The Editor of The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis, is currently writing a book on the history of walking in America. You may remember that my recent book on Lovecraft in New York had a lot to say about the nature of Lovecraft’s walking, including noting his occasional use of canes. Wayne Curtis has a preview of his book, an article which explains the culture of walking cane use as a mode of gentlemanly display…

“A century and a half ago, walking sticks and canes weren’t just associated with the aged, but with young dandies and others of dapper inclination.”

These included “system canes”, of special interest to writers now since they can serve a pivots for a plot in a story with a historical setting. These could conceal and deploy anything from…

“a picnic utensil set, opera glasses, an ear trumpet, a perfume bottle, a detachable baby rattle, a blow gun, a winemaker’s thermometer, a folding fan, a telescope, a flask with cork top, a pocket watch, a sewing kit, a compact and mirror, a full-length saw blade, a microscope, a pennywhistle, a set of watercolors and paintbrush, a whistle for hailing a cab, and gauges for measuring the height of a horse.”

On Lovecraft’s main cane, here is Kirk on the Kalem Klub establishing their Sunday “dandy walk” promenade, in which they strolled in their best suits up and down Clinton St…

“The occasion required the “wearing” of a cane, but the acquisition of this adjunct to our Sunday splendour proved no great problem. Lovecraft produced an heirloom [a walking cane] from Providence which was undeniably authentic, and at once chastely severe and unobtrusively classical.” (Letter from Kirk, in Lovecraft’s New York Circle, Hippocampus Press, 2006, p.225).

This cane was presumably Winfield’s “silver-headed walking stick” (L. Sprague de Camp), which Lovecraft had inherited, and which Lovecraft must have taken to New York. de Camp says that Lovecraft came to wear Winfield’s sartorial garb on special occasions. A dandy cane was certainly part of Lovecraft’s dream vision of himself as a young man…

“After carefully tying my stock, I donned my coat and hat, took a cane from a rack downstairs, and sallied forth upon the village street” (recalling a dream he had, in Selected Letters I, p.100).

In a letter to Frank Belnap Long in 1927 he wrote…

“be sure to depict me [in Long’s new novelette, presumably “The Space Eaters”] in my new Puritan frock coat. I think I shall adopt an umbrella also — as a constant companion…” (in Selected Letters II, p.172)

There may be more on Lovecraft’s ownership of walking sticks and umbrellas, and use of them on special occasions, in the collection Lovecraft Remembered, edited by Peter H. Cannon, but I don’t have access to that. It seems that fancy canes, at least until 1927, were generally used only by Lovecraft on special occasions. But one also wonders if he took a stout defensive cane or umbrella on some of his more insalubrious New York night-walks and his deeper rural rambles, if only to defend himself from dog attack. Rabid dogs were then a concern, albeit a minor one, over and above the fear of general dog-bite from aggressive farm and village dogs.