging hotel furniture when he traveled so his bed aligned correctly. He believed magnetic north improved his creativity. When insomnia defeated even the compass, he would rise at two in the morning and walk twenty miles through London in the dark, dreaming on his feet.

He also kept a talking raven named Grip.

Grip buried coins in the garden, hid cheese behind books, and bit the children enough that Dickens banished her to the stable. There she developed a taste for lead paint. In 1841, she died of it. Dickens, heartbroken, had her stuffed and mounted above his writing desk, then promptly acquired a replacement raven, also named Grip.

That same year, he wrote the dead bird into his novel Barnaby Rudge. A young Edgar Allan Poe reviewed it for a Philadelphia magazine, arguing that Dickens hadn't used the raven nearly enough. When Dickens visited America the following year, the two met in Philadelphia. Dickens showed Poe a portrait of his children and the original Grip. Poe was delighted to learn the bird had been real.

Two years later, Poe wrote "The Raven."

Today, the stuffed Grip sits in the Free Library of Philadelphia's rare book department. Across the hall is the only surviving manuscript of "The Raven" in Poe's hand.

One paint-eating bird. Two masterpieces. Same building.