This fine postcard evokes the rural world in which the wife of Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather, and later Lovecraft’s mother, came of age. A small public library, barely bigger than a chicken-coop, with a chicken-yard to one side. Possibly eggs were sold for a nominal amount, as an enticement to children to join the library. The location is North Scituate which is about six miles west of the very centre of Providence. Robie (known to Lovecraft as ‘Rhoby’) — Robie Alzada Place (1827–1896) — is the one who gives the place the connection to Lovecraft. S.T. Joshi, in I Am Providence, notes of her…

Of Whipple Phillips’s wife Robie [married Jan 1856] very little is known. Lovecraft states that she attended the Lapham Institute (cited by Lovecraft as “Lapham Seminary”) in North Scituate, Rhode Island … but does not supply the date of her attendance.

Lovecraft explained the somewhat convoluted family line, to Moe in a letter…

These [ancestors] marry’d, respectively, Stephen Place and Jeremiah Phillips — and in the next generation Sarah’s daughter Rhoby Place (nam’d for her aunt) marry’d Rhoby’s son Whipple Phillips …. these espoused cousins becoming my mother’s parents.

The Lovecraft family ‘Commonplace Book’ contained much information about Robie’s Place family and ancestors at nearby Foster, R.I. de Camp’s biography of Lovecraft, perhaps leaning on oral evidence that has not come down to us, has…

In 1855, he and his younger brother James fell in love with two local girls, Robie Alzada Place and her cousin Jane Place. Said Whipple to James: “You take Jane and the farm, while I take Robie and go to Providence to seek my fortune.

The newly married couple then lived a few miles further west, at Foster, in the homestead built there by her father Stephen Place and in which Robie had been born. (Lovecraft’s mother was also to be born at the Foster house). One might then suspect that the unmarried Robie had regularly travelled the few miles from Foster to North Scituate for her schooling. But a little research reveals a new data point. It was a boarding school with large boarding facilities for girls, and she may thus have been staying there in the week and then going home at weekends…

Her most likely attendance dates centre on circa 1845-50, with Lovecraft himself suggesting from “1845” in one letter. The school would have been known as the “Smithville Seminary”, here seen circa 1900 and with the frontage much unchanged. One assumes a school library matching that of the town itself, and perhaps with some connection between the the two libraries.

Did Lovecraft ever visit? He certainly passed through the general district at his leisure on his 21st birthday. Since he had treated himself to an epic all-day tram (‘car’) ride. This first sent him out of Providence and…

riding westward through the picturesque countryside of my maternal ancestors” (letter to F. Lee Baldwin, 1934)

On his return from New York his family history researches may have taken him there in pursuit of memories of Robie and her schooling, and especially her astronomical work. We know that in the mid 1920s, after returning from New York, he made several long and intensive ‘gleaning’ expeditions to Foster and Greene and roundabouts in search of family history.

However, he may not have found much. By 1923 the Institute had passed through several hands and the old Baptist records and yearbooks had undoubtedly been removed to Baptist archives. By 1923 it had become established as the Watchman Institute, though there were bad fires there in 1924 and 1926 and “both wings burned down” according to one history. One has to wonder if there was much there for Lovecraft and his aunt to glean circa 1926-28, other than a brief stroll past the smoke-stained frontage and around the charred grounds.

But Lovecraft might have learned something of the texture of the old life, in Foster and North Scituate, nearer to home. Because his near-lifelong Providence barber came from North Scituate, and one thus imagines that the barber’s memories of the place and its gleaming ‘school on the knoll’ came up from time to time in the barber’s chair…

Had my hair cut yesterday by the same old barber who removed my flowing curls in 1894. He’s a good old R.I. Yankee of the 7th generation of North Scituate settlers.” (May 1926)

There was also a fine new observatory in North Scituate, albeit 75 years later and private. Lovecraft’s “The September Sky” newspaper astronomy column (1st September 1914) concluded by noting the opening of the then-new observatory there…

Of particular interest to Rhode Islanders is the opening of Mr. F. E. Seagrave’s new private observatory in North Scituate, about two miles north of the village. The building stands on an eminence 342 feet above sea-level, free from the smoke and lights of the city, and commanding a magnificent view of the celestial vault.

The observatory had formerly been on 119 Benefit Street, Providence, but there appears to be no evidence of the young Lovecraft being invited to visit the new one on Peeptoad Road. But Robie might have done so, and before the building of the observatory there. Robie had been a Baptist, but that did not then preclude also being an astronomer with a substantial library and presumably a telescope to match. Lovecraft told Moe in a 1915 letter…

My maternal grandmother, who died when I was six, was a devoted lover of astronomy, having made that a speciality at Lapham Seminary, where she was educated; and though she never personally showed me the beauties of the skies, it is to her excellent but somewhat obsolete collection of astronomical books that I owe my affection for celestial science. Her copy of Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens is today the most prized volume in my library.

Robie’s Smithville Seminary was itself on a knoll, perhaps good enough for observing. But back in circa 1845-55 (before the building of the observatory), could Mr. Seagrave’s apparently excellent 342-feet high observing hill have also been one regularly visited by parties of local amateur astronomers — Robie among them?

