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This paper opens with Leigh Hunt’s 1808 claim that one of the advantages of the periodical essay is the ease of disposing of it – “if you are not rich enough to possess an urn or a cloth-holder,” for instance, “it may save you a world of opodeldoc by wrapping the handle of your tea-kettle.” This paper traces the strange persistence of opodeldoc – a medical liniment invented by Paracelsus – in the imagination of the material versatility of the literary periodical. Writing thirty-five years after Hunt, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Thingum Bob” signs the ill-fated compositions he attempts to place in journals “‘Oppodeldoc’ (a fine sonorous name)”. The composite nature of opodeldoc makes it an apt metaphor for the periodical, but its materiality ultimately dissipates in the “fine” sonority of a “name”, which, it will be argued in this paper, was in fact the material affordance of “opodeldoc” that made it appeal to the ear of Poe – who of course also heard his own name at its centre.
