The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

  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 o
f 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.

  44 The Turba Philosophorum (“Assembly of Philosophers”) is an alchemical work by Guglielmo Grataroli (1516-1568), first published in 1613. It was translated into English by A. E. Waite in 1914.

  45 Geber (fl. fourteenth century) is the otherwise unknown author of several alchemical works influential in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is no such work among his four surviving books called Liber Investigationis; HPL probably refers to De Investigationis Perfecti Magisterii (“On the Investigation of the Perfect Magistery”), one of the books contained in De Alchimia Libri Tres (1531).

  46 Artephius (d. 1119?) is the reputed author of an alchemical work called Clavis Majoris Sapientiae (“The Key of Greater Wisdom”), published in 1609.

  47 The Zohar (c. 1285) is a collection of Jewish occult literature embodying the principles of kabbalism. The Kabbala is a mystical belief system emerging in the twelfth century and emphasizing the possibility of an individual’s reunification with God.

  48 Albertus Magnus (1200?-1280), Dominican bishop and teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, pioneered the study of the natural sciences and also dabbled in alchemy, thereby gaining a posthumous reputation among occultists. Petrus Jammy prepared the first edition of his collected works (Opera, 1651 [21 volumes]).

  49 Ramon Llull (1232/33-1315/16; anglicized as Raymond Lully) was a Catalan mystic and Neoplatonist. His Ars magna (written 1305-8), first published in 1501, is actually a work of Christian apologetics. Lazarus Zetzner published it as part of Llull’s Opera (1598).

  50 Roger Bacon (1220?-1292?), British philosopher, scientist, and Franciscan friar, was one of the great minds of the Middle Ages and a proponent of experimental science. The major work on alchemy attributed to Bacon (although probably not by him) is generally known as Speculum Alchemiae (1541), translated into English as The Mirror of Alchimy (1593). The existence of a Thesaurus Chemicus has not been verified.

  51 Robert Fludd (1574-1637) was a British physician, mystic, and occultist. The Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae (“Key to Philosophy and Alchemy”) was first published in 1633.

  52 Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was a German alchemist and magician and author of De Lapide Philosophorum (“On the Philosophers’ Stone”), first published in 1619.

  53 An actual volume: Jaffur Shureef [i.e., Ja’far Sharif], Qanoon-e-Islam; or, The Customs of the Moosulmans of India, trans. G. A. Herklots (London: Parbury, Allen & Co., 1832). The volume could obviously not have been in Curwen’s possession in 1746. HPL appears to have found a reference to the volume in the article on “Magic” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article did not supply a date for Herklots’s edition.

  54 See n. 37 to “The Dunwich Horror.”

  55 HPL here alludes to the so-called triangular trade, in which rum and other trade goods were sent from New England to Africa for slaves, who were taken to the West Indies in exchange for sugar, molasses, and other goods, which were then brought back to New England and manufactured into rum, whereupon the process began anew. Rhode Island shipping magnates were particularly adept at this business in the eighteenth century.

  56 Three of the chief families in the shipping business in eighteenth-century Providence. “. . . there can be no doubt that somewhere Nathaniel Brown built vessels for Providence traders, and notably for the two Crawfords, Major William and Captain John. . . . Foremost in the ranks of those who exchanged the profession of farmer and land-trader for that of sailor and ship-owner, we find representatives of the Tillinghast, Power, and Brown families” (Kimball 228-29).

  57 HPL cites four leading ports in the West Indies in the eighteenth century: Martinique (an island controlled by the French up to 1762, when it was captured by the British); St. Eustatius (an island controlled by the Dutch); Havana (the chief city of Cuba, at this time controlled by the Spanish); and Port Royal (a port on the south coast of Jamaica, controlled by the British).

  58 The “Royal” (British) troops were on their way to New France (Canada) because of the Seven Years War (or French and Indian War) of 1756-63, in which the British and their colonies in America fought the French and their colonies.

