Edgar Allan Poe's "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences"

It is a sincere pity, as far as I'm concerned, that the word "diddling" has drifted so far from its original meaning. Taken from the name of Jeremy Diddler, the clever swindler of James Kenney's 1803 farce "Raising the Wind," "to diddle" used to mean simply to defraud. Now, as far as I can tell, it means something that a creepy scout leader does to his troop members. This is just too bad. But, despite my reputation with my students, lamentations on the decline of American English really aren't my style. So leaving jeremiad aside for the moment, let's proceed to Edgar Allan Poe's 1850 essay "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences."

Originally published as "Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as an Exact Science," "Diddling" has little else to do with the Kenney play, and Poe later dropped "Raising the Wind" (a slang phrase meaning "to put together a little money") from the title. However, the focus on con artistry and its perpetrators remains. Poe begins by locating the con at the center of human identity:

"Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man ... A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny."

What follows is not so much a reasoned argument regarding the con as it is a series of examples of successful and amusing diddles, arranged in no particular order, that each alike bear the nine characteristics Poe identifies as vital to the con: minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin. Many of these are easy enough to swallow as part of a definition; it is certainly audacious to take another man's wallet and impertinent to do it while he's watching. The variety of methods evolved for taking that wallet clearly earn con artistry points of originality, and if interest does not motivate, I would be hard pressed to determine what does.

But the quality of minuteness is trickier. Poe identifies the diddle as conducted always on the small scale. The diddler on the large scale, we are told, is generally called a financier. Now, obviously Poe is having a little fun here (and drawing attention to the oft-recognized parallel between the tactics of the petty crook and the Wall-Street tycoon), but it's worth considering that a line may need to be drawn between Poe's "diddle" and what we have come to think of as the con. Ocean's Eleven are hardly financiers for all their pocketbooks might tell, and long cons can prove very lucrative; if they couldn't, they would never be practiced.

Ultimately we may have to go beyond Poe's definition to get to the heart of the con; however, he does call attention to one vital aspect that many others neglect: the "grin." The immense, and in the real world necessarily private, pleasure that the diddler enjoys upon successfully completing his work is perhaps his most appealing characteristic. The diddler, in Poe's definition, is having fun, a fact which may go a long way toward explaining why we like him so much and why literature detailing his movements has had such a long and successful career.