Boston, the largest city and capital of Massachusetts, and the cultural and financial center of New England, plays a prominent role in H. P. Lovecraft's fiction.
The city was founded in 1630 by Puritans who named it for their hometown in England. It played a central part in the American Revolution, the scene of key events like the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill, and home to notable figures like Paul Revere and John and Samuel Adams.
Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott made Boston a cultural hub in the 19th century.[1]
Lovecraft's Visits[]
Lovecraft made repeated visits to Boston, the nearest large city to Providence. In 1919, he saw Lord Dunsany speak at Boston's Copley Plaza hotel, an event that had a major impact on Lovecraft's writing.[2] His attendance at the 1921 National Amateur Press Association convention in Boston was similarly impactful, as it was there that he met his future wife, Sonia Greene.[3]
Lovecraft went to Boston with Donald Wandrei in 1927, with Samuel Loveman in 1929, and with W. Paul Cook in 1931, among other visits.[4]
In Lovecraft's Fiction[]
Richard Upton Pickman[]
In "Pickman's Model", the narrator Thurber declares, "Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman." “The place for an artist to live is the North End," Pickman insists:
Don’t you realise that places like that weren’t merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren’t afraid to live and feel and die.... I can shew you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder.... Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other’s houses, and the burying-ground, and the sea?...
Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I’ll wager that in eight I can shew you something queer in the cellar. There’s hardly a month that you don’t read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down—you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year.There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers....
What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess I’ll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren’t suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them.... [T]hese ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace....
Pickman has a more public studio on Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay, which he dismisses as
a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn’t Boston—it isn’t anything yet, because it’s had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they’re the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove.
The story depicts Boston locations like Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, Mount Auburn Cemetery and Beacon Hill are the habitations of ghouls. It suggests that a "subway accident" at Boston's Boylston Street station was really a ghoul attack.
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Pickman is described as "a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard" in Boston. When he's found in the Dreamlands, Pickman is sitting "on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston."
Randolph Carter[]
Lovecraft's recurring character Randolph Carter lives on Boston's Beacon Hill. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, Nyarlathotep reminds him of
the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily.
After returning in an transformed state from his trip "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", Carter takes a room "in the decaying West End, where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously" under the name of Swami Chandraputra.
Other Bostonian Characters[]
Herbert West, the central character of "Herbert West--Reanimator", is described in the story as "the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West." His final quarters, where he meets his gruesome end, are in "a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston."
The title character of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward conducts antiquarian research in Boston, at "the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline". Ward leaves on his trip to Europe from Boston, departing "from the White Star pier in Charlestown". Later he is examined by an eminent alienist from Boston, Dr. Lyman.
The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, featured in "Out of the Aeons", is located in Boston, on Mt. Vernon Street in the "exclusive Beacon Hill district". "It is not likely that anyone in Boston—or any alert reader elsewhere—will ever forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum," narrator Richard H. Johnson notes. The story gives Boston a sensationalistic newspaper, the Boston Pillar.
Other mentions of Boston in Lovecraft's fiction include:
- Joel Manton, Carter's friend from "The Unnamable", is "born and bred in Boston".
- Boston is the home of Francis Wayland Thurston, the narrator of "The Call of Cthulhu".
- The surveyor for the Arkham reservoir in "The Colour Out of Space" is based in Boston.
References[]
- ↑ American Writers Museum, "Boston: The Birthplace of American Literature".
- ↑ The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, "Lovecraft and Dunsany", by R. Alain Everts.
- ↑ En la Noche de los Tiempost, "About Sonia Greene".
- ↑ An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Travels, Lovecraft's", by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Hippocampus Press, 2004).