1. Written in November–December 1931, the story first appeared in a small-press publication by Visionary Publishing Co. (Everett, PA) in 1936; it ran in abridged form, after Lovecraft’s death, in Weird Tales 36, no. 3 (January 1942), 6–33, where it was introduced with this reading line: “Unspeakable monstrousness overhung the crumbling, stench-cursed town of Innsmouth . . . and folks there had somehow got out of the idea of dying. . . .”
2. Lovecraft’s notes and an early draft of the story are found in the book Something About Cats and Other Pieces, a collection of writings by and about Lovecraft published by Arkham House in 1949. The book also includes a family tree for Olmstead, showing his descent from Captain Obed Marsh. See note 48, below.
3. Prohibition, as the U.S. antiliquor movement was eventually known, became federal law with ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, on January 16, 1919. The amendment prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States. . . .” The “great social and economic experiment,” as it was called by President Herbert Hoover, lasted until December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and leaving the regulation of intoxicating liquors to the individual states.
4. Not Nazi concentration camps, of course, but these horror chambers were not invented by them: In the Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, known as Lord Kitchener and commonly called Herbert, commander in chief of the British forces, saw systematic cruelty as his most effective option. He set up corrugated stone-and-iron blockhouses along the railway lines as lookout posts, then cleared the land by burning farms, killing livestock, and herding women and children into “concentration camps” (a technique probably learned from the Spanish, who used the tactic of reconcentrado against Cuban guerrillas in 1895) that were watched over by the blockhouses. By the end of 1901, more than 100,000 Boers were living in the inadequately supplied camps; some 20,000 inmates, most of them children, died of disease brought on by unsanitary conditions. Kitchener’s strategy, despite the international outrage it provoked, worked, and a new weapon entered the vocabulary of terror. Arthur Conan Doyle defended Britain’s use of the tactics in The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct (1902) and received a knighthood at least partially in reward for this propaganda.
5. A small coastal town in Massachusetts about thirty-five miles northeast of Boston.
6. If Arkham is to be identified with Salem (and this is far from certain—there is evidence in “The Dunwich Horror” that Arkham is in central Massachusetts), Newburyport is about twenty miles north. A bus that ran through “Innsmouth” would also likely run through the towns of Newbury (not to be confused with Newburyport), Ipswich, South Hamilton, and Beverly, none of which, however, is a harbor town. The closest harbor town in a straight line from Newburyport to Salem is Manchester-by-the-Sea. There are several small unnamed islands not far from Manchester-by-the-Sea that might be “Devil Reef.” In an early draft of “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft indicated that the narrator, after traveling to Arkham, planned to visit Gloucester. This is not inconsistent with the “Arkham is in reality Salem, and Manchester is Innsmouth” theory; Gloucester is about thirteen miles northeast of Salem, a few miles northeast of Manchester-by-the-Sea (Innsmouth?). Lovecraft’s notes for the tale also indicate that Innsmouth is closer to Arkham than to Newburyport.
7. A fictional river. There are only three significant rivers in the immediate vicinity of “Innsmouth”: the Merrimack, which flows into the Atlantic in Newburyport, the Ipswich (flowing into the Atlantic at Ipswich Bay), and the Rowley, a small river in the vicinity of Rowley. While Ipswich is in the right place, between Newburyport and Salem, and has a river that might be disguised as the Manuxet, it is clear that Ipswich is not Innsmouth, for it is mentioned shortly as an alternate destination for the narrator.
8. The Boston & Maine Railroad went bankrupt in the 1970s, selling off many lines, and in 1983, the company itself was sold; today its lines are part of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority network. It had stations in Newburyport, Rowley (another town on the line between Newburyport and Salem), and Salem.
9. A town in Addison County, on the western border of Vermont, with a current population of under 700 people. Vermonters have been heard to say, “I may be a fool, but I’m not a damned fool.”
10. This was clearly a local epidemic; there is no recorded history of any epidemics in Massachusetts in 1846, although yellow fever was a severe problem nationwide five years earlier. According to Donald R. Burleson, in H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study, Newburyport had a smallpox epidemic in the late 1700s.
