PROFESSOR GEORGE TICKNOR
1791
August 1, Monday: George Ticknor was born in a well-to-do family of Boston.
1805
Benjamin Dudley Emerson and his brother Abner Emerson graduated from Dartmouth College.
Benjamin would teach for many years in Newburyport, Massachusetts and Boston. Abner would teach in
Somerville, Massachusetts but die at a relatively earlier age.1
George Ticknor entered the Junior Class at Dartmouth College.
1. I am unable to uncover evidence that the math whiz of the family, Frederick Emerson, attended college (which may or may not
mean that he did not attend, taking into account the collateral fact that I am also unable to uncover evidence as to when and where
he died and am, nevertheless, convinced that he has indeed died).
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1807
THE NEW-ENGLAND ALMANACK FOR 1807. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: John Carter.
CURTIS’S POCKET ALMANACK, AND REGISTER OF NEW-HAMPSHIRE FOR THE YEAR 1807. Samuel Curtis.
Amherst, New Hampshire: Printed by Joseph Cushing. The 1800 census of New Hampshire by town, its militia
officers, its postmasters, its attorneys, its county criers, its ministers, etc. The description of Dartmouth College
indicated that its library comprised some 3,000 volumes.
George Ticknor graduated from Dartmouth College. He would be studying Latin and Greek with the Reverend
Dr. John Sylvester John Gardiner, rector of Boston’s Trinity Church.
1810
George Ticknor began the study of law.
1813
Boston boys Samuel Joseph May, Caleb Cushing who would become a Democratic politician, Samuel A. Eliot
who would become mayor of Boston, 13-year-old George Bancroft who would become a national historian
and Secretary of the Navy, George Barrell Emerson who would become an educational reformer, and David
Lee Child who would become a radical abolitionist, were matriculants at Harvard College.
Before entering Harvard, George Barrell Emerson had undergone a few weeks of preparation at Dummer
Academy in Byfield, New Hampshire. He would concentrate in mathematics and Greek. He had been taught
the Linnaean system of classification by his father and it would appear that right after getting settled in his
dorm room, he visited the botanic garden in order to ply Professor William Peck there with questions about
plants he had noticed during his boyhood in his hometown of Wells that he had been unable to identify.
George Ticknor was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and opened a law office in Boston.
Professor Sylvestre François Lacroix’s TRAITÉ ÉLÉMENTAIRE D’ARITHMÉTIQUE, A L’USAGE DE L’ÉCOLE
me
CENTRALE DES QUATRE-NATIONS (A Paris: Chez M
veuve Courcier, Imprimeur-Libraire pour les
o
Mathématiques, quai des Augustins, n 57).
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1815
Deciding that the law was not for him, Boston attorney George Ticknor went off to study philology and the
ancient classics at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
The German Confederation was established, that would be gradually rearranging both its borders and its inner
unities until Ministerpräsident Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck’s national unification of 1871:
WALDEN: Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty
states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a
German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation
itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by
the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an
unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture
and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless
expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million
households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is
in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of
life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that
it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice,
and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should
live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.
1817
November 25, Tuesday: Thomas Jefferson wrote George Ticknor, Harvard College’s new Smith Professor of
French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, about the need of the Republic for an informed citizenry,
repeating among other old wisdoms the Baconian maxim that
Knowledge is Power.
(We may note that in this year of 1817 Harvard, using funding obtained through the selling of slaves in the
sugarcane fields of Antigua, was creating its new Law School.)
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1819
Adam Gurowski was expelled from the gymnasium of Kalisz, Poland for revolutionary demonstration (he
would, at various German universities, continue his studies, being at one point a student of philosophy under
G.W.F. Hegel; at some point he would lose an eye, presumably as the unintended but not to be unexpected
result of a student saber duel of the sort then prevalent).
At about this period a Germanization of Boston intellectual culture would be beginning, with the return from
study at German universities of George Ticknor2 and Edward Everett.
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
1820
While attending the public schools of Mühlhausen and the city Gymnasium, John Augustus Roebling had also
been being tutored privately to qualify him for entrance to the Royal Polytechnic School at Berlin. At the
Institute during the 1820s he would be studying under G.W.F. Hegel and the tradition in the Roebling family,
however accurate it might be, has become that he was this philosopher’s favorite:
It is impossible to study him diligently and not be profoundly influenced
by his teachings, and for a youth like John A. Roebling to have been brought
into intimate contact with his dominating personality, was ... a privilege,
because it opened the boy’s eyes to the spiritual reality back of the
change and decay of material phenomena....
