This week on ‘Picture Postals’, Lovecraft’s Hope Street high school, in an (admittedly rather mundane) view I’m fairly sure I’d not seen before…

And his Grandpa Whipple’s school, the East Greenwich Academy, in another more pleasing card…

This gave Lovecraft a very significant element of his own schooling, via a book from his grandfather’s time…

I had always had an ear for rhythm, and had very early got hold of an old book on “Composition, Rhetorick, and Poetic Numbers” […] used by my great-great grandfather at the East Greenwich Academy about 1805.

[As a young boy] for my guidance in correct composition I chose a deliciously quaint and compendious volume which my great-grandfather had used at school, and which I still treasure sacredly minus its covers:

THE READER:

Containing the Art of Delivery — Articulation, Accent, Pronunciation, Emphasis, Pauses, Key or Pitch of the Voice, and Tones; Selection of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Prose; Poetick Numbers, Structure of English Verse, Feet and Pauses, Measure and Movement, Melody, Harmony, and Expression, Rules for Reading Verse, Selections of Lessons in the Various Kinds of Verse.

By Abner Alden, A. M.

This was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence. It was in the “long S”, and reflected in all its completeness the Georgian rhetorical tradition of Addison, Pope, and Johnson, which had survived unimpaired in America even after the Romantic Movement had begun to modify it in England. This, I felt by instinct, was the key to the speech and manners and mental world of that old periwigged, knee-breeched Providence whose ancient lanes still climbed the hill …

The edition is online at Archive.org.