11. The narrator, we learn later, is from Toledo, Ohio, hardly a westerner by the 1920s. Perhaps he spent summers out West.
12. Lovecraft apparently saw such a colony in 1930 on a drive to Onset, Massachusetts, a small summer resort for Bostonians, and mentioned it in a letter dated August 15–16, 1930, to his aunt Mrs. F. C. Clark.
13. Probably drawing its name from the Gilmans, mentioned later in the tale as one of Innsmouth’s “gently bred” families—nonetheless, a terrible pun in light of later revelations about the “Innsmouth look” (each of the fishy-looking folk could be described as a “gill-man”) and its origins.
14. The Danvers State Hospital is said to have introduced the prefrontal lobotomy as a treatment for serious cases.
Like many such institutions, in the twentieth century Danvers stopped advertising itself by name as a psychiatric hospital. At its opening, in 1878, in Danvers, Massachusetts, and in subsequent transformations, it was clearly designated as such: the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, the Danvers Lunatic Asylum, and the Danvers State Insane Asylum. It is no longer thought to be politically correct, apparently, to refer to safe havens for mentally ill persons as “insane asylums.” A similar comment is made by the admittedly crazy narrator of Caitlin Kiernan’s award-winning novel The Drowning Girl (2012) about Butler Hospital, where both of Lovecraft’s parents died (the institution was then known as Butler Hospital for the Insane—see the foreword, note 26, above).
Perhaps evidence of Lovecraft’s abhorrence of asylums was his behavior when his mother was admitted to Butler in 1921 for her final illness: He would visit her frequently, meeting her on the grounds of the hospital, but he never entered the buildings, even when she was confined to her bed (Joshi, I Am Providence, 306). Lovecraft failed to visit his father when he was institutionalized, but this behavior is understandable: The boy was only eight when his father died, and it appears that he was told (falsely) that his father was completely paralyzed and comatose in his final years. See Kenneth W. Faig Jr.’s The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (50). In later years, Lovecraft never told anyone that his father had been confined as insane, in the final stages of neurosyphilis, only that he was “stricken with a complete paralysis resulting from a brain overtaxed with study & business cares” (Lovecraft to Reinhardt Kleiner, November 16, 1916, Selected Letters, I, 33).
15. Manchester was officially incorporated in 1645. It was a fishing village until 1845, when it became a summer residence for Boston’s elite. It has never had any manufacturing.
16. Originally founded as the Antiquarian and Historical Society of Old Newbury, the Historical Society of Old Newbury was organized in 1877 and, in 1927, was located at the corner of High and Winter streets; it has since moved to 98 High Street.
17. Helen E. Tilton supervised the reading room of the Newburyport library beginning in 1905; it is likely that Anna was a close relative.
18. That is, half fish-like and half toad-like (Batrachia is the order of amphibians including frogs and toads).
19. Kingsport, it will be recalled, may be identified with Marblehead, Massachusetts, but may also be identified as Salem. See “The Festival,” note 7, above. Both would be visib
le from Manchester.
20. The house is investigated further by Lovecraft in “The Strange High House in the Mist,” written in 1926 and first published in Weird Tales 18, no. 3 (October 1931), 394–400.
21. The dominant Northeast grocery chain for many years, the company incorporated in 1917, changing its corporate name from the Ginter Company to First National Stores, Inc., in 1925. Its stores were later branded as Finast. The names of the stores were changed again when the company disappeared in the 1990s through mergers.
22. Of course, Walpurgisnacht and All Hallows’ Eve. See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, note 138, above.
23. That is, the reign of King Edward VII, from 1901 to 1910.
24. Lovecraft drew a partial map of Innsmouth, reproduced (along with his notes) in Something About Cats and Other Pieces. In 1972, artist Eric Carlson produced a larger version, and in 2006, Joseph Morales redrew it for better legibility.
Map of Innsmouth, drawn by Eric Carlson, 1972, appearing in Nyctalops 6 (February 1972).
