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

Also at this time Lovecraft himself developed an interest in firearms. Recall that during the initial creation of the Providence Detective Agency he himself, unlike the other boys, sported a real revolver. Lovecraft evidently amassed a fairly impressive collection of rifles, revolvers, and other firearms: ‘After 1904 I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, & became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.’²⁶ At this point Lovecraft seemed to lose interest, and he sold off most of his weapons.

Interestingly, Lovecraft began to guide Chester and Harold Munroe into more academic interests, enlisting them as assistants and even colleagues in some of his own intellectual work. The Rhode Island Journal for March 1906 states that a meteorological sub-station has been opened by Harold at his home at 66 Patterson Street. Three months later we hear of the establishment of a Providence Astronomical Society. At this time one of the Munroes assisted Lovecraft in giving a lecture on the sun at the East Side Historical Club by showing lantern slides. I do not imagine that this was anything but a group of Lovecraft’s high school friends; we shall see later that they continued to meet in this fashion for several years.

Rather different was the lecture Lovecraft gave to the Boys’ Club of the First Baptist Church on 25 January 1907.²⁷ This was clearly a formal organization, although I do not believe that Lovecraft was a member: if the contretemps with his Sunday school class (for which see below) dates to 1902, it is not likely that he would have been invited back any time soon. But the mere fact that he gave the lecture may indicate that he had achieved a certain celebrity as an astronomical authority; for he had already become widely published in the local papers by this time.

The death of Lovecraft’s grandfather roughly coincided with the emergence of two new elderly male figures in his personal and intellectual life: his uncles, Dr Franklin Chase Clark (1847–1915) and Edward Francis Gamwell (1869–1936).

Lovecraft became acquainted with Gamwell in 1895, when the latter began courting his aunt Annie Emeline Phillips. Edward and Annie married on 3 January 1897, with the six-year-old Lovecraft serving as usher. Annie went to live with Edward in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edward was the city editor of the Cambridge Chronicle (1896–1901), then the Cambridge Tribune (1901–12), and then the Boston Budget and Beacon (1913–15). But Annie and Edward visited Providence frequently, especially after the birth on 23 April 1898 of Phillips Gamwell, Lovecraft’s only first cousin on the maternal side. Gamwell taught Lovecraft to recite the Greek alphabet at the age of six, and Lovecraft even maintains that it was his uncle’s extensive editorial capacities that incited him to start The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy.²⁸

Lovecraft was much closer to Dr Clark than to Gamwell, and indeed the former became after Whipple’s death exactly the sort of father replacement Whipple himself had been. Franklin Chase Clark had received an A.B. from Brown University in 1869, as Edward F. Gamwell would in 1894, had attended Harvard Medical School in 1869–70 (where he is likely to have studied with Oliver Wendell Holmes), and had gone on to attain his M.D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He married Lillian Delora Phillips on 10 April 1902. Lovecraft does not mention being involved with the wedding, but he probably served in some capacity. One imagines that Lillian left 454 Angell Street at that time and moved in with her husband, who lived at 80 Olney Street.

In spite of Clark’s scientific background, it was in the area of belles-lettres that he exerted the greatest influence on the young Lovecraft. Clark had translated Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, and Statius into English verse, and Lovecraft reports that he ‘did much to correct & purify my faulty style’,²⁹ specifically in verse but also in prose. We can perhaps see Clark’s influence as early as the accomplished classical verses in Poemata Minora, Volume II (1902).