“One of the principal features today is the Maria Mitchell Observatory in Vestal St. (formerly Goal Lane), which adjoins the birthplace of the celebrated female astronomer (professor at Vassar) whose name it bears. The observatory is modern — a memorial to Prof. Mitchell. I had a good chance to observe Saturn through its excellent 5” telescope.” (to J. Vernon Shea, 10th February 1935)

“I had an excellent view of Saturn” (to Arthur Harris, 1st September 1934)

He had once had a fever-vision of flying to Saturn…

though I often dream of things of the most bizarre and vivid sort … the only well-defined delirium I ever had was in 1903 … [I] mumbled things about flying to Mars and Saturn.

In summer 1934 the observatory’s observers (Margaret Harwood and John Heath) were noted for their work on discovering variable asteroids, and the observatory seemingly benefited from the general oversight of the Harvard College Observatory. The 1908 (“modern”, to Lovecraft’s thinking) elevation plans for the place show that the apparently twee external ‘garden house’ appearance actually hides hidden depths…

Pictures missing

Which may interest Mythos writers, as in “how far down does it go…”? Google StreetView shows the Observatory much as it was, though with side extensions. It appears to be open to interested visitors.

The resort town also has the Loines Observatory, which allows public viewing and is often confused with the Maria Mitchell Observatory, but the first dome there was not open until 1968…

“Since its establishment in 1968 and 1998, Loines Observatory’s two domes house multiple telescopes for research and public astronomical programs”.

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.

H.P. Lovecraft spent Christmas and New Year 1935/36 visiting New York City and, as he told Robert Bloch in a letter, his “high point” stop was the new Hayden Planetarium. This was a just-opened New York marvel, built and fitted out in double-quick time with the aid of the philanthropist Charles Hayden. It had opened on the 2nd October 1935. Those were the days when one could go from drawing-board to opening day in 18 months, even in New York City.

The above leaflet describes the institution as it was in the 1940s, and is just about readable. The top postcard shows a charcoal drawing by Walter Favreau.

The Planetarium had a huge 700+ seat circular projection chamber, and permanent/temporary exhibition galleries on the history of astronomy and the solar system. It was far more than a planetarium, being creatively masterminded throughout by the pioneering cosmic artist and multi-media designer Walter Favreau. As such it was far more than a quick 90-minute in-and-out popcorn show for Lovecraft. It had several giant meteorites on display, and was the sort of place a keen astronomer and science-fiction writer might spend a day and an evening. Lovecraft went twice, and probably lingered. His comment that it “seems to be crowded at all hours” might suggest that at least one of his visits was in the evening.

His fiction writing days were over by this point, having written “The Haunter of the Dark”, but the Hayden Planetarium went on to inspire many others of genius. As Lovecraft told Bloch, the institute was “the most impressive educational device I had ever encountered”. Over the subsequent years and decades it became a vital place for interesting new generations in outer space and the stars, and also provided work for many early space artists. By 1952 it had seen about five million visitors.

Here is Lovecraft in a letter to Galpin of January 1936, describing his two visits…

On two occasions — once with Sonny [Belknap Long] & once with Sonny & Wandrei — I visited the new Hayden Planetarium of the Am.[erican] Museum, & found it a highly impressive device. It consists of a round domed building of 2 storeys. On the lower floor is a circular hall whose ceiling is a gigantick orrery — shewing the planets revolving around the sun at their proper relative speeds. Above it is another circular hall whose roof is the great dome, & whose edge is made to represent the horizon of N.Y. as seen from Central Park.

In the centre of this upper hall is a curious projector which casts on the concave dome a perfect image of the sky — capable of duplicating the natural apparent motions of the celestial vault, & of depicting the heavens as seen at any hour, in any season, from any latitude, & at any period of history.

Other parts of the projector can cast suitably moveable images of the sun, moon, & planets, & diagrammatick arrows & circles for explanatory purposes. The effect is infinitely lifelike — as if one were outdoors beneath the sky. Lectures — different each month (I heard both Dec. & Jan. ones) — are given in connexion with this apparatus.

In the corridors on each floor are niches containing typical astronomical instruments of all ages — telescopes, transits, celestial globes, armillary spheres, &c. — & cases to display books, meteorites, & other miscellany. Astronomical pictures line the walls, &c; at the desk may be obtained useful pamphlets, books, planispheres, &c.

The institution holds classes in elementary astronomy, & sponsors clubs of amateur observers. Altogether, it is the most complete & active popular astronomical centre imaginable. It seems to be crowded at all hours — attracting a publick interest in astronomy which did not exist when I was young.

One of the backlit displays of the 1950s.

Doubtless Lovecraft would have thought of how much his grandmother Robie (Rhoby) would have admired such a place…

My maternal grandmother, who died when I was six, was a devoted lover of astronomy, having made that a specialty at Lapham Seminary, where she was educated.

As a boy he inherited her astronomy books and, it seems, some of her equipment.

