Origin
Lovecraft may have named the town after the lost port of Dunwich in Suffolk, England. This town was the subject (though not mentioned by name) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "By the North Sea", which was in an anthology owned by Lovecraft. This Dunwich also appears in Arthur Machen's novella The Terror (1917), which Lovecraft is known to have read.
Lovecraft also could have been inspired by other New England towns with names ending in -wich, such as Ipswich near Salem, Massachusetts, East and West Greenwich in Rhode Island, and Greenwich, Massachusetts, a decaying rural village that has since been flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Although the English town is pronounced "DUN-nich" (similar to the New England Greenwiches), Lovecraft never specified how he preferred his Dunwich be pronounced.
Lovecraft is said to have based Dunwich on Athol, Massachusetts, and other towns in Western Massachusetts. S. T. Joshi has also seen Dunwich as being influenced by East Haddam, Connecticut, location of the "Devil's Hopyard," the "Moodus Noises," and a witch tradition.
Read more about this topic: Dunwich (Lovecraft)
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx’s Capital.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)