This week, another look at an aspect of the Providence dockside. H.P. Lovecraft wrote…

All my spare cash goes into trips to ancient towns like Newport” … In Rhode Island there is only one city really American, and that is Newport”.

How did he get there? He travelled by sea, and this was his departure point…

The “Newport boat” landing and departure point, Providence.

This picture shows a setting briefly evoked in one of the world’s most famous horror stories…

“Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat [while he was walking up] a short cut from the waterfront…” (“The Call of Cthulhu”)

Lovecraft himself often “took a boat trip to Newport” from Providence, at the very time he was writing “Cthulhu”. The voyage would have been a day-trip, and thus he would have been at the Providence dockside early. For instance he was writing a letter before dawn in August 1926, and in it he wrote…

Well — it’ll be dawn soon, so that I can tell whether or not I’m going to Newport.

As the Great Depression deepened, he was sometimes able to afford more Newport trips each summer. At one point, what was usually 50 cents in high season became just 15 cents. In August 1932 he remarked on the voyage itself and its duration…

For the past three days I have been taking advantage of the incredibly low steamboat rates (15 cents round trip), and making diurnal [daily] voyages to ancient Newport. It is an admirable relaxation — a two-hour sail past green shores…

Though he regretted that he could not write his letters on the steamship, because…

the vibration will play the devil with my penmanship.

The throbbing steamship that Lovecraft endured was the Sagamore, a “remodelled” Bristol liner that now sometimes served as a local freight and cattle-boat, rather than the more salubrious liner which also plied the same route.

This would be the dawn sight of the Newport dockside, as Lovecraft approached from the sea…

And here is the same dockside seen in the distance, beyond some rather more picturesque fishing jetties…

After bringing in the Providence crowd, the steamship would then cast off for Block Island, returning later to pick up at Newport and return to Providence.

Once ashore in Newport, Lovecraft “wander’d through the living past” of the old town or “hiked into the Bishop Berkeley [British philosopher] country … some four miles beyond Newport beach on the road to Middletown”, through green fields of “sportive lambkins”. Often he sat writing for hours on “the great oceanward cliffs”, and once surveyed “the assembled U.S. Navy” in the bay — the place being also “quite a military town”.

Sometimes he ventured down into the holds of an ancient and venerable sailing ship that had been docked for the benefit of the Navy cadets.

Also, he haunted the oldest graveyards in his… “vain search in Newport for the grave of Michael, the elder James’s father [in his family-tree], who died in 1686”.

A lane in Newport, and Trinity church.

Lovecraft managed to see the town before the circa Fall/Winter 1927 “civic improvements” were made, which in a letter he called “detestable” because they would imperil…

the quaint narrowness of the main street, and the incomparable colour & atmosphere of the ancient wharves

He would also have known the Old Stone Tower, which appears to have had a small park around it where he might have sat and read.