Newly coloured, a huge picture of The Museum of Natural History, Roger Williams Park, Providence. 1906, Lovecraft was then aged 16 and deeply investigating astronomy — so much so that the following year Prof. Upton of Brown personally introduced the young Lovecraft to Percival Lowell.
Only when record-pictures are this size and glass-plate clarity can one see certain details. The lizard-creature atop the building, for instance…
Or the wry humour in placing an “I Speak Your Weight” machine next to a short bench which looks about wide enough to accommodate one very fat person.
On the opposite side of the entrance-steps is what appears to be a huge lump of concrete, but I would guess was more likely a very fossil-rich accretion full of fossils… and thus designed to attract the sort of children interested in fossil-hunting. Another small but interesting detail is the British-English use of the wording “rubbish” on what today would be a ‘trash’ bin.
Lovecraft may have become overly familiar with the Museum’s exhibits by 1906, but it appears to have had local and visiting exhibitions and these could have been a continuing draw. He surely returned to it in the Autumn of 1916, when the famous astronomer Prof. Percival Lowell (he of the ‘Martian canals’ theory) exhibited there…
a remarkable collection of astronomical photographs … in the form of glass transparencies, exhibited in a darkened room, and illuminated from behind, so that they stand out with vivid clearness
There were 150 of these and they formed a “blockbuster” show, attracting over 1,300 visitors on the first day in Providence…
Currier of Brown University was at the museum all afternoon answering questions with regard to the 150 transparencies
I was uncertain of the 1916 date for this show, before, but Popular Astronomy for 1916 confirms it. The journal reprinted a newspaper report from Providence…
Lovecraft claimed lack of belief of Lowell’s ‘canal’ theories (“I never had, have not, & never will have the slightest belief in Lowell’s speculations” he wrote in 1916), though his surviving articles show more ambivalence. But he surely cannot have been sniffy enough about the theories to have missed this major local show of the Lowell Collection, in his favourite local park and running from circa 9th-23rd October 1916. Many of the pictures by Lowell and his highly skilled assistants were not again equalled in topographical detail until the 1960s. Also, Lovecraft would have been aware that by 1915 Lowell had theorized and had begun the search for “Planet X” (Pluto)…
in a manner not wholly dissimilar to that advised by Lovecraft himself in his letter to the Scientific American of July 1906. (S.T. Joshi, Primal Sources)
Rather amazingly the Lowell Collection of planetary photographs does not seem to have been digitized for modern public use. Perhaps there is a worry that they might still be mis-used re: the ‘Martian canals’? Nor are there even any pictures of what the Lowell exhibition looked like to the visitor of 1916.
Lowell died unexpectedly in November 1916, and Lovecraft penned a short poetic ‘elegy’ so turgid that it could even be intended to be read as some sort of sardonic snub in a coded 18th century manner. It ends by imagining Lowell ascending to the heavens and becoming a star, adding… “a new brilliance to the Southern Cross!” Could this be Lovecraft’s snippy allusion to the criss-cross of Lowell’s ‘canals’ theory, and also that Lowell had things ‘upside down’? Because the simple four-star Southern Cross is only visible ‘down under’ in places such as Australia. Apparently all Australians know that an observer can draw ‘imaginary lines’ out from the cross, to find the direction south at night.