25. Ornamental patterned flower gardens.
26. The phrase was popularized through publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Imp of the Perverse” (which first appeared in Graham’s American Monthly in 1845), and it means that urge to do nothing—or the wrong thing—when crises arise:
Again:—We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. . . . It must—it shall be undertaken to-day—and yet we put it off until to-morrow. And why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. . . . The clock strikes and is the knell of our welfare, but at the same time is the chanticleer-note to the Thing that has so long overawed us. It flies. It disappears. We are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!
27. Robert H. Waugh, in “The Weird Historical Novel: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Other Historical Ventures,” from his collection A Monster of Voices: Speaking for H. P. Lovecraft, points out that the description that follows is inaccurate with respect to the economic cycles of nineteenth-century New England but accurate regarding the cycles of the early twentieth century (152).
28. A snow (pronounced “snoo”) or snaw was a small three-masted sailing vessel similar to a brig, used as a merchant ship and as a warship. The Oxford English Dictionary records usage of the term as early as 1676 and as recent as 1881.
29. Although Eliza (which Zadok corrupts into “Elizy”) and Hetty may sound like odd names for ships, there was an American ship named Eliza sailing in 1799 under Captain Rowan (the first American ship to sail into San Francisco Bay); and in 1802, a schooner named Hetty sailed out of Philadelphia, under Captain Jona Briggs.
30. Otaheite (more often rendered without the acute accent), visited by Captain Cook on an early voyage, is now known as Tahiti.
31. Now Pohnpei, an island in the Caroline Islands in the Pacific; one of four Federated States of Micronesia and home of the sovereign island nation’s capital, Palikir.
32. The Easter Island heads (actually, they are whole-body statues, but the large heads dominate) were first discovered by Westerners in 1722 when Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen visited the island (now Rapa Nui). Called moai in the native Polynesian tongue, and measuring about thirteen feet high and five feet wide each, the statues appear to have been carved by native Polynesians between 1250 and 1500 CE and were transported using rollers made from trees to their coastal sites. The statues appear to be a mixture of memorials for deceased ancestors and commemorations of important local figures. Richard Huber, in “H. P. Lovecraft and Easter Island,” points to the uncanny resemblance between Lovecraft and the statues! The statues are mentioned again in “The Haunter of the Dark” (here, below), where images resembling them—thought to be representations of aliens—populate the secret chapel of the Shining Trapezohedron.
33. See “Dagon” (here, above).
34. The symbol has been traced to ancient civilizations in the Indus Valley and elsewhere and remains a powerful icon in various Eastern religions. In 1920, the Nazi Party adopted the swastika to link the party leaders to the Aryans (Indo-Europeans), viewed by the Nazis as the true and direct ancestors of the German people. Bennett Lovett-Graff, in “Shadows over Lovecraft: Reactionary Fantasy and Immigrant Eugenics,” asserts that it is no coincidence that the Nazi symbol appears in Lovecraft’s tale of the dangers of racial impurity. Note that after exposure by the narrator and capture by federal agents, the Deep Ones, like the victims of the Nazis, end up in “camps and prisons.” See note 4, above.
“. . . odd how he could stand so much whiskey.” Shadow over Innsmouth. Visionary Publishing Co., 1936 (artist: Frank Utpatel)
35. Astarte or Ishtar, a goddess of sexuality and fertility, found in several cultures, including the Canaanite.
36. The phrase itself, referring to several ancient coins (essentially the equivalent of saying “nickel, nickel, dime, and some pennies”), has no literal significance, but the prophet Daniel explains to King Belshazzar that the phrase is a portent of the doom and division of his kingdom (Daniel 5:25–28). Here it is merely an example of the “wrath of Jehovah” that Zadok recalls being threatened.
37. An administrative division of the Knights Templar, a fraternal order.
38. This mirrors an era of the history of Freemasonry in America. In 1826, William Morgan disappeared after threatening to reveal the secrets of the Masons, with the result that some accused the Masons of having murdered Morgan. A period of public disrepute for the Masons followed, leading to the founding of an anti-Masonic political party (Andrew Jackson was a Mason, and so the new party was also anti-Jacksonian). By 1850, however, interest in the order had rebounded, and by the time of the American Civil War, Freemasonry was more popular than ever.
