An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Fifth and last child of Whipple V.Phillips and Robie Alzada Place Phillips; youngest sister of Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, HPL’s mother. Gamwell was educated in Providence and married Edward Francis Gamwell on June 3, 1897; they had two children, a son, Phillips Gamwell, and a daughter, Marion Roby Gamwell, who lived only five days in February 1900. She separated from her husband some time prior to the death of her son in Colorado at the end of 1916. During part of the period 1919–24, she assisted her sister Lillian Clark in keeping house for HPL at 598 Angell Street; however, in a letter to her dated August 27, 1921 ( SL1.148), HPL writes of her recently taking up residence in New Hampshire. She visited ancestral sites in western Rhode Island with HPL in 1926 and 1929. On May 15, 1933, she took up housekeeping with HPL in a second-story flat at 66 College Street, but broke her ankle soon after moving in; she also underwent an operation to remove a cancerous breast early in 1936 (in his letters HPL discreetly referred to the cause of her hospitalization as “grippe”). She was shocked to find her nephew’s “Instructions in Case of Decease” ( LSNo. 11 [Fall 1985]: 71–73) in the fall of 1936 and was unable to care for him effectively when he became gravely ill in the early months of 1937 because of her own illness. R.H.Barlow came to Providence shortly after HPL’s death and with her permission deposited most of HPL’s literary papers in the John Hay Library of Brown University during the period 1937–

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42. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei also visited her in Providence in 1938. They dedicated to her the first hardcover collection of HPL’s stories, O . She died of cancer in early 1941. Gamwell, Edward F[rancis] (1869–1936).

Married HPL’s aunt Annie Emeline Phillips on June 3, 1897. He received the A.B. from Brown University in 1894. Gamwell was city editor of the Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle(1896–1901), editor and proprietor of the Cambridge Tribune(1901–12), and editor of the Budgetand American Cultivator,both published from Boston (1913–15); thereafter, he engaged in independent commercial writing and advertising. He was the editor of An Historic Guide to Cambridge(1907). Gamwell separated from his wife sometime before the end of 1916. He removed from Cambridge to Boston about 1931. HPL notes that it was Gamwell’s journalistic work that inspired him to begin the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomyin 1903 (see SL1.39).

See Kenneth W.Faig, Jr., Edward Francis Gamwell and His Family(Moshassuck Press, 1991). Gamwell, Phillips (1898–1916).

Son of Annie E.Phillips Gamwell and Edward F.Gamwell. He was the only other member of HPL’s generation in descent from Whipple V.Phillips and his wife Robie A.Place Phillips. He lived most of his short life with parents in Cambridge, Mass. He began corresponding with HPL around 1910. HPL donated his boyhood stamp collection to him. HPL later attributed his fondness for letter-writing to the extensive correspondence he had with Gamwell from 1912 to 1916 (see SL3.370). In October 1916 Gamwell and his mother traveled to Roswell, Col., where Phillips’s paternal grandmother Victoria Clarissa Maxwell had relatives, in an attempt to regain his failing health. He died there on December 31, 1916, of tuberculosis. HPL wrote a poetic tribute, “An Elegy on Phillips Gamwell, Esq.” (Providence Evening News,January 5, 1917).

Gardner.

In “The Colour out of Space,” the family on whose farm the strange meteorite lands. Nahum is the patriarch, the last survivor of the blight that overtakes his farm. When his wife Nabby (short for Abigail) goes mad, he locks her in the attic, where she becomes a “terrible thing [that] very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble” and ultimately “does not reappear in [Ammi Pierce’s] tale as a moving object.” Zenas is their oldest son, followed by Thaddeus (1866–1883) and Merwin (sometimes affectionately called Mernie). Thaddeus goes mad, and Merwin and Zenas disappear into the poisoned well.

Gedney,———.

In At the Mountains of Madness,a graduate student and a member of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31. He accompanies Lake on his subexpedition and is subsequently discovered, dead, by Dyer and Danforth deep within the Old Ones’ city.

Genie.

In “Memory,” a supernatural entity who asks the Daemon of the Valley of the deeds and identity of the creatures (i.e., human beings) in a deserted valley.