A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Aside from discovering Poe and giving his fledgling fictional career a boost, Lovecraft also found himself in 1898 fascinated with science. This is the third component of what he once described as his tripartite nature: love of the strange and fantastic, love of the ancient and permanent, and love of abstract truth and scientific logic.⁶ It is perhaps not unusual that it would be the last to emerge in his young mind, and it is still remarkable that it emerged so early and was embraced so vigorously. Lovecraft first came upon a section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’ at the back of Webster’s Dictionary, and very shortly thereafter he had a full-fledged chemistry set and was deep in experimentation. As with his enthusiasm for the Arabian Nights, his chemical tastes led his family to indulge the boy in whatever tools he needed. The first book he read on the subject was The Young Chemist (1876) by John Howard Appleton, a professor of chemistry at Brown University and a friend of the family.

The immediate result of the discovery of science was a spate of literary work. Lovecraft began The Scientific Gazette on 4 March 1899. This first issue—a single sheet—still survives; it contains an amusing report: ‘There was a great explosion in the Providence Laboratory this afternoon. While experimenting some potassium blew up causing great damage to everyone.’ Incredibly, this magazine was initially a daily, but ‘it soon degenerated into a weekly’.⁷ No subsequent issues survive until the New Issue Vol. I, No. 1 (12 May 1902), and I shall postpone discussion of it until the next chapter.

Lovecraft also wrote a number of short chemical treatises. There was a six-volume series with the general title Chemistry, of which four volumes survive: Chemistry (10 cents); Chemistry, Magic, & Electricity (5 cents); Chemistry III (5 cents); and Chemistry IV (15 cents). These volumes discuss such things as argon, gunpowder, a carbon cell battery, gases, acids, tellurium, lithium, explosives, ‘explosive experiments’, and the like. There is also a small work called A Good Anaesthetic (5 cents). Judging by the handwriting, these works probably all date to around 1899. Non-extant works include Iron Working (5 cents), Acids (5 cents), Explosives (5 cents), and Static Electricity (10 cents).

It appears that Lovecraft’s early scientific interests engendered some practical experimentation, if the following account—related to W. Paul Cook by one of Lovecraft’s neighbours—dates to this period. It is one of the most delightful and celebrated anecdotes about Lovecraft that has come down to us. Let Cook tell it in his own inimitable way:

That section [of Providence, in which Lovecraft lived] was then open fields, rather swampy here and there, with very few houses. One day this neighbor, Mrs. Winslow Church, noticed that someone had started a grass fire that had burned over quite an area and was approaching her property. She went out to investigate and found the little Lovecraft boy. She scolded him for setting such a big fire and maybe endangering other peoples’ property. He said very positively, ‘I wasn’t setting a big fire. I wanted to make a fire one foot by one foot.’ That is the little story in the words in which it came to me. It means little except that it shows a passion for exactitude (in keeping with him as we knew him later)—but it is a story of Lovecraft.⁸

This anecdote is, as I say, not dated; but the mention of ‘open fields’ suggests that it occurred while Lovecraft was at 454 Angell Street, since the area was already being built up during his early teenage years.

Another rather anomalous discovery Lovecraft made at this time was anatomy—or, rather, the specific facts of anatomy relating to sex. Here is his account of it:

In the matter of the justly celebrated ‘facts of life’ I didn’t wait for oral information, but exhausted the entire subject in the medical section of the family library (to which I had access, although I wasn’t especially loquacious about this side of my reading) when I was 8 years old—through Quain’s Anatomy (fully illustrated & diagrammed), Dunglison’s Physiology, &c. &c. This was because of curiosity & perplexity concerning the strange reticences & embarrassments of adult speech, & the oddly inexplicable allusions & situations in standard literature. The result was the very opposite of what parents generally fear—for instead of giving me an abnormal & precocious interest in sex (as unsatisfied curiosity might have done), it virtually killed my interest in the subject. The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism—a mechanism which I rather despised or at least thought nonglamourous because of its purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect & beauty—& all the drama was taken out of it.⁹