  59 All these shopkeepers are mentioned in Kimball: James Green (326), Joseph and William Russell (326), Clark and Nightingale (321).

  60 The old Colony House burned down in 1758 and the new one overlooking North Main Street was built in 1761 (Kimball 211-12). It still stands.

  61 George Whitefield (1714-1770) was a British religious leader who came to America in 1739 and initiated the “Great Awakening,” a revival of evangelical and emotional religious sentiment that swept the colonies in the 1740s. The incident related here by HPL is taken directly out of Kimball: Josiah Cotton had become pastor of the Congregational church in Providence in 1728; in 1742, Cotton’s parish “was shaken to its foundations by this newly awakened zeal” from Whitefield, and in “the spring of 1743, the discontented faction formally withdrew from the church, and, in the language of the record, ‘they set up a separate meeting, where they attended to the exhortations of a lay brother’ ” named Joseph Snow, Jr. (Kimball 193-96).

  62 When HPL visited this area in southern Rhode Island in July 1933 he remarked: “This was the historic ‘South County’ or ‘Narragansett Country’ west of the bay, where before the Revolution there existed a system of large plantations & black slaves comparable to that of the South” (HPL to R. H. Barlow, July 13, 1933; ms., JHL).

  63 Dutee Tillinghast and his daughter Eliza are imaginary, although of course the Tillinghast family is not (see n. 56).

  64 Stephen Jackson ran the “town school house” on the Town Street from 1754 until at least 1763. HPL’s wording here is taken almost verbatim from Welcome Arnold Greene, The Providence Plantations for Two Hundred and Fifty Years (Providence: J. A. & R. A. Reid, 1886), pp. 53-54. He had the book in his library.

  65 The name Weeden is found sporadically in Providence history in the eighteenth century, as in Joseph Weeden, a first lieutenant during the battles with the French in the 1740s, and John Weeden, a butcher in 1786. HPL’s original name for this character was Ezra Bowen.

  66 Samuel Winsor, Sr., was pastor of the First Baptist Church from 1733 to 1758; his son, Samuel Winsor, Jr., was pastor from 1759 to 1771.

  67 This is an adaptation of an actual marriage notice from the Providence Gazette of May 26, 1786, as quoted by Kimball (317-18): “Thursday last was married at Cranston . . . William Goddard, Esquire, o
f Balti more, Printer, to Miss Abigail Angell, eldest daughter of the late Brigadier-General Angell; a Lady of great Merit, her mental Acquirements, joined to a most amiable Disposition, being highly honourable to the Sex, and are pleasing Presages of connubial Felicity.”

  68 Durfee and Arnold are both distinguished families of long standing in Providence. HPL does not appear to have had any specific individuals in mind when envisioning this imaginary correspondence.

  69 King’s Church is now St. John’s Episcopal Church (see n. 20), originally founded by Gabriel Bernon in 1723. John Graves was pastor of King’s Church from 1754 until at least 1782, although his loyalist sympathies prevented his officiating at the church from 1776 onward. He did not leave Rhode Island, dying in Providence in 1785.

  70 HPL’s chronology is a little suspect here. The little-known Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander (1724?-1772) came to America only in 1768. He spent much time in Newport, where he observed the pictorial talent of the teenage Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). He tutored Stuart and took him to England in 1770, dying shortly thereafter.

  71 Stephen Hopkins (1707-1785) was involved in Rhode Island politics since 1735. He was governor of Rhode Island in 1755-57, 1758-62, 1763-65, and 1767-68, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Joseph Brown (1733-1785) was a Rhode Island engineer and architect (he designed the First Baptist Meeting-House in 1775) and a member of the Brown family, noted for its prowess in shipping (see n. 56). Benjamin West (1730-1813) was an almanac maker and astronomer, and author of a pamphlet (later referred to by HPL—see p. 115), An Account of the Observation of Venus upon the Sun the Third Day of June 1769 (1769). He is not to be confused with the painter Benjamin West (1738-1820).