This week, more on the transport theme. Letters to Family briefly reveals that, as a young boy, Lovecraft and his grandfather used to drive out in a horse and carriage/gig named “Tom”. Evidently they would enjoy getting purposely lost in the country east of Providence…
… we wandered interestingly in the young dusk, and became picturesquely lost — as when Grandpa and I used to get lost driving “Tom” in East Providence — on some unknown height…
The implication here is that, being lost, he and Grandpa would then need to find elevated viewing points to drive up to or halt by, presumably partly to-reorient themselves but also to enjoy unexpected views.
(The above quote is not indexed: in the Index to Letters to Family add “p. 145” to Phillips, Whipple and to Lovecraft, H.P. … and Whipple Phillips).
Not Lovecraft and his grandfather, but evocative of riding “Tom” into a field to enjoy a sunset vista.
These were the days before any substantial automobile ownership, and it would have been very safe and quiet on the roads and lanes. Most likely the field and track gates were only latched, not padlocked as they might be now. The only danger and noise was likely from the occasional fierce farm-dog, but dog training was far better in those days and they were also trained not to spook horses.
What was “Tom”? Possibly Lovecraft’s “Tom” was a large four-seater family ‘city carriage’ with the sides down or off for the better weather, but the type of East Providence backroads and lanes travelled probably meant this was not practical. The roads, especially back-roads on which one might become lost, would not have been as good as today. True, the turnpikes (toll-roads) had been abandoned in Rhode Island by the 1880s, and a decade or two later one could go where one liked. But the patchwork of local upkeep is said to have left much to be desired, being good in places, but poor and uneven a mile further on, then good again. Rhode Island’s famous scientific ‘road surfacing’ experiment was not until 1907. This saw the laying of 14 ‘experimental sections’ to discover which was the best-wearing and most dust-free option. They were, surprisingly, the first such state in the nation to actually do such rigorous tests and the results came in 1909. A simple mix of “tar with natural stone macadam” beat all the fancy expensive mixes that contractors recommended. But the state’s new roads were not laid until after 1909. Thus the pre-tarmac roads encountered by Lovecraft and his grandpa circa 1895-1900 would have been quite varied, especially if one was trying to take a semi-random route in outlying rural districts.
The unpaved road to Warren, in the far south of East Providence.
This means that a city-type carriage was probably not practical. Could there have been another lighter buggy-style carriage? Well we know the family kept several “carriages”, before financial problems meant…
the horses and carriages were sold too, so that I had a gorgeous, glorious, titanic, and unbelievable new playhouse — the whole great stable with its immense carriage room, its neat-looking ‘office’, and its vast upstairs, with the colossal (almost scareful) expanse of the grain loft…
Lovecraft somewhat hazily recalled this loss/gain as being “ca. 1895”, but S.T. Joshi dates the departure of the carriages and live-in coachman-groom a little later…
“when the coachmen left (probably around 1900)” (I Am Providence).
Whatever the dating we can thus be sure there were once several horse-drawn vehicles, hence the large size of the stable. The trips with his grandfather could then equally have been in a lighter runabout gig of the sort seen above. Possibly the formative vista-seeking trips were enjoyed when Lovecraft aged four or five, but if Joshi’s “1900” dating is a better informed guess they may have been a little later, perhaps at age seven or eight.
Anyway the dating of the stable probably does not matter for the dating of the trips. Since I assume that a sixty-something businessman like Grandpa Whipple would have still required hired horse transport to get around, even if he could no longer afford to have it located in the home stable. Experts on the Whipple finances may know more, but my guess is that he retained local access to at least a horse and buggy, even if it had to be hired in from nearby. He also likely retained the local ‘pull’ to borrow one from a friendly neighbour on a fine evening, even if finances were tight.
As quick-eyed photographers know, being on a bicycle (ideally tirelessly electric, or in this case a horse-buggy) enables one to discover exponentially more photographic possibilities than when plodding along on foot. If getting psychogeographically lost on purpose to find “picturesque” sights, Grandpa’s random turnings and likely exploration of spectrally embowered by-ways must have had much the same effect, offering many more ‘picture views’ than for the walker. I assume that the views were not simply for mundane re-orientation after becoming lost, and would have been enjoyed for their own sake.
But I also suspect the apparently random nature of the trips were about more than stacking up the probabilities of finding a really good near-sunset view. Recall, for instance, that his grandfather also gave the boy other forms of training at this time, such as finding his way through what Lovecraft called “a certain chains of dark rooms” to cure his fear of the dark. On a New York walk he recalled that he had also enjoyed becoming purposely lost in the local Cat Swamp as a boy…
Remembering that I had no map & knew nothing of the country, [I went] trusting with chance with a very agreeable sense of adventure into the unknown; just as I used to enjoy getting “lost” on walks around Cat Swamp, East Providence, or somewhere, with you [his aunt], Gramp, or my mother in the early and middle ‘nineties.” Letters to Family, page 421.
These things were also a form of navigation training. Thus getting lost with “Tom” could also have been another form of training, with purposeful random turnings aiming to teach the boy some skills of ‘natural navigation’ (the sort of things now found in best-selling books such as The Natural Navigator). But, if finding the way home at dusk, then also navigation by key stars and the moon. The adult Lovecraft often displayed an aristocrat’s hazy sense of time re: being less than prompt for meetings, but he seems to have had a countryman’s navigational skills. He was able to quickly find his way in situations when his clueless companions had their heads spinning. One suspects that this innate skill was honed early, firstly with his grandfather and later independently on his bicycle.
His grandfather had, once, been a rural man likely to value such skills. There was still at the back of the family horse-stable “the orchard”, which the boy Lovecraft would regularly raid for summer fruit. And there was also a field beside the house which pastured the family cow…
… the family cow — a beloved possession reminiscent of the prehistoric Greene days ere my grandfather became an urban dweller.” (Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner)
Again, not actually the boy Lovecraft and the family cow, but somewhat evocative of the likely scene.
It was, he later recalled…
an open field with a stone wall where great elms grew [and] a cow pastured under the gardener’s care. Here, when I was five, they built me a playhouse…
