Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

“I have walked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything

around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.”

At home Grandfather Philo read the Bible aloud, with special emphasis on the gloomy fates that awaited sinners, in particular female sinners. Years later Hawley would tell an associate, “The devil took up residence in our household when I was a child, and never left it.”