In this week’s ‘Picture Postal’ post, Marblehead. In Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book of story-ideas, we read…

No. 81   Marblehead — dream — burying hill — evening — unreality

It was a story never to be written, though perhaps parts of “The Festival” and the “The Strange High House in the Mist” hint at what it might have been like. Are there then pictures of Marblehead’s ‘burying hill’, which inspired the story-idea? Indeed there are.

Here we can just about see an indication of the wealth of macabre carvings to be found on the stones. We also see the ground in relation to distant buildings further around the coastline.

However, in the above picture we see summer. Lovecraft would have first seen the burying ground in the Christmas-time snow, and toward dusk…

I came to Marblehead in the twilight, & gazed long upon its hoary magick. I threaded the tortuous, precipitous streets, some of which an horse can scarce climb, & in which two waggons cannot pass. I talked with old men & revell’d in old scenes, & climb’d pantingly over the crusted cliffs of snow to the windswept height where cold winds blew over desolate roofs & evil birds hovered…” — H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner, 11th January 1923.

Yes, Lovecraft was tromping through snow. Evidently at that time, if wrapped up warm and keeping moving, he was not so averse to cold weather. It turns out there are several pictures of the summit in the snow, recorded by Samuel Chamberlain. This photographer seems to have been here c. 1928 onwards, so perhaps the pictures date from a time when Lovecraft was alive and visiting. Here I’ve toned and burned the plain archival scans of the negatives, as the photographer would have done at the time on prints for public presentation…

Compare this with the postcard above, and it is the same view. The same pair of distinctive headstones and fenced plot are seen.

… atop all was the peak; Old Burying Hill, where the dark headstones clawed up thro’ the virgin snow like the decay’d fingernails of some gigantick corpse.” (Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner)

From the round dome of rock above the burying ground, Lovecraft also looked across to the old town. To see his fabled view of Marblehead with its many-lighted windows.

The view across to Marblehead.

Immemorial pinnacle of fabulous antiquity! As evening came I look’d down at the quiet village where the lights came out one by one; at the calm contemplative chimney-pots & antique gables silhouetted against the west; at the glimmering small-paned windows … Shades of the past! How compleatly, O Mater Novanglia, am I moulded of thy venerable flesh & as one with thy century’d soul!

He dates and times the experience very precisely…

… huddled and archaick roofs under the snow in the delirious sunset glory of four p.m., Dec. 17, 1922!!! I did not know until an hour before that I should ever behold such a place as Marblehead, and I did not know until that moment itself the full extent of the wonder I was to behold. I account that instant — about 4:05 to 4:10 p.m., Dec. 17, 1922 — the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence.

He visited many times thereafter, and in better weather. Here is another from Samuel Chamberlain, looking up at the low rock-dome of the hilltop in the early springtime. With the burial ground running narrowly just below, along a short and turfy terrace.

From the summit, evidently one could also have a view over the ocean below.

On the rocky dome just above the Burying Ground, looking out to sea.

Although a 1909 picture-map shows the Ground is located relatively inland, rather than dropping down to shoreline rocks…

Despite the deathly location from which he took his view, in the waterfronts and lanes of the old town of Marblehead itself Lovecraft felt that he…

“had sojourned for a time in the past itself — not the past of books, but the living, breathing streets. Since then I have dreamt of nothing but Marblehead … old streets and gables and chimney-pots, and the endless maze of fanlighted Colonial doorways. … ancient houses set at all possible angles on moss-grown rock foundations and weird terraces …” (Selected Letters I).

Pictures from the Samuel Chamberlain Photograph Negatives Collection, 1928-1971, held at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.