H.P. Lovecraft frequently bicycled, and did so from 1900 to 1908. In 1908 he was severely ill, and thereafter he probably only cycled sporadically until 1913 when he gave it up entirely.
Below is a basic preliminary timeline for his bicycling. We shall probably learn more of such things when the huge volume of ‘the aunts’ letters is released.
I haven’t been able to find out what brand(s) of bicycle he had. He noted such things for his typewriter and telescopes and suchlike gear, but not his bicycles.
1900: “Good old 1900 — will I ever forget it? My mother gave me my first bicycle on Aug. 20 of that memorable year — my tenth birthday.” One assumes it was a smaller junior model, with a frame suited to middle childhood.
1900-1902: At first hesitant with it, and unable to dismount without assistance and horse-block, he soon began what he termed… “a persistent though perforce short-distanced cycling which made me familiar with all the picturesque and fancy-exciting phases of the New England village and rural landscape.” With a junior model of bicycle his daily range was probably more limited than otherwise.
1902: “… before I was 12 years old … my foot and bicycle rambles in quest of ancient houses and archaic streets and centuried villages” He was a “veritable bicycle centaur”, a remark which probably most evokes the late summer of 1900 near home and then the summers of 1901-1904 further afield.
Perrins Railroad crossing and halt, over on the east shore of the Seekonk in Providence, which was near to home and was likely the sort of road along which the young Lovecraft ventured on initial bicycle forays.
1902: His cycling was not all freewheeling along well-paved level roads, then fairly free of motor traffic and thus part of the ‘golden age’ of cycling. On a much later car journey he found the car… “jogging over the indescribable washouts & hummocks that used to force us to dismount in the old cycling days.”
1903: But there were also many urban jaunts, though necessarily only in clement weather. Of the incredibly mild Halcyon weather of Christmas 1903 he remembered… “1903, when I wore a summer weight coat (and short trousers!) as I rode my bicycle from home over to see my aunt” in another part of Providence.
1904: “the warm, shallow, reed-grown Barrington River down the east shore of the bay. I used to go there on my bicycle & look speculatively at it. That summer [1904] I was always on my bicycle – wishing to be away from home as much as possible, since my [new] abode reminded me of the home I had lost.” He briefly contemplated throwing himself into the river, and ‘ending it all’, but he was saved by his intellectual curiosity about the world. He also takes solo rowing-boat trips on the Seekonk around this time, when he might otherwise have been cycling.
1904: “The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle.” The “Ladd Observatory tops a considerable eminence about a mile from the house.” He wheeled the bicycle up, and rode it down on the short trip home. He had begun to use Ladd from Autumn/Fall 1904, and likely first used it heavily in the good observing conditions of winter 1904/05. Possibly the birthday bicycle of 1900 was now too small for him, and thus would have been an embarrassment to ride to school — but such a bike could still have served a nimble lad for a short and brisk freewheeling home down the hill.
1905: One gets the feeling that by 15 he was starting to move on to other activities than simple solo leisure cycling for exploration of the district. He had anyway probably visited all the suitable antiquarian places within easy reach, during his last three summers. He may perhaps have cycled to high school for his intermittent attendance there, but I know of no evidence for that. We might assume that he got a larger bicycle around this point, more suited to his adolescent years and perhaps school, but given the family’s finances it was probably a rather mundane model. He much later refers to the bicycle of this point in time as one made by Corp Bros., and states it was kept in the cellar of his home at 598.
Outside any possible school journeys, during the summers from 1905-07 there is much evidence that he was out and about with his friends. Almost certainly on their bicycles, as this culminated in long trips with the Munroe brothers to help rebuild an old clubhouse structure out near Rehoboth. The distance from the East Side to Rehoboth is about eight miles there and the same back, implying a robust and adult-sized bicycle. Sonia’s late 1940s memoir has it that her husband told her he had broken his nose while cycling with friends, about age 15 or 16 (1905 or thereabouts).
1906: Due to bad handlebars he has “a bad accident” on Irving Hill in September, and ruins a new suit of clothes.
1908: Although we know from Lovecraft himself that 1913 is the terminal date for his cycling, the activity probably became very sporadic following his breakdown of 1908. While he recalled in a letter that… “My greatest exercise was bicycle-riding, which I pursued from 1900 to 1913”, it was likely only sporadic after 1908 due to his poor health during what he called… “the semi-invalidism of my 1908-1920 period”.
