Although it is probably not one of the great historical pranks, Poe's “Balloon Hoax” still has the power to mislead and confound readers up to the current day. T. O. Mabbott, in his edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III: Tales and Sketches, 1843–1849 (3:1063–88), gives the full text of the hoax, with annotations and a variorum of the 1844 and 1850 printings. Although Mabbott retains a number of changes that he considers to have been authorial in the Griswold text, which serves as his copy text, he dismisses one potentially significant change of “British Channel” in the 1850 printing back to the 1844 “Bristol Channel.” (There are references to both bodies of water elsewhere in the story.) This change to “British Channel” has become somewhat canonical as it was carried forward by several future editors, including J. H. Ingram (1874–75), E. C. Stedman and...

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