Weird Tales had a strict policy regarding the publication of serials, but given Lovecraft’s influence upon the magazine, the rule was cheerfully broken in order to bring The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, handwritten in 1927 and never typed up during the writer’s lifetime, to the reading public in the May and July of 1941, four years after H.P.L.’s death from cancer. In May of 1930, Lovecraft received a letter from publishers Simon & Schuster informing him that they would be interested in publishing a novel, should he ever buckle down and write one. Charles Dexter Ward is his longest piece of fiction, and Simon & Schuster might well have taken notice had he chosen to send it to them, but, oddly, he did not.

The character of Charles Dexter Ward shares many traits with Lovecraft, including his passion for an earlier age, his habit of taking ‘antiquarian walks’ around Providence, and his researches into his own ancestry (H.P.L. discovered that he was descended from the Elizabethan astronomer who introduced Copernicanism to England). Like Lovecraft, Ward did not graduate from high school or attend college, but his reasons are more fantastic than his creator’s. It is perhaps noteworthy that the kindly psychiatrist Marinus Bicknell Willet does not declare Ward insane until the troubled young man begins using archaic spellings in his correspondence, something H.P.L. insisted on doing all his life; note his insistence on using ‘shew’ instead of ‘show’ in The Nameless City, The Call of Cthulhu and, indeed, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Lovecraft made use of many names from his own experience in the telling of this tale. Ward’s cat is called Nig, presumably the writer’s nickname for his own beloved childhood pet, Nigger-Man (The animal also appears in his 1922 story The Rats in the Walls). The character of Captain Whipple owes his name to Lovecraft’s grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. One minor character lives at 598 Angell Street, HPL’s address in Providence for most of his life (A Professor George Gammell Angell plays a significant part in The Call of Cthulhu). Perhaps unconsciously, Lovecraft chose to use the name John Carter for one of the men under Captain Whipple’s command. Carter was, of course, the hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars stories, which he had read as a boy in All-Story Weekly.

Lovecraft also inserted his own literary views into the story, with a description of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as ‘a mnemonic hodge-podge.’ In an editorial for his self-published magazine The Conservative, he went further, calling the famous poem ‘a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation.’

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is linked to the Cthulhu Mythos via the Necronomicon and Yog-Sothoth, whose connection to the Old Ones – as ‘guardian of the gate’ – is not established until The Dunwich Horror, written a year later. Randolph Carter, hero of several of Lovecraft’s stories, also gets a brief mention.