1908 on: He often appears to have been essentially nocturnal during the early years of this “semi-invalidism” period, partly due to his observing of the night-sky via his own telescope and his work on the Ladd Observatory telescope. There were acetylene lamps for bicycles, and we know he had added an oil lamp on his first bicycle by circa 1906 if not 1905. For Morton, in one letter he recalled an “acetylene bicycle lamps” in a litany of memories from his childhood. He did the same with Moe. In his parody poem “Waste Paper” he has… “I used to ride my bicycle in the night / With a dandy acetylene lantern that cost $3.00”. But cycling at night probably wasn’t much fun in the period before abundant bright street-lighting and good tarmac/asphalt, even with the quality acetylene lamp, and it appears his eyesight was such that he now had to wear glasses. One then suspects that the acetylene lamp was mainly of use for the short bicycle journeys on known journeys — such as back from the Ladd Observatory in the winter, and that in the cold clear months which offered the best observing conditions for the night sky.
1909: Rhode Island begins the mass laying good tarmac roads, making for excellent bicycle riding.
1910: A near-killer bout of the measles in late 1909 / early 1910 (the exact dates seem to be uncertain) left him very weak, and the long convalescence probably precluded cycling that summer.
1911: Judging by one letter about a long trolley trip in the summer of 1911 (a ‘birthday treat’ to himself, in which he rode the trolleys all day and alone), he evidently felt himself too ill to cycle even in high summer.
1913: According to an un-referenced assertion in de Camp’s biography, Lovecraft had another bad prang on the bicycle in summer 1913. He came off the machine and damaged his nose, and thereafter he gave up cycling completely. Sonia places this incident in 1905-06, some seven years earlier, probably confusing it with the 1906 prang. Elsewhere Lovecraft confirms the 1913 terminal date for his cycling in a letter, but not the prang or nose problem. We’re not told by de Camp if this was a secondary prang due to his bringing out and ‘dusting down’ a long-unused machine with failing brakes, or if it occurred in the ongoing course of regular cycling. I can’t find Joshi noting this apparent event in I Am Providence, which otherwise has many things to say about Lovecraft’s “hideous” face and his opinion of it. Was the incident some local hearsay that de Camp had picked up? I do seem to remember Lovecraft talking somewhere in a letter about some damage to his nose, and how it thereafter veered a little — but despite much searching I can’t re-find that item.
After: He seems to have given up the Ladd Observatory work circa September 1918, due to deteriorating eyesight and his lack of advanced mathematics. He presumably walked there and back in 1913-18, after he had given up his bicycle. I expect that the Christmas holidays, when the students and some staff were away, probably offered him the year’s prime opportunity to get time on the big telescope under a good clear sky. After summer 1913 his primary mode of conveyance was walking, the public trolley cars (trams), trains, buses, and occasional lifts in cars driven by others. He also appears to have hitch-hiked (‘thumbed a lift’) on his more remote rural backroads expeditions.
“The Picture in the House” (December 1920): The narrator is bicycling in the Miskatonic Valley, and this must evoke Lovecraft’s own bicycling. The text hints that family history was the reason for such fledgling antiquarian travels…
I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season.
For an adult to cycle in Providence wasn’t the “done thing” back then. This was very different to the situation in Great Britain during the Edwardian period, where there was a sustained cycling mania among all ages and classes once good brakes on modern ‘safety’ bicycles were available. Nor did Lovecraft avail himself of bicycles to get himself along long sea-front promenades on his travels. The trolleys (trams) were undoubtedly a more convenient, if rather more noisy and odoriferous, way of getting about. Lovecraft did however very briefly return to cycling during a late summer visit to the resort of Nantucket in the mid 1930s. As S.T. Joshi explains in I Am Providence…
“for the first time since boyhood he mounted a bicycle to cover the districts outside the actual town of Nantucket. “It was highly exhilarating after all these years — the whole thing brought back my youth so vividly that I felt as if I ought to hurry home for the opening of Hope St. High School!” Lovecraft ruefully regretted the social convention that frowned upon adults riding bicycles in respectable cities like Providence.
A strange man dons ‘The Flower-Planter of Shame’ at the entrance to the John Hay Library, Providence…
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