The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (71 page)

4
See n. 5 to “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.”

5
The Waites later become a leading family in Innsmouth in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931). See also n. 16 to “The Thing on the Doorstep.”

6
A few months after writing this novel, HPL, tracing the evolution of his own interests from literature to science and back to literature, remarked: “And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether!” (SL 2.160). He owned an impressive array of books on colonial history, architecture, and furniture.

7
One wonders whether HPL chose this date to reflect what he believed to be the birth year of his close friend, Frank Belknap Long (1901- 1994). The fact that Ward's birthday is in April (see p. 141) may be additional evidence, as Long's birthday was April 27. For complicated reasons HPL erred in his belief as to Long's year of birth. See Peter Cannon, “Frank Belknap Long: When Was He Born and Why Was Lovecraft Wrong?”
Studies in Weird Fiction
No. 17 (Summer 1995): 33-34.

8
The Moses Brown School at 250 Lloyd Avenue was founded in 1819, initially under Quaker auspices, on land donated by Moses Brown. It lies about three blocks from 10 Barnes Street, where HPL wrote this novel.

9
On the source of this name see n. 39.

10
Olney Court was an extension of Olney Street on the west side of North Main Street. The area was called Stampers' (formerly Stompers') Hill. HPL appears to have had a specific house in mind for Joseph Curwen's 1761 residence, but the entire area has now been razed to make way for new development. Olney Court is no longer in existence.

11
The City Hall, facing the southwest end of Exchange Place in downtown Providence, was designed by Samuel F. J. Thayer and dedicated in 1878. The State House was designed by the celebrated New York firm of McKim, Mead and White; it opened officially on January 1, 1901. It is constructed entirely of white Georgia marble and contains the fourth largest unsupported dome in the world. The Providence Public Library at Washington and Empire Streets was designed by Stone, Carpenter & Willson and completed in 1900. The Providence Athenaeum, a private library at College and Benefit Streets, was designed by William Strick land and opened in 1838. Poe frequented the library during his late courting of Sarah Helen Whitman (1848-49). The Rhode Island Historical Society was founded in 1822. A building to house its library was built in 1844 at 68 Waterman Street. The historical society is now at the John Brown house (52 Power Street) and the library is at 121 Hope Street. The John Carter Brown Library, on the main campus green of Brown University, was designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and completed in 1904. Its collection of Americana was begun by John Carter Brown (1797-1874), and in 1904 it became affiliated with Brown University. The John Hay Library at College and Prospect Streets was built by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and completed in 1910. At this time and for many years afterward it was the main undergraduate library of Brown University; it is now the rare book library, housing among other things the H. P. Lovecraft Papers. The private library of Colonel George L. Shepley was housed at 292 Benefit Street, in a house erected in 1921. HPL visited the library in 1923 (see SL 1.268). It is no longer extant.

12
This description corresponds accurately with HPL's own outward appearance as well as with his self-image. He was 5' 11˝, very thin (his ideal weight was 140 pounds), and did indeed walk with a stoop. One acquaintance, Mary V. Dana, has noted: “he appeared to be about five foot eight [
sic
], a bit round-shouldered and thin, and with a concave sallow face, brilliantly lively brown eyes, and a reserved up-turned mouth.” See Mary V. Dana, “A Glimpse of H.P.L.” (LR 30).

13
HPL refers to the Jenckes-Pratt house (c. 1775) at 133 Prospect Street (corner of Prospect and Barnes Streets), close to the Halsey mansion and to HPL's residence at 10 Barnes Street.

14
Prospect Terrace is a small park on Congdon Street at the foot of Cush ing Street; it provides a splendid view of downtown Providence and other westward regions. HPL was fond of writing postcards there.

15
This is an authentic memory from HPL's childhood, but it occurred not in Providence but in Auburndale, Massachusetts, in late 1892 or early 1893: “What has haunted my dreams for nearly forty years is
a strange sense of adventurous expectancy connected with landscape and architecture and sky-effects.
I can see myself as a child of 2½ on the railway bridge at Auburndale, Mass., looking across and downward at the business part of the town, and feeling the imminence of some wonder which I could neither describe nor fully conceive” (SL 3.100).

