The Purloined Heart: Intertextuality Between Dickens and Poe with Dr Katie Bell

Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe had a profound influence on each other, and although they only met once in America, Poe read and reviewed many of Dickens's works before his death in 1849, while Dickens went home to England promising to promote Poe's career. Intertextuality between ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and the lesser-known Dickens text, ‘The Clock-Case. A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second,’ is the focus of this paper. Poe was enthusiastic about the power of Dickens's short story, and this paper demonstrates how he utilized aspects of it to craft one of the most popular horror stories of all time: ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’

Katie Bell received her PhD from the University of Leicester in English Literature in 2019. Her thesis examines the lasting influence Charles Dickens’s works have had upon other writers, specifically 20th-century American authors of the Southern Gothic genre. She also obtained her MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester in 2013. While living in the UK, she worked closely with the Dickens Museum in London as a curatorial assistant, docent, and researcher. She currently teaches high school literature in Atlanta, Georgia, and is working on a book based on her MA at Leicester through Palgrave Press.

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