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

The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner was a weekly based in Phenix, Rhode Island, a community now incorporated into the city of West Warwick, well to the west and south of Providence. Lovecraft describes it as a ‘country paper’ and states that it was ‘more than willing to print & feature anything from Whipple V. Phillips’ grandson’.³⁹ In this letter he maintains that ‘During 1906, 1907, & 1908 I flooded the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner with my prose articles’; but no issues subsequent to 28 December 1906 seem to survive. Evidence exists, however, that the paper did indeed continue at least through 1907, so it appears that we have lost a good many articles that Lovecraft published in it.

The Gleaner articles—many of them based upon corresponding articles or serials in the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy—do more than merely provide information on the astronomical phenomena for the month; they are among the first of several attempts by Lovecraft over the years to educate the public on the fundamentals of astronomy. In the present instance, Lovecraft has chosen provocative queries about Mars, the moon, and the solar system which he believes (probably rightly) the public will find stimulating.

The articles for the Providence Tribune tend to be less interesting only because they rather mechanically deal with the purportedly noteworthy celestial phenomena of each month, becoming somewhat repetitive in the process. They are distinguished, however, for the fact that they are among the few occasions when illustrations by Lovecraft were published: of the twenty articles, sixteen were accompanied by hand-drawn star charts.

My feeling is that a purchase Lovecraft made at this time with his own money—a rebuilt 1906 Remington typewriter—was connected with these published astronomy articles. The typewriter was not used for preparing his hectographed scientific journals (for they remain handwritten to the very end) nor even, apparently, the fiction he was writing (no typescripts from this period survive), so that the preparation of the astronomy columns—the only things he was submitting to a publisher at this time—would be the only logical purpose for securing a typewriter. It was the only typewriter Lovecraft would ever own in his life.

Lovecraft also states that he wrote a lengthy treatise, A Brief Course in Astronomy—Descriptive, Practical, and Observational; for Beginners and General Readers, in 1906: ‘it got as far as the typed and hand-illustrated stage (circa one hundred fifty pages), though no copy survives’.⁴⁰ It is clearly the most substantial scientific work he had ever written or ever would write.

The quotation from ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ with which I opened this chapter suggests how radically the study of astronomy affected Lovecraft’s entire philosophical conception of the universe. Indeed, it is around the period of 1906 that we can definitively date Lovecraft’s philosophical awakening. Previous to that there had been only his various conflicts with church authorities in Sunday school. His first attendance, if it truly dates to the age of seven, saw him taking sides with the Romans against the Christians, but only because of his fondness for Roman history and culture and not out of any specifically anticlerical bias. By the age of nine, as he declares, he was conducting a sort of experimental course in comparative religion, pretending to believe in various faiths to see whether they convinced him; evidently none did. This led to his final Sunday school encounter:

How well I recall my tilts with Sunday-School teachers during my last period of compulsory attendance! I was 12 years of age, and the despair of the institution. None of the answers of my pious preceptors would satisfy me, and my demands that they cease taking things for granted quite upset them. Close reasoning was something new in their little world of Semitic mythology. At last I saw that they were hopelessly bound to unfounded dogmata and traditions, and thenceforward ceased to treat them seriously. SundaySchool became to me simply a place wherein to have a little harmless fun spoofing the pious mossbacks. My mother observed this, and no longer sought to enforce my attendance.⁴¹ These sessions presumably occurred at the First Baptist Church, where his mother was still on the rolls.

But years of astronomical study triggered the ‘cosmicism’ that would form so central a pillar of both his philosophical and his aesthetic thought: