James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), Irish poet, essayist, translator, and short story writer, had a short and miserable life, strewn with alcohol and laudanum, which made him a cursed author who is considered by critics as "the Irish Poe", both for his melancholic life as well as for his visionary and innovative work. He wrote widely and sparsely in countless Irish brochures, magazines and newspapers, on many occasions supporting the nationalist cause, although he barely earned to live and did not see a single book published in his lifetime. One day in June 1849 he was found by friends dying in an abandoned building in Dublin. He died days later, four months before Poe's death. For Chesterton, Mangan is "the greatest of the modern Irish masters of literature" and his gaunt figure wrapped in a stiff blue cape, his gray hair covered with a threadbare hat and with an eternal umbrella in his hand, will be forever engraved on the memory of the city of Dublin. Mangan's faith in the spirit world, full of visions, and his fondness for ghost stories, as well as his fine humor and skepticism permeate the stories collected in this volume, among which the thirty flasks stand out, a story that seems to have inspired the analysis of psychological association of Poe's The Crimes of Morgue Street, An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shadows, in which there is an antecedent of the internal dialogue characteristic of Joyce's Ulysses, and A Dose of Sixty Drops of Laudanum, an authentic handbook of his aesthetic, ethical and even literary creed.
James Clarence Mangan, "the Irish Poe", was born in Dublin in 1803. His father, a hardened drunk, ran a grocery store in a poor part of the city. Mangan studied at Saul’s Court School, where he learned German and the rudiments of various European languages. At the age of fifteen, when his father lost his business, he had to work as a copyist for ten long years in seedy offices. It was in this period that he began his fondness for alcohol and laudanum - like De Quincey, from whom he had read the Confessions - and when he began to write poetry. He had an unrequited love affair with young Margaret Stackpole from which the poet came out quite touched. He was forced to translate numerous works in order to survive, especially by German poets, which he put together in two volumes in Anthologia Germanica (1845).
In 1842 the nationalist newspaper The Nation offered him a fixed salary for his collaboration, but he could not keep it due to his fondness for laudanum. In June 1849, sick and starving, he collapsed in an abandoned building where he was found by his friends. Admitted to a hospital, he died days after morbid cholera.