Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

Consider your prior knowledge regarding the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. How did the Industrial Revolution affect societies? What were some of the positive effects of industrialization? What were some of the negative effects?

Teaching Suggestion: This Short Answer Question orients students with both the setting of the story as well as the context of Poe’s work: mid-19th century cosmopolitan Paris. Poe’s story centers on C. Auguste Dupin and an unnamed narrator as they use their amateur investigation skills to solve a murder in Paris. In fact, the city of Paris had the first police force with a detective branch in the period of European democratization, and the founder of the detective branch, Eugène-François Vidocq, inspired Poe to write the character of Dupin, which would in turn inspire Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Poe alludes to the dual effects of industrialization, in which modernization and progress improved the standard of living for populations while simultaneously eradicating the authentic communities that existed prior to industrialization.