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:
“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)
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)