England

England is a country on the island of Britain, the largest and most populous of the four countries that form the United Kingdom. H. P. Lovecraft was a strong admirer of English culture, with several English writers being strong influences on his work. England appears occasionally in Lovecraft's fiction, notably in "The Rats in the Walls" and "Arthur Jermyn", where it is a primary setting.
Other writers in the Cthulhu Mythos have used England as a setting--Ramsey Campbell, for example, places many of his Mythos tales in England's Severn Valley. Much of Brian Lumley's fiction is also set in England.
==Literary Influence==
In Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft's survey of weird fiction, he singles out numerous writers from England as major contributors to the genre--including M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood among the "modern masters" in the field. (Another British writer with a major influence of Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, was Welsh, while Lord Dunsany, while born in England, did most of his writing in Ireland.) 
==In Lovecraft's Fiction==
As a committed Anglophile with a deep interest in ancestry and tradition, Lovecraft repeatedly employed England as a setting for his fiction. "The Hound", for example, locates the protagonists' museum of the blasphemous in England. "The Rats in the Walls" focuses on an American's return to his ancestral home, Exham Priory, with disastrous results. "The Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" occurs largely at Jermyn House, the family's estate in England. The dreamer Kuranes from "Celephais" appears to have lived his waking life in England's Surrey. 
England appears more incidentally in Lovecraft's fiction as well. In his contribution to "The Challenge from Beyond", the Eltdown Shards, those "debatable and disquieting clay fragments...dug up from pre-carboniferous strata", come from southern England, and are interpreted by the Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall, "a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings". Joseph Curwen, the antagonist of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, "liv[ed] for a time in England...and his speech, when he deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman." In "The Thing on the Doorstep", Edward Pickman Derby is rumoured to meet "with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York." 
==Other Mythos Writers ==
The Lovecraft pastiches a teenaged Liverpudlian initially sent to August Derleth were set in Lovecraft's New England until, at Derleth's suggestion, Ramsey Campbell relocated them to an English landscape. Thus was born perhaps the most detailed Mythos setting outside of Lovecraft Country, Campbell's Severn Valley, which places horrors in imaginary towns in Southwest England, including Brichester, Goatswood, and Severnford. 
Brian Lumley, who hails from England's County Durham, also frequently sets his Mythos stories in England. "The Sister City", for example, concerns the discovery of an ancient pre-human city, Lh-yib, beneath the moors of Yorkshire. Lumley's recurring protagonist Titus Crow lives at Blowne House, near the English village of Leonard's-Walk Heath.
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Regions/Territories