St Louis fogs were as thick as those in some of Tom’s favourite childhood reading – recently published detective stories with ‘illustrations’ by Sidney Paget featuring London’s Sherlock Holmes.3 ‘A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths.’4 Many years later, Tom stated that Prufrock’s ‘yellow fog’ was drawn from that of his industrial birthplace, but even in his childhood St Louis fog was mixed with Conan Doyle’s imaginings.5 Tom’s father supported moves to improve air quality, and a smoke abatement ordinance introduced when Tom was five had some beneficial effect, but was soon ruled unconstitutional. For most of Tom’s boyhood the air was generally worse than it had been in 1885 when Frenchman Charles Croonenbergh had commented that ‘the pasty dust from American coal smoke falls so thick in the streets, that one is satisfied by an afternoon walk in St Louis as if one had eaten a heavy dinner … Everyone coughs.’6 ‘Yellow fog’ and ‘brown waves of fog’ billow through Tom’s early urban poetry, a fog coated with ‘soot that falls from chimneys’.7 The cough in ‘Gerontion’ is the most insistently memorable in English-language verse. Recalling St Louis as ‘very smoky’ – and opining that New England brought a literal ‘change of climate’ that did one good – in adulthood Tom suffered increasingly from lung problems; eventually he died from emphysema.8 Not all of that can be blamed on his later fondness for cigarettes and London.

The St Louis of his boyhood, like its great rival Chicago, was famous for local government corruption. His Republican father signed a petition calling for political fair play. Yet with its heritage of municipal bribery, grime and slumminess, the place had, too, a heritage of idealist philosophy. Owing much to German thought, this intellectual tradition regarded reality as a mental construct. It stressed how the intellect influences society. Passionate about Kant and Hegel, Henry C. Brokmeyer and his followers had founded the St Louis Philosophical Society in 1866. The following year they launched the internationally circulated Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Its contributors would include Josiah Royce and William James. The Society invited Ralph Waldo Emerson to St Louis. It developed connections with New England Transcendentalism as well as with the local Unitarian community. Other figures linked to this Philosophical Society included a remarkable Scottish polymath Thomas Davidson, who went on to write on Aristotle and, after emigrating to England, founded what became the Fabian Society; also the Unitarian literary scholar James Kendall Hosmer (several of whose relations were associates of Lottie Eliot), and Susan E. Blow who, with fellow member W. T. Harris, pioneered the kindergarten movement in America. Blow’s ideas were followed by the St Louis Wednesday Club which Lottie Eliot helped found in 1890, and Blow was a friend and 1890s literary collaborator with Lottie’s sister-in-law, Etta Eliot.9

St Louis Philosophical Society members wrote and lectured on Dante, establishing in the city what one of their leaders, Denton J. Snider, called a ‘Dante cult’. Signs of this were still apparent in Tom’s boyhood when a local hotel hosted ‘An Evening with Dante’.10 Susan Blow’s 1886 Study of Dante contends that ‘We live in an age which is rapidly losing the consciousness of sin. Equally alien to our feeling are the physical self-scourgings of the medieval saint and the spiritual agony of the Puritan.’11 It may seem strange that this same woman pioneered children’s education, contributing to the efforts that made the St Louis school system a national beacon, but it would not have seemed odd to Lottie Eliot as she made poems out of scenes of ancient martyrdom while also campaigning for children’s rights.

With her love of ‘Infinite Mind’ and her taste for philosophy, high educational ideals, poetry and culture, Lottie belonged to a community where the Philosophical Society’s influence was still felt. Her own intellectual loyalties lay with such St Louis women’s organisations as the Humanity Club, the Wednesday Club, the Colonial Dames of America and, especially, the Unitarian church. Her husband, a former Sunday School superintendent at the Church of the Messiah and a member of its choir, helped Lottie preserve Tom’s earliest gifts, including a christening spoon from his great-aunt Caroline.12 For the first ten years of Tom’s life the Church of the Messiah’s minister was the Reverend John Snyder, William Greenleaf Eliot’s successor; Snyder even set up in the church an Eliot Society, which brought together under one aegis several congregational women’s groups, and whose members included Tom’s elderly Grandmother Eliot. Throughout his boyhood, Tom was taken regularly to this Unitarian place of worship, one of the most important institutions of his early life.

Writing on ‘Unitarianism in St Louis’ in 1899, Tom’s childhood minister set out ‘historically’ Unitarians’ beliefs. According to Snyder, the earliest Christians had belonged to a ‘Unitarian epoch of the church’ and had followed Jesus’s teaching which, true to Jewish monotheism, maintained that ‘the Lord is one!’ Later, ‘The Christian Church only ceased to be Monotheistic when it ceased to be Jewish.’ The Unitarian Snyder contended that a modern ‘Tri-Unitarian’ Catholic or Protestant who believes in the Three-in-One of Father, Son and Holy Ghost ‘rests his case upon the forced interpretation of a few doubtful and obscure texts, which may be stretched or shrunken to fit his dogma’. Christianity had been shaped by forces as different as ‘Greek mysticism’ and ‘Roman imperialism’. Machinations of church ‘hierarchy’ had led to a deadening of spirituality into a ‘magical sacramentalism’. So, for Unitarians, it was the other Christian churches which had lapsed from the true faith. However much he idealised it, Snyder recognised that ‘The form of the primitive church will never be restored’, but he asserted that such a restoration was not even desirable since

Its formal administrative defects have been slowly outgrown. But Unitarianism seeks to reproduce the spirit of the Apostolic Church – its democratic simplicity –, its freedom from sacerdotalism, its boundless charity, its spiritual spontaneity, its vital ethicalism.