16
“I used to drag my mother all around when I was 4 or 5 & not allowed to be so far from home alone.” HPL to J. Vernon Shea, November 8, 1933 (ms., JHL).

17
Job Durfee (1790-1847) was a congressman and later chief justice of the Rhode Island supreme court. His home at 49 Benefit Street was built in 1790-98 and renovated in 1866.

18
In HPL's day the colonial homes in Benefit Street were in fact getting run-down; the restoration of the area did not get under way until the 1950s.

19
Now North and South Main Street.

20
HPL refers to the churchyard of St. John's Episcopal Church (1810) at 271 North Main Street. He was well aware that Edgar Allan Poe had courted Sarah Helen Whitman in this churchyard (her house at 88 Benefit Street abuts it); see “The Shunned House” (1924): “[Poe's] favourite walk led northward . . . to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination” (MM 235). In 1936 HPL, R. H. Barlow, and Adolphe de Castro wrote acrostic “sonnets” on the name Edgar Allan Poe in the churchyard.

21
See n. 60.

22
The Golden Ball Inn at 159 Benefit Street was erected by Henry Rice in 1784. Only a part of the building is now extant.

23
The street was called Gaol Lane because a jail was built there in 1733, next to the County Court House (Colony House).

24
In his youth HPL read the entire run of the
Providence Gazette and Country-Journal
(1762-1825) at the Providence Public Library (SL 5.208). The “Shakespear's Head” building, built in 1772, still stands at 21 Meeting Street. It is now the home of the Providence Preservation Society.

25
Properly, the First Baptist Meeting-House at 75 North Main Street, designed by Joseph Brown (1733-1785) and completed in 1775. HPL believed that it had “the finest Georgian steeple in America,” as he says in “The Call of Cthulhu” (CC 157 and n. 35). The steeple was based upon an alternate design for the steeple of the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, executed by British architect James Gibbs, a disciple of Sir Christopher Wren. See Gertrude Selwyn Kimball,
Providence in Colonial Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), p. 24 (hereafter cited in the text as Kimball).

26
These alleys, branching off South Water Street and bordering the Providence River, were eliminated in the 1960s to make way for newer commercial development.

27
HPL had long had a fondness for these utilitarian structures on South Water Street, called “Brick Row”; but in the late 1920s the city decided that their deteriorating condition necessitated their razing. HPL launched a public campaign to save them, writing letters to the
Providence Journal
(including one published as “Retain Historic ‘Old Brick Row,' ” March 24, 1929), and encouraging his friends to make similar appeals; but by the end of 1929 they had been torn down, inspiring HPL's pensive poem, “The East India Brick Row” (
Providence Journal
, January 8, 1930).

28
The spires in question are those of the First Baptist Meeting-House and of the First Unitarian Church at 301 Benefit Street, built in 1816.

29
The Christian Science Church at Prospect and Meeting Streets was built in 1906-13.

30
The date has been chosen to coincide with the initial outbreak of the witch panic in Salem: the first interrogations of witchcraft accusers occurred on March 1.

31
Fraunces' Tavern, at 54 Pearl Street in Manhattan, was built in 1719. For much of the later eighteenth century it was operated by an African American, Samuel Fraunces, and served as the meeting place for many prominent political and social figures in colonial America. In 1904 the Sons of the Revolution of New York purchased it and made it a museum. It is now in the process of being restored to its original purpose.

32
The reference is to the fact that Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island in 1636, had fled Massachusetts because his Baptist faith was not looked upon with favor by the Puritan leadership in Boston. Shortly thereafter two other religious dissidents, Samuel Gorton and Anne Hutchinson, also arrived in the new colony. Williams declared complete freedom of religion for the colony shortly after his arrival there, and this was codified in a charter of 1663 (see Kimball 25, 58).

