A Tuscaloosa scholar of antebellum literature reads about a father who threatens to disinherit his Labrador over a surname and turns to Poe’s most famous family catastrophe
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My kitchen, a thunderstorm rolling over the Black Warrior River, the lights flickering in a way that feels too literary, The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe open on the table, 8.50pm.
A Surname And A Labrador
The London Prat this week carried a piece on whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name. A retired insurance manager from Ealing threatens to boycott his son’s wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after the son agrees to take his bride’s surname. The father invokes centuries of family heritage. The heritage turns out to begin with a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.
I have lived in Alabama for fourteen years, and I can tell you that genealogy is a full contact sport here. People in Tuscaloosa can recite their family trees back to the eighteenth century, often with considerable creative licence. A woman at my church, a Methodist congregation I attend mostly for the casseroles, told me within ten minutes of meeting me that her family came over on a ship that arrived shortly after the Mayflower, and that the delay was the ship’s fault. So the Ealing father felt familiar. I have met him, in a seersucker suit, at a garden party in the Druid City.
The Name Is The House
Poe published The Fall of the House of Usher in 1839. He was a Southerner by upbringing, raised in Richmond, Virginia, and though he resisted being called a regional writer, his tales are full of the Southern obsession with decaying families. In this one, a narrator visits his boyhood friend Roderick Usher at the family mansion. The Ushers have never put out collateral branches. The family name has passed directly from father to son for generations, so that the house and the family have become the same thing in the minds of the local peasantry. The House of Usher means both the building and the bloodline.
Roderick is sick with nerves and dread. His twin sister, Madeline, is dying of a mysterious illness. She is entombed alive in the family vault, escapes, and falls upon her brother. They die together. As the narrator flees, the house cracks along a fissure and sinks into the dark tarn in front of it. The line ends. The name ends. The house ends. All at once.
What The Ealing Father Fears
The Ealing father, it seems to me, is having an Usher panic. He has fused his name with his house, his heritage, his identity. If the son takes another name, the line, as he imagines it, ends. The house falls into the tarn. The Labrador is disinherited because there will be no one left to inherit anything.
Poe’s point, I think, was that this kind of fusion is a sickness. A family that refuses to branch, to mix, to change, does not preserve itself. It suffocates. The Ushers die because they are too close to each other, too sealed in their own name and their own house. A son who takes his wife’s name is, in Poe’s terms, the healthiest member of the family. He is putting out a collateral branch. He is letting air into the vault.
The Southern Version Of This Disease
The antebellum South was obsessed with lineage, and that obsession was bound up with slavery in ways the genealogies rarely mention. Family trees recorded the white heirs and left out the enslaved people who were often blood relatives, the children of enslavers and the women they owned. The names were inherited in one direction only. Many Black Alabamians today carry the surnames of the families who enslaved their ancestors, a fact that turns every Southern genealogy into a far more complicated document than a church garden party would suggest. The Ealing father’s button maker is an innocent ancestor by comparison.
The Storm Outside
The lights have just gone out completely, which is exactly what should happen while reading Poe. I am writing by the light of my phone and a scented candle labelled Autumn Harvest, which smells of nothing from any harvest I have ever encountered. The river is loud. The thunder is louder. If my house cracks along a fissure and sinks into the Black Warrior River, I would like it recorded that I was reading the correct author at the time.
Swedish Names, A Postscript
In Sweden, names are far more flexible than in Ealing or Alabama. For centuries, Swedes used patronymics, so a son of Nils would be Nilsson and his own son would take a new name from him in turn, and the surname changed every generation. When families did adopt fixed surnames, many simply created new ones from nature, combining words for birch, mountain, lake and stream. My grandmother chose her surname from a list in 1946 because she disliked her husband’s. Nobody disinherited a Labrador. Poe would have found Sweden very dull. The Ealing father would have found it terrifying. The lights are back on. The house still stands. Somewhere in Ealing, I hope, a Labrador is sleeping soundly, unaware that it has been written out of the will.