39. In Greek mythology, the hydra is a serpentlike, many-headed water beast, slain by Hercules as part of his labors. This is the first and only mention of the female leader of the Deep Ones.
40. In Lovecraft’s notes, it is clear that the driver has been instructed that the bus is unable to go farther.
The narrator may have had a device something like this screwdriver made for gun sights.
“ ‘I looked over the squalid sea of roofs below me.’” Shadow over Innsmouth. Visionary Publishing Co., 1936 (artist: Frank Utpatel)
41. This is in accord with the records of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which show that the full moon occurred on July 14, 1927.
42. Originally conceived as a cost-saving move, turning off streetlights on moonlit nights has become a “green” cause, not only for the resulting energy-saving but to reduce light pollution.
“. . . The reef was alive with a teeming horde of alien shapes . . .” The Shadow over Innsmouth. Visionary Publishing Co., 1936 (artist: Frank Utpatel)
43. Just as in “The Colour Out of Space,” there is the suggestion that true alienness involves physical attributes, such as color, that are not part of human perception.
“. . . Flopping, hopping, surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight . . .” The Shadow over Innsmouth. Visionary Publishing Co., 1936 (artist: Frank Utpatel)
44. Maumee is a suburb of Toledo. The narrator may be concealing a stay at the Toledo Asylum for the Insane, opened in 1888 and built on the “cottage” system (rather than the immense main buildings of an older period). In 1894, the institution changed its name to the more benign Toledo State Hospital. If the narrator told others of his observations in Innsmouth, he was likely deemed as crazy as his cousin Lawrence.
45. A small private liberal arts college located in Oberlin, Ohio, about ninety miles east of Toledo. Although Oberlin always embraced progressive causes and community activities, it is unlikely that the student body would have embraced the Innsmouth program of devil worship!
46. There was no insane asylum in Canton at the ti
me, but about ten miles west, in Massillon, was the Massillon State Hospital for the Insane, opened in 1898.
Massillon is located in the northeastern portion of Ohio in Stark County, on the Tuscarawas River, fifty miles south of Cleveland, and departed from the style of earlier asylums, which had massive buildings to house inmates. The Athens Lunatic Asylum, in Athens, Ohio, about 170 miles distant, and Norwich State Hospital, in Preston, Connecticut, similarly adopted the cottage-style of architecture.
The main building at the Athens Lunatic Asylum, Athens, Ohio. There were seven smaller cottages on the 1,000-acre property.
This aerial view of Norwich State Hospital, in Preston, Connecticut, taken in 1934, shows the cottage design still in use.
47. With armlike appendages or branches.
48. Lovecraft’s notes (reproduced in Something About Cats and Other Pieces) lay out several versions of the family tree:
Obed—gt. gt. grandfather b. 1798–1878 Innsmouth.
Ft’thya-ly:—fish-thing—gt. gt. grandmother b. B.C. 78,000—returned to water after death of earthly husband.
Alice Marsh—gt. grandmother 1847–1867 Innsmouth. Aunt of Old Man marsh—half-sister of his father. Dau. of /Capt. Marsh’s son Onesiphorus & Thing/m. Arkham man Joshua Orne 1840–1904. [An alternate verison adds Capt. Obed Marsh, born 1830, Ezekiel Marsh, also born 1830, and Alice Marsh, born 1847.] Henry Marsh, also known as Old Man Marsh, was born in 1862.
Eliza Orne—grandmother. Only child (John Marsh Orne b. 1870—Suicide 1903 after 1st child die—Charles Peckham Orne b. 1873 disappeared 1914—Rebecca Orne b. 1875 m. 1900, 2 children odd 1 dead other queer bachelor) 1869–19 Arkham d. 1899 m. Cleveland man James Wmson [an alternate version indicates he remarried Helen Crane in 1895]
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 94
