In his boyhood article “Can the Moon Be Reached by Man” (October 1906) H.P. Lovecraft opens with the observation that…

In 1649 a Frenchman named Jean Baudoin published a book entitled: A Trip from the Earth to the Moon.

The footnotes in Collected Essays reveals that this was actually a translation of a book by the Englishman Francis Godwin (1562-1633). Though it does not seem likely the boy Lovecraft had yet read either Godwin or Baudoin, since I have found that he was likely borrowing his opening fact from Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. In Chapter II of this novel Verne has a French speaker addresses the Gun Club in Baltimore, reminding them of various great French ‘firsts’ in the field…

Permit me,” he continued, “to recount to you briefly how certain ardent spirits, starting on imaginary journeys, have penetrated the secrets of our satellite. In the seventeenth century a certain David Fabricius boasted of having seen with his own eyes the inhabitants of the moon. In 1649 a Frenchman, one Jean Baudoin, published a “Journey performed from the Earth to the Moon. At the same period Cyrano de Bergerac published that celebrated ‘Journeys in the Moon’ which met with such success in France.”.

We know that Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon was in Lovecraft’s library in book form. But the young Lovecraft was presumably unaware, in 1906, that Verne had conveniently omitted to inform readers that the work was a translation from the Englishman Francis Godwin (1562-1633, possibly the great uncle of the writer Jonathan Swift). Nor is the reader told that Bergerac, also lauded by Verne’s orator, had actually been parodying the English Godwin. Had Lovecraft known of the English author or the Swift connection in 1906, then he would surely have been mentioned these facts. In his Anglophile fervour he might even have upbraided Verne for his cheek. Not that it would have mattered much to most readers of the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, of course.

Godwin had been the Bishop of Hereford at the time he wrote the book circa the 1620s, the tale of a fantastical voyage to the Moon titled The Man in the Moone: or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither. Godwin’s tale was published posthumously in 1638, and tells off a voyage accomplished by the man being carried to the Moon by a flock of powerful one-footed swans (not geese, as one modern encyclopaedia wrongly has it). One might think that his sounds somewhat similar to the dream-leap to the Moon that Carter experiences in Lovecraft’s “Dream Quest”, …

Verily, it is to the moon’s dark side that they go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows […] upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with their friend packed securely in their midst

This method of flight is also broadly similar to Godwin, in its distributive aspect. Godwin has his hero invent a mechanical device that evenly distributes his weight among the especially powerful swans.

Thus it seems worth asking if Lovecraft happened upon Francis Godwin during his intensive New York research for Supernatural Literature? Or perhaps in his conversations with the members of his New York circle who we know where collecting and reading early science-fiction? If so, the discovery would be conveniently timed, re: the writing of “Dream Quest”. But the publication dates do not fit. The first modern edition of Godwin’s Moone was in 1937, just before Lovecraft’s death. He may have known of it, as it was not only known among cloistered academics but also covered by popular articles such as the one in Flying Magazine (dated February 1937, and likely appearing on the newstands earlier). There had also been a long review-article in 1931 (“Bishop Godwin’s Man in the Moone“, Review of English Studies), which may well have become known to his circle — but again this was far too late to have influenced “Dream Quest” and its visit to the Moon.

However, my feeling is that he would have been encountered references earlier via his study of his favourite poet Samuel Butler. For instance, the author of the Poetical Works of Samuel Butler footnotes an allusion in Hudibras as relating to… “Bishop Godwin … getting to the Moon upon ganzas or wild swans”. Lovecraft knew Samuel Butler well and had “ploughed through” even the toughest of his poems, and his Hudibras was a special favourite. Lovecraft owned the extensively footnoted 1864 edition of this large and allusive work. The 1864 edition’s annotator does not actually name “swans” in this case, but he refers to the Bishop and his ganzas (a fictional super-powerful breed of swan) on page 286…

There is also the more general theory, lightly held my many learned men until the 17th century, that many types of birds migrated to the Moon in winter. Again, this was the sort of early proto-scientific theory that Lovecraft would have been aware of. As for finding cats on the Moon, as in Dream-quest, the 12 year old Lovecraft already delighted in the idea of other nearby worlds populated by his beloved cats, and so this seems to have been his original idea, part whimsy and part science — the idea of creatures on Venus or Mars was then still a topic on which reputable scientists could speculate in the press.