Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

Composition and first appearance

Lovecraft wrote the story in 1920. The first publication began in the March 1921 issue of The Wolverine. The title's promise of facts prepares an evidentiary narrative assembled from family history, expedition records, oral accounts, correspondence and a final object.

Sources: H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in composition order, H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in publication order, Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

The outcome disclosed at the start

The narrator announces Arthur Jermyn's death before reconstructing its cause. Arthur has killed himself after opening a box sent from Africa. Some of those who examine the evidence afterward prefer to deny that he existed.

Suspense therefore depends less on whether Arthur will survive than on what the object means. The narration directs attention toward an explanation while repeatedly implying that the explanation itself is intolerable.

The opening also insists that Arthur's unusual appearance had not previously prevented him from living as a poet and scholar. His death follows a discovery about origin and identity, not simply a new awareness of how others see him.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Sir Wade’s explorations

Sir Wade Jermyn, Arthur's great-great-great-grandfather, explored the Congo region and wrote about its peoples, animals and supposed antiquities. His accounts of an ancient city and unusual inhabitants damaged his reputation.

He brought a wife and infant son to England but kept the woman secluded. The explanation offered to others was that she was the daughter of a Portuguese trader and disliked English customs. She accompanied him back to Africa and did not return.

Wade's increasingly disturbing descriptions eventually led to confinement at Huntingdon. His final years suggest fear of his own household as well as fascination with what he had found abroad.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Philip and Robert

Wade's son Philip inherited the title but alienated his social circle through behavior the narrative presents as coarse and violent. He joined the navy and later disappeared from a merchant ship near the Congo coast.

Philip's son Robert became a scholar, examining the inherited collection and pursuing African research. His family nevertheless repeated the pattern of concealment: two of his three children were kept from public view, while the middle child, Nevil, left home and later returned with an infant son.

The sequence makes inherited status and intellectual accomplishment insufficient to stabilize the family's sense of itself. Physical description and conduct are repeatedly pressed into the role of clues.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

The visit of Samuel Seaton

On 19 October 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton brought Robert information about legends of a ruined city and its white ape inhabitants. The exact conversation is unknown. Its immediate aftermath is not: Robert killed Seaton and his own children.

Nevil died protecting his young son Alfred, who survived the attack. Robert was confined and later died without explaining himself.

The episode anticipates Arthur's discovery while withholding its content. A piece of apparently relevant ethnological information has already triggered an attempt to destroy the family line, but the narrator cannot reconstruct precisely what Robert understood.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Alfred and Arthur’s upbringing

Alfred inherited as a small child. As an adult he entered entertainment, abandoned his wife and son, and eventually died during a violent encounter with a circus gorilla he had trained.

Arthur's mother brought him to Jermyn House and secured the best education their reduced resources allowed. Arthur loved the old house, excelled academically and developed a poetic imagination. The narrator makes his intellectual and emotional sensitivity conspicuous beside the hostile descriptions of his body.

His ambition was to continue the family's work and understand the ruined civilization in Wade's papers. The inherited collection offered both a scholarly project and a means of establishing continuity with an ancestor whose reputation he hoped to recover.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

The expedition and Mwanu’s account

After his mother's death, Arthur sold part of his estate and went to Africa in 1911. Among his informants was Mwanu, an elderly chief whose account connected the lost city with a preserved female figure worshipped by its inhabitants.

According to the legend, a white visitor had become the consort of an ape-princess. They left with a child, later returned without that child, and after the princess's death the visitor preserved her body. The account survived in several variants, including different stories about later returns.

Arthur treats these narratives as evidence relevant to Wade's travels, but has not yet recognized how closely their sequence may correspond to his own family history.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Ruins and the promised specimen

Arthur finds remains of the city in early 1912, although his expedition cannot clear the underground passage he sees. The discovery supports part of Wade's account without resolving the identity of the inhabitants.

The Belgian agent Verhaeren offers to obtain the preserved figure, which had been carried away by the N'bangus after the city's destruction. Arthur returns to England expecting a valuable specimen.

While waiting, he studies Wade's private history and wonders why so little evidence of the secluded wife remains. His proposed explanation still fits the respectable family story: the woman must have been an ordinary human wife alienated from an obsessive husband.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

The letter, the box and the locket

Verhaeren's letter describes a difficult-to-classify mummy with a golden chain and armorial locket. He also hints at an amusing resemblance whose significance Arthur does not yet confront.

The box arrives on 3 August 1913. Arthur opens it alone, reacts with terror and later dies by self-immolation on the moor. The servants can report his movements, but not the private moment in which he recognizes the object.

The closing explanation supplies two converging details: the locket bears the Jermyn arms, and the mummy's face resembles Arthur. Together with the expedition records and legend, they identify Wade's hidden wife as the preserved figure.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Destruction of the evidence

The narrator reports that members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burn the specimen and discard the locket. Some then deny Arthur's existence. These are fictional acts attributed to a real institution within the story, not an authenticated episode in its history.

Their behavior completes the pattern of concealment that began around Wade's household. Investigation has produced evidence, but the response is to suppress it rather than revise an accepted understanding of humanity.

The title's factual posture is consequently uneasy: its narrator discloses a history that the supposed custodians of evidence refuse to preserve.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Racism, hierarchy and the supposed revelation

The horror rests on the narration's assumption that unexpected ancestry can negate a person's human identity and social standing. Its descriptions repeatedly connect bodily difference with violence or intellectual deficiency, while exceptional refinement is presented as compensation. Those assumptions are part of the story's racist and hereditarian framework, not biological facts endorsed by this encyclopedia.

The African setting is also filtered through a colonial hierarchy. Local accounts supply crucial knowledge, but European agents and institutions are repeatedly positioned as the authorities who acquire, classify or destroy it. The narrative's imagined city and species are inventions, not evidence about actual African peoples or human origins.

Arthur's established kindness, scholarship and artistic sensibility complicate the judgment the ending attempts to impose. The discovery changes what he knows about ancestry; it does not erase the qualities the story has already given him. That tension makes the work useful for examining how inherited categories can turn knowledge into catastrophe.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook

Connections and limits

The Shadow over Innsmouth also links travel, family research and the discovery of nonhuman ancestry, but gives its narrator a very different final relation to that knowledge. The comparison reveals variation within Lovecraft rather than a single inevitable response to descent.

Arthur Jermyn does not identify the preserved figure as Shub-Niggurath or tie the lost city to a named cosmic deity. Its principal mechanisms are genealogy, concealment, resemblance and the interpretation of evidence.

Sources: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family — Unspeakable Tales ebook, The Shadow over Innsmouth — Unspeakable Tales ebook