Poe's Life in Boston

EDWIN MANCHESTER
"The Ultima Thule," Daguerreotype
Providence, R.I., November 9, 1848

One of the most iconic images of American literary history, this intensely forlorn portrait of Poe, created in Providence four days after he consumed a near fatal overdose of the opiate laudanum in a Boston hotel, was dubbed the "Ultima Thule"–or "ultimate limit"–by Sarah Helen Whitman in 1874. In his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum," first published in 1842, Poe wrote:

I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture ... the pit. Whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself-the pit, typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments.

From Michael J. Deas, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe