This week’s ‘picture postal’ from Lovecraft seems appropriate for the season. The season when the first leaves first begin to fall, crisping and chattering along the walkways in the wind.

At the ‘town’ end of Angell Street, Providence.

I hadn’t before realised that in winter or early spring the leaves would be off the trees when the boy Lovecraft arrived at the town end of his long and beloved Angell Street. The lack of leaves would reveal the steeple of the First Baptist Church through the trees, as seen here. The bright white church would serve as an elegant visual herald of the beginning of the busy centre of his beloved Providence.

Thus the church was not cherished by Lovecraft simply as a nice piece of architecture (“the finest Georgian steeple in America” etc), but would have been intimately connected with his childhood sense of liminality. It stood on and marked the border between his ‘home street’ on the hill and ‘the home city’ in the busy centre below.

My thanks to the Providence Public Library for the scan. Here some spotting and side-wear has been lightly and partly repaired, and the picture colourised.

Lovecraft as a small boy had also attended the Sunday School, presumably held in a room in the church ‘meeting house’ itself…

I was placed in the ‘infant class’ at the Sunday school of the venerable First Baptist Church, an ecclesiastical landmark dating from 1775 [and “my mother’s hereditary church”]; and there resigned all vestiges of Christian belief. The absurdity of the myths I was called upon to accept, and the sombre greyness of the whole faith […] caused me to become so pestiferous a questioner that I was permitted to discontinue attendance.

It thus had a further significance for him, as the place where he had rejected Christianity.