The inspiration behind Poe’s famous raven was a real bird named Grip (and you can still go visit him today).
Dickens owned the talking raven in the 1840s. Grip was known for causing chaos around the house, biting children, shouting strange phrases, and generally acting how a Victorian literary raven would act.
Dickens eventually wrote the raven into his own book, Barnaby Rudge. Poe admired Dickens’s use of the bird so much that many scholars believe Grip directly influenced The Raven.
The story gets stranger, because Dickens had Grip preserved, and the raven can still be seen at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
