International Correspondence School (2)

Between 1908 and 1911, HPL took a correspondence course. This was not "fluff", but a serious course of work to which thousands of young men were subscribing.

As we see so often, Lovecraft did not live "in a vaccuum", but he responded to stimuli in magazines he read, and got diseases that other people caught, and responded uniquely to customs, mores, and historical trends.


(above: One of these men might have graded Lovecraft's chemistry papers.)


(above: Started to help educate mining engineers, by 1894 it had 25 offices and 55 instructors. By 1899 it had moved into the new Finch building, now on the National Register)




* Scranton By Cheryl A. Kashuba, Darlene Miller-Lanning, Alan Sweeney, 2005.

Lovecraft's 1910 Correspondence Course

Below are excerpts found online about Lovecraft's 1910 correpondence study in Chemistry. This is some 26 years later, but represents what he would have received and studied. It's as close as I've come to recovering what he actually held in his hands in 1910 (save I have a vitage copy of the Young Chemist he would have once had - not his of course). This was from an Ebayeum auction. As this is the 5th edition, one suspects HPL had a near 1st edition as the school may have just begun somwhat before HPL saw the ad for it.



"Inorganic Chemistry" Parts 1,2,3 #198A-1, B-2,C-3, Edition 5.Prepared Especially For Home Study-International Correspondence Schools - Scranton, Pa. by Herbert Winkel, B.S.- Copyright 1936 by International Textbook Company, Copyright in Great Britain. All rights reserved - Printed in U.S.A. All three of these booklet are in very good condition. Total of over 200 softcover pages with a foldout periodic chart.

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He even composed a chemistry textbook, "a bulky manuscript entitled A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry, by HP Lovecraft, 1910."

One tangible memorial of my hobby remains — a bulky manuscript entitled "A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry", by HP Lovecraft. 1910.

One significant work did come out of this, however: A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry, written in 1910 and deemed by Lovecraft a 'bulky manuscript'.11 This work, so far as I know, does not survive, and we know nothing of it.

After several years devoted to scientific writing (including a lost treatise, A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry [1910])

... the unpreserved Inorganic Chemistry (1910)

Yet at home I continued my chemical studies, dabbling in a correspondence course which helped me in matters of analysis ... of my hobby remains — a bulky manuscript entitled A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry, by HP Lovecraft, 1910

See also an ad for "International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Pa." in the Scientific Gazette (January 1909), which is very likely the correspondence course Lovecraft himself took. ... Pennsylvania, offering a complete course for $161.00. This is no doubt the correspondence course in chemistry that Lovecraft admits to taking 'for a time'.