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

Lovecraft speaks little of his uncle, Edwin Everett Phillips, and does not seem to have been close to him. Edwin briefly assisted his father in his Idaho enterprise, but he returned to Providence in 1889 and attempted—not very successfully, it appears—to go into business for himself. In 1894 he married Martha Helen Mathews; at some point they were divorced, then remarried in 1903. Throughout his life Edwin held various odd jobs, and at some point established the Edwin E. Phillips Refrigeration Company. His one significant involvement with Lovecraft and his mother was, as we shall see, an unfortunate one.

Annie Emeline Phillips, Lovecraft’s younger aunt, was nine years younger than Susie. Lovecraft remarks that she ‘was yet a very young lady when I first began to observe events about me. She was rather a favourite in the younger social set, & brought the principal touch of gayety to a rather conservative household.’⁹ I know nothing about her education.

We can finally turn our attention to Sarah Susan Phillips, born on 17 October1857. Regrettably little is known about her early years. Lovecraft states that she, like Lillian, attended Wheaton Female Seminary, but her attendance can be confirmed only for the school year 1871–72. From this period up to the time of her marriage in 1889 the record is blank. Clara Hess, a friend of the Lovecrafts, gives a description of Susie, probably dating from the late 1890s: ‘She was very pretty and attractive, with a beautiful and unusually white complexion—got, it is said, by eating arsenic, although whether there was any truth to this story I do not know. She was an intensely nervous person.’¹⁰ Elsewhere Hess remarks: ‘She had a peculiarly shaped nose which rather fascinated me, as it gave her a very inquiring expression. Howard looked very much like her.’¹¹

What little we know of Winfield Scott Lovecraft prior to his marriage derives from research recently conducted by Richard D. Squires of the Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology.¹² Winfield was born on 26 October 1853, probably at the home of George and Helen Lovecraft at 42 Marshall Street in Rochester. George Lovecraft was at the time a ‘traveling agent’ for the Ellwanger & Barry Nursery, a major business in Rochester. The family attended services at the Grace Episcopal (now St Paul’s) Church. These facts may be of some relevance to Winfield, since he was himself a salesman and was married at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, even though his bride was a Baptist.

From 1871 to 1873 Winfield was employed as a blacksmith for the James Cunningham & Son carriage factory, Rochester’s largest employer for many years. During this time he boarded with another uncle, John Full Lovecraft, in a home on Marshall Street. By 1874 all traces of Winfield Scott Lovecraft disappear from the records in Rochester.

Lovecraft stated on several occasions that his father was educated at a military school, but the location of this military school has not been traced; Winfield clearly did not attend West Point, as a check of its registry of graduates establishes. It is possible that it may not have been a formal military academy (of which there were very few at the time) but a school that emphasized military training. In any event, it is likely to have been local—somewhere in New York State, perhaps close to the Rochester area.

At some point Winfield moved to New York City, as this is given as his place of residence on his marriage certificate. He probably roomed there with his cousin, Frederick A. Lovecraft (1850–93). It is believed that he became employed by Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence, then one of the major business concerns in the city. The evidence for this employment does not derive from any statement by Lovecraft, but from a remark by Lovecraft’s wife Sonia in her 1948 memoir.¹³ It is not clear how and when Winfield began work for Gorham (assuming that he actually did so), and why, even if he was working as a travelling salesman, he was listed as a resident of New York City at the time of his marriage on 12 June 1889.

Equally a mystery is how he met Sarah Susan Phillips and how they fell in love. Susie certainly does not appear to have been a ‘society girl’ like her sister Annie, and Winfield was not a door-todoor salesman, so that he is not likely to have met her in this way; nor, if he had, would the social mores of the time have allowed them to fraternize. The Phillipses were, after all, part of the Providence aristocracy.