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

Because of the large quantity of Lovecraft’s letters and the valuable information they contain, I have been careful to cite these documents very specifically. The primary source for Lovecraft’s letters remains Selected Letters (1965–76; 5 vols; abbreviated as SL), even if many of the letters are abridged. This edition was itself founded upon an immense quantity of transcripts prepared by Arkham House over the years, and in many cases these transcripts contain fuller versions of the letters. I have abbreviated citations from these transcripts as AHT. Another substantial volume is Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (2000), edited by David E. Schultz and myself, and containing many of the autobiographical letters from which I have drawn so heavily in this book.

The manuscripts of many of Lovecraft’s letters are available at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the primary repository of works by and about Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth, and some other relevant documents, are at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

CHAPTER ONE

Unmixed English Gentry

Only an intermittently diligent genealogist, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was able to discover little about the paternal side of his ancestry beyond the notes collected by his great-aunt Sarah Allgood. Subsequent genealogical research has failed to verify much of this information, especially regarding the Lovecrafts prior to their coming to America in the early nineteenth century. According to the Allgood notes, the Lovecraft or Lovecroft name does not appear any earlier than 1450, when various heraldic charts reveal Lovecrofts in Devonshire near the Teign. Lovecraft’s own direct line does not emerge until 1560, with John Lovecraft.

The paternal line becomes of immediate interest only with Thomas Lovecraft (1745–1826), who apparently lived such a dissolute life that he was forced in 1823 to sell the ancestral estate, Minster Hall near Newton Abbot. According to Lovecraft (or the notes he was consulting), Thomas Lovecraft’s sixth child, Joseph S. Lovecraft, decided in 1827 to emigrate, taking his wife Mary Fulford and their six children, John Full, William, Joseph, Jr, George, Aaron, and Mary, to Ontario, Canada. Finding no prospects there, he drifted down to the area around Rochester, New York, where he was established by at least 1831 as a cooper and carpenter.

Lovecraft’s paternal grandfather was George Lovecraft, who was probably born in 1818 or 1819.¹ In 1839 he married Helen Allgood (1821–81) and lived much of his life in Rochester as a harness maker. Of his five children, two died in infancy; the other three were Emma Jane (1847–1925), Winfield Scott (1853–1898), and Mary Louise (1855–1916). Winfield married Sarah Susan Phillips and begat Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Lovecraft appears to have been much more industrious in tracking down his maternal ancestry, but again his conclusions are not always to be trusted. At various points in his life he traced his maternal line either to the Rev. George Phillips (d. 1644), who in 1630 left England on the Arbella and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, or to Michael Phillips (1630?–86) of Newport, Rhode Island. Whatever the case, Asaph Phillips (1764–1829), probably Michael’s great-great-grandson, headed inland and settled around 1788 in Foster, in the west-central part of the state near the Connecticut border. Asaph and his wife Esther Whipple had eight children, all of whom, incredibly, survived to adulthood. The sixth child, Jeremiah Phillips (1800–48), built a water-powered grist mill on the Moosup River in Foster and was killed on 20 November 1848 when his flowing greatcoat got caught in the machinery, dragging him into it. As Jeremiah’s wife Roby Rathbun Phillips had died earlier in 1848, their four children were left as orphans. They were Susan, James, Whipple, and Abbie. Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833–1904) is Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather.

Whipple attended the East Greenwich Academy (then called The Providence Conference Seminary), probably prior to the death of his father Jeremiah. In 1852 he went to live with his uncle James Phillips (1794–1878) in Delavan, Illinois, a temperance town his relatives had founded; he returned the next year to Foster because the climate did not suit him. He married his first cousin, Robie Alzada Place (1827–1896),² on 27 January 1856, settling in a homestead in Foster built by Robie’s father Stephen Place. Their first child, Lillian Delora (1856–1932), was born less than three months later. There were four other children: Sarah Susan (1857– 1921), Emeline (1859–65), Edwin Everett (1864–1918), and Annie Emeline (1866–1941). Lovecraft’s mother Sarah Susan was born, as her own mother had been, at the Place homestead.