Lovecraft does not mention the giant hallway paintings, indicating only that “Astronomical pictures line the walls”. One might imagine dull diagrams. But it seems that many were either quite visionary or were early imaginative ‘space art’ in the Chesley Bonestell manner, and by the noted dinosaur and prehistoric artist Charles R. Knight who was here branching out into star mythology. Here we get an idea of the scale of the visionary hallway art, which was apparently also boxed and backlit for added effect.

On the right, scientific director of the Hayden Planetarium, Dr. Clyde Fisher. On the left, probably the artist and designer Walter Favreau.

There were apparently others. Lovecraft might have especially relished a large-scale hallway painting made from this 1934 pre-production miniature by Walter Favreau of the ‘Destruction of New York’. The place’s lead designer and artist Favreau was especially interested in presenting cosmic catastrophe, and his planetarium sky-show apparently ended by illustrating five different ways the earth might one day perish. One ending featured a gigantic alien moon hurting toward the earth.

The idea that the sun would suddenly engulf our earth became a replacement for a previous doomsday scenario well-known in Lovecraft’s youth and young manhood. Here is H. G. Wells in 1931, remembering the way that this false scientific consensus be-numbed and hobbled the optimism of the late Victorians and early Edwardians, and indeed the world…

… the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the “inevitable” freezing up of the world — and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling [book] Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years. Given as much as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, and the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour of regret that one was born so soon.

This is from his 1931 preface to a new edition of his famous book The Time Machine (1895). Wells refers to the idea that the Sun only had a limited store of material to burn, and must inevitably cool as it would use this up before another million years had gone by — and with its depletion the Earth was also forever cooling and would relatively soon become inhospitable to life. Here is the Wells of 1894, noting the consensus of his day…

On the supposition, accepted by all scientific men, that the earth is undergoing a steady process of cooling …” (“Another Basis for Life”, Saturday Review, 22nd December 1894).

Possibly Lovecraft was influenced by this gloomy theory as late as early 1918, as he wrote to Kleiner then that… “In a few million years there will be no human race at all”.

Back home in Providence in the Autumn of 1936 the impoverished and increasingly ill Lovecraft was being misled in a different but no less calamitous way. He laboured at his desk not on new cosmic fiction, but on ‘Suggestions for a Reading Guide’. This being a long and involved general survey which was set to be the concluding chapter of Anne Tillery Renshaw’s Well Bred Speech — Lovecraft was effectively ghost-writing the book from her short chapter outlines for this textbook guide to English usage. He broke his health to get it finished, staying awake for 60 hours at a stretch and eating out of ancient tins unearthed from the back of his pantry. His ‘Suggestions’ chapter was discarded by Renshaw. But he slipped in one paragraph on the need for basic books on astronomy, mentioning the need to own a good star-atlas and planisphere…

The best contemporary star-atlas is Upton’s, but a quicker working knowledge of the constellations can be obtained by the use of a small revolving planisphere, such as is sold for a quarter at the new Hayden Planetarium in New York.

This one is from the Hayden in the 1950s, but they had looked much the same a decade or so earlier…

S.T. Joshi notes in I Am Providence…

Lovecraft bought two 25¢ planispheres [at the Hayden] and charitably gave them to [Belknap] Long and Donald Wandrei, so that they would make fewer mistakes in citing the constellations in their stories.

Finally here is the first scientific director of the Hayden Planetarium, Dr. Clyde Fisher. He was also the put-upon general manager for the first two years, but then a professional house manager was brought in and he was given the happier job of Curator of Astronomy. His portrait has since taken on a most Lovecraftian cast. Seemingly through natural decay in the archives, rather than the creeping invasion of cosmic outer entities, but you never know…

Further reading:

* “The Man Who Plays God”, a 1950 Mechanix Illustrated profile of the pioneering artist and designer Walter Favreau who masterminded the creative and presentational aspects of the Hayden Planetarium, including designing the sky-shows.

* More can also be found at the Hayden Planetarium website. It still exists, and welcomes donations in these difficult times. They might also welcome funding to locate and digitise their Sky: Magazine of Cosmic News, which began November 1936. It evidently featured a range of artists, not always purely astronomical. Here is a 1938 edition of Sky responding to the famous War of the Worlds broadcast…

* The current magazine of their parent Museum is Rotunda, which might welcome a good scholarly article on Walter Favreau. Favreau has evidently been utterly forgotten, even by the many assiduous historians of the space arts, space education and early multimedia. He appears to have begun his career as a toy-maker and tinkerer-inventor in New York City in the early 1910s, had a studio in the late 1920s at 20 East 41st Street making scale-models for architects, and was still being referred to as the creative director of the Planetarium in 1952 — when he was busy constructing a 32-foot scale-model of a von Braun moon rocket. One would expect to find him being at least mentioned in the substantial recent history of the form, Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria 1930-1970 (Rutgers University Press, 1987, 2005), whose author had a Doctoral Student Grant-in-Aid of Research for sustained work in the Hayden archives. Rather surprisingly this book has no mention of the USA’s leading planetarium artist of the period, though does find space for several sections on ‘planetariums and gender’.