Here we go. Lucretia Maria Davidson (1808-1825) was one of the Beautiful, Virtuous, Dead Teen Poets I was talking about earlier. Margaret Miller Davidson (1823-1838), Lucretia’s younger sister, was another. Margaret Jr. was named after her mother, Margaret Sr. (1787-1844), who acted as teacher, agent and career manager for both daughters, who, depressingly enough, she outlived. All three of them exploited and were further elevated by the aforesaid Soggy Cult of Tuberculosis, which romanticized the disease that both LMD and MMD Jr. died from. Seriously, there was a whole strain of early Romantic thought linking death by tuberculosis with great sensitivity, poetic skill and tragic beauty.

Interesting information and commentary about these individuals can be found in the following places:

Robert Southey, then the British poet laureate, wrote a very laudatory article (1827) in The Quarterly Review that gave the Soggy Cult more gushing power, but I can’t find a copy of it online.

The Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson (1857) contains poems by LMD, but, more pertinent to our investigation into the Soggy Cult, a short dedication by MMD Sr. to Washington Irving, in which MMD Sr. reconstructs LMD’s life so that it might conform to the lineaments of the Soggy Myth. There is also a very long biographical sketch by Catharine Marie Sedgwick that appears to draw on familial reminiscences, unpublished poems and LMD’s letters. Amid the constant tendency to romanticize LMD, there appear many interesting details of her everyday life as a middle-class girl of the very early 1800s. These details are very important! Oh yeah, there’s also some poetry in there.

Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (1850) contains poems by LMD’s sister, MMD Jr. In service of the Soggy Cult, Washington Irving wrote a long biography, ostensibly of MMD Jr., but also encompassing much about MMD Sr., who provided the notes on which the biography is based, and also about LMD, who of necessity enters into any discussion about the MMDs.

"Margaret Miller and Lucretia Maria Davidson" (1850) represents Edgar Allan Poe’s critical response to the Soggy Cult’s libations of praise for LMD and the MMDs. He thinks Sedgwick and Irving too effusive in their evaluation of LMD and MMD Jr. Apparently, Poe will employ the tropes of the Soggy Cult for horrific effect in his fiction, but he has no use for it in real life.