[On May 6, 1776, Rhode Island became the first colony to formally declare its independence from England. That’s one of many ways this smallest state has made a big impact, so for the 250th anniversary of that occasion this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Little Rhody histories, leading up to a weekend reading list for folks who want to learn more!]
On three Little Rhody contexts for its most famous literary legend, H.P. Lovecraft.
- Butler Hospital: In 1893, when Lovecraft was only three years old, his father Winfield Scott Lovecraft was institutionalized at Providence’s Butler Hospital, where he would remain until his death in 1898. It seems likely that his worsening symptoms were the result of late-stage syphilis, although Lovecraft would later maintain that it was a paralytic state due to overwork. And I would argue that that discrepancy likely reflects the ways in which this longstanding and venerable medical institution, the state’s oldest (having been founded in 1844), would have been instead a space of at best mystery and ambiguity, and at worst tragedy and terror, for young Lovecraft. Turning the ordinary and the scientific into the mysterious and the terrifying would, of course, become Lovecraft’s claim to fame.
- Whipple Van Buren Phillips: After Winfield’s institutionalization, young Lovecraft lived with his mother and her family, including her wealthy local businessman father (Lovecraft’s grandfather) Whipple. Whipple’s extensive resources and connections certainly helped make the transition and the rest of Lovecraft’s childhood less painful than they might otherwise have been. But he also and importantly became the young boy’s gateway to the world of the weird, as he apparently told Lovecraft fantastic stories of his own creation that featured “deep, low, moaning sounds” that he would perform during his readings. Expanding on my concluding point in item 1 above, I really love that the wealthy relative who made Lovecraft’s childhood privileged was also it seems the most direct inspiration for his lifelong interest in the weird and the terrifying. Both/and rather than either/or was very much the lesson of Lovecraft’s early life.
- Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy: As that hyperlinked list of Lovecraft’s scientific articles illustrates, he began writing such articles at a very, very young age (the earliest ones on that list were when he was just 9!), and when he was still only 13 he turned that practice and his blossoming obsession with astronomy into a full periodical publication, his Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy. (One of two such publications of Lovecraft’s around this time, as he also produced volumes of his Scientific Gazette.) Given that during these same years Lovecraft was suffering from repeated psychiatric episodes that he called “near breakdowns,” traumas that eventually led to his inability to graduate high school, I think we have to see these earliest, highly scientific publications as both a survival mechanism and a complement to the mysteries and horrors of the mind—and every side of those experiences were grounded in Lovecraft’s childhood in Little Rhody.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rhode Island histories or stories you’d share?
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