33
The Great Bridge—once the widest bridge in the world prior to its recent partial removal—spans the Providence River and thereby facilitates transportation from the East Side to what is now downtown Providence. A bridge was first built at this location in 1660, but wear and tear forced it to be torn down and rebuilt in 1711-13 (see Kimball 154-56).

34
The first Congregational church in Providence was built in 1723 at the corner of Benefit and College Streets; it is no longer standing.

35
Dr. Jabez Bowen, Sr. “came to Providence from Rehoboth in the early twenties of the eighteenth century. . . . Old Doctor Jabez lived at the foot of the present Bowen Street. Across the way was his ‘well-known Apothecary's Shop just below the Church, at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar' ” (Kimball 344-45). Kimball does not identify the source of her quotation, but it is probably from the
Providence Gazette
, perhaps from Bowen's obituary. See further n. 87.

36
The Narragansetts, one of several Native American tribes in Rhode Island, had been nearly wiped out during King Philip's War (1675-76), most of the remnants being huddled together on a virtual reservation in the southern part of the state.

37
The farmhouse of Arthur Fenner was a real structure. “This ‘farm in the woods' was built, probably, in 1655, and stood in the present suburb of Cranston” (Kimball 80). It was rebuilt after its destruction in 1675 by Native Americans during King Philip's War, and torn down in 1895 (Kimball 113).

38
Kingstown (now divided into the towns of Kingston and West Kingston) was a town in south-central Rhode Island. It was originally a farming community, settled in the mid-seventeenth century.

39
Both variants of the name are prominent in early Salem history. Jonathan Corwin was one of the judges during the witchcraft trials of 1692. His descendant, Samuel Curwen (1715-1802), was the one who altered the spelling of his surname. He was a judge in the Admiralty Court just prior to the Revolution but, as a loyalist, left Salem for England in 1775; he returned in 1784. His
Journal and Letters
appeared in 1864.

40
Kimball writes at length about Dr. John Checkley (1680-1754), referring to him as “a man of extraordinary intellectual ability, and a keen and appreciative scholar. His conversational powers were especially extolled, both for the elegance and ease which marked his words, and for his racy humor and inexhaustible fund of anecdote. He was regarded as one of the wits of his time, and his
bons-mots
were current for a whole generation” (170). His controversial religious views prevented his ordination into the Church of England until 1738, at which time he came to Providence; he also preached at Attleboro, Warwick, and Taunton.

41
Kimball discusses John Merritt directly after her discussion of Checkley (see Kimball 178-80). Many of the phrases HPL uses to describe Merritt are taken directly from Kimball. Merritt's tombstone is in the churchyard of St. John's Episcopal Church.

42
An impressive list of Renaissance chemists and alchemists. Paracelsus was the pseudonym of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), a German-Swiss physician and alchemist who did pioneering work in medicine and chemistry. Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) was a German scholar who wrote on mineralogy in such works as
De natura fossilium
(1546) and
De re metallica
(1556). Jan Baptista van Helmont (1580-1644) was a Belgian chemist chiefly known for his identification of carbon dioxide. Franciscus Sylvius (1614-1672) was a German physician and chemist who created controversy by his assertion that all biological phenomena have a chemical basis. Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604-1668) was a German-Dutch chemist and inventor of Glauber's salt (sodium sulfate resulting from the residue of hydrochloric acid). Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was an Anglo-Irish chemist, author of
The Sceptical Chymist
(1661) and other works, and cofounder of the Royal Society of London. Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) was a Dutch physician whose chief scholarly contribution was the codification of much of the medical knowledge of his time. Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682?) was a German chemist and physician who propounded theories of combustion that led George Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), a German physician, to conjecture the existence of an immaterial element called phlogiston, purported to exist in every combustible substance; it was a theory that dominated chemistry for much of the eighteenth century.

43
Hermes Trismegistos (“thrice-great Hermes”) is the putative author of a series of occultist and alchemical works written in Greek and Latin from the first to the third centuries C.E. Louis Nicolas Ménard edited these writings as
Hermès Trismégiste
in 1866, making it difficult for Curwen to own this volume in 1746.