An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

A century and a half pass, and in 1918 Charles Dexter Ward—Curwen’s direct descendant by way of his daughter Ann—accidentally discovers his relation to the old wizard and seeks to learn all he can about him. Although always fascinated by the past, Ward had previously exhibited no especial interest in the outré;but as he unearths more and more information about Curwen—whose exact physical double he proves to be—he strives more and more to duplicate his ancestor’s cabbalistic and alchemical feats. He undertakes a long voyage overseas to visit the presumable descendants of individuals with whom Curwen had been in touch in the eighteenth century. He finds Curwen’s remains and, by the proper manipulation of his “essential Saltes,” resurrects him. But something begins to go astray. He writes a harried letter to Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, the family doctor, with the following disturbing message: “Instead of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation…. Upon us depends more than can be put into words—all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.”

But, perversely, Ward does not stay for the appointed meeting with Willett. Willett tracks him down, but something astounding has occurred: although still of youthful appearance, his talk is eccentric and old-fashioned, and his stock of memories of his own life seems to have been bizarrely depleted. Willett undertakes a harrowing exploration of Curwen’s old Pawtuxet bungalow, which Ward had restored for conducting experiments; he finds, among other anomalies, all manner of half-formed creatures at the bottom of deep pits. He confronts Ward—who he now realizes is no other than Curwen—in the madhouse where he has been committed; Curwen attempts an incantation against him, but Willett counters with one of his own, reducing Curwen to a “thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.”

While living in Brooklyn, HPL was contemplating a “novelette of Salem horrors which I may be able to cast in a sufficiently ‘detectivish’ mould to sell to

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Edwin Baird for Detective Tales—which rejected ‘The Shunned House’” (HPL to L.D.Clark, July 27, 1925; ms., JHL); but then, in September, he read Gertrude Selwyn Kimball’s Providence in Colonial Times(1912) at the New York Public Library, and this rather dry historical work fired his imagination. He was, however, still talking of the Salem idea in late January 1927 (see SL2.99). Perhaps the Kimball book—as well as his return to Providence—led to a uniting of the Salem idea with a work about his hometown. It was from this book that the anecdotes about John Merritt, Dr. Checkley, and other points mentioned early in the novel derive.

The genesis of the work goes back beyond August 1925. The quotation from Borellus—Pierre Borel (c. 1620–1689), the French physician and chemist—is a translation or paraphrase by Cotton Mather in Magnolia Christi Americana(1702), which HPL owned. Since the epigraph from Lactantius that heads “The Festival” (1923) also comes from the Magnolia,HPL may have found the Borellus passage at that time also. It is entry #87 in his commonplace book, which dates roughly to April 1923.

In late August 1925 HPL’s aunt Lillian related to him an anecdote about his hometown. HPL replied: “So the Halsey house is haunted! Ugh! That’s where Wild Tom Halsey kept live terrapins in the cellar —maybe it’s their ghosts. Anyway, it’s a magnificent old mansion, & a credit to a magnificent old town!” (HPL to Lillian D.Clark, August 24, 1925; ms., JHL). The Thomas Lloyd Halsey house at 140 Prospect Street is the model for Charles Dexter Ward’s residence, which HPL deliberately renumbers 100 Prospect Street. Now broken into apartments, it is still a superb late Georgian structure (c. 1800) fully deserving the encomium HPL gives it in his novel.