2. Both Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau would have classes under Professor Ticknor.
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His course of study at the Institute, however, would have consisted mostly of architecture and engineering,
bridge construction, hydraulics, and languages, rather than of Hegelian idealist philosophy. Meanwhile, in
America, during this same decade, George Ticknor, an alumnus of Göttingen, would be seeking to introduce
the sorts of reform at Harvard College which would raise it from the level of a high school to that of a
“respectable” high school. And Harvard did try! One of the innovations of this decade, for instance, would be
the tradition of “Class Day,” and an annual reunion of its graduates.
Alexander Young, Jr. graduated from Harvard. He would go on to the Harvard Divinity School, although
perhaps not immediately, as the school listed only the following gentlemen as commencing their ministerial
studies in this year:
Samuel Todd Adams
John Goldsberry (Brown University)
William Farmer
William Henry Furness
Ezra Stiles Gannett
Henry Brown Hersey
Benjamin Kent
Calvin Lincoln
(In these early years of the Divinity School, there were no formal class graduations as students would be in the
habit of studying there for varying periods until they obtained an appropriate offer to enter a pulpit.)
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1824
Samuel Gridley Howe graduated from Harvard Medical School and sailed to participate for six years in the
Greek revolution, first as a soldier, then as a surgeon, then as a participant in the postwar reconstruction.
Professors George Ticknor, Edward Everett, and George Bancroft, as high-minded academic emissaries from
the backwaters in America, went off to Europe to witness real cultural currents. These three Harvard men
(Ticknor the professor of belles lettres; Everett the professor of classics, Bancroft the tutor) would later become
important in Massachusetts politics. While in Europe the three scholars would come belatedly in contact with
the writings left behind by Herr Professor Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling, as
well as with the contemporary writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Contact with German metaphysicians
would reinforce the conservatism of Ticknor and Everett while developing in Bancroft what has been referred
to as “democratic ideals.” Once safely back in Cambridge, the three would serve as catalysts for the new view
of the world. Ticknor would advocate a really higher education, such as transforming Harvard into a university
by broadening its curriculum and testing and grading students rather than tolerating advancement through
mere seniority. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would also be being challenged by these three visitors
to real culture, from the 1830s on, to formulate his new Unitarianism.
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1825
Horatio Greenough graduated from Harvard College and went to Italy for two years. Augustus Addison Gould
graduated and (after a period as a private tutor in Maryland) would study at that institution’s school of medicine
at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
Professor George Ticknor issued REMARKS ON CHANGES LATELY PROPOSED OR ADOPTED IN HARVARD
UNIVERSITY (Boston: Hilliard).
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
George Ticknor campaigned to turn Harvard College from a socialization school for
Boston’s elites to a quality European university. Although his own modern languages
department established an elective curriculum, he was largely unsuccessful.
His REMARKS ON CHANGES remains a readable thesis on why Harvard should adopt a more
professional curriculum and makes for some interesting comparisons with Emerson’s
ideas on education and Thoreau’s later experiences at the college. Essentially,
Ticknor argues that since Harvard has rapidly become a leading US institution, it
should now take responsibility for that role through the improvement of several
key areas of Harvard life. The first and most central —and this relates directly
to Emerson— is teaching. The most a typical Harvard instructor, Ticknor writes,
undertakes “is to ascertain from day to day, whether the young men who are assembled
in his presence, have probably studied the lesson prescribed to them” and there
“his duty stops.” The idea, Ticknor continues, “of a thorough commentary on the
lesson; the idea of making explanations and illustrations of the teacher, of as
much consequence as the recitation of the book, or even of more, is substantially
unknown in our school.” It is hard to imagine Emerson or Thoreau disagreeing with
Ticknor’s vision of a college instructor, but they would and Emerson does
explicitly disagree with Ticknor’s more controversial ideas about professional
scholarship, specialization and research.
[Shawn Gillen, February 1992]
1827
Professor Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert was made a professor at the University of München. In this post,
attempting to produce a religiously grounded interpretation of the cosmos, he would arouse the antagonism of
Lorenz Oken.
Cornelius Conway Felton graduated from Harvard College. Horatio Wood graduated (his copious and
carefully written notes on French and Spanish literature per the lectures of Professor George Ticknor, fresh
from the German universities, would be preserved, and under the influence of Dr. Karl Follen, Horatio would
persist in being a strenuous runner until the 7th decade of his life).
At the Divinity School, the following gentlemen commenced their studies:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Julian Abbot
Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (A.B. Col. [Columbia College?])
Francis Cunningham
Joseph Hawley Dorr (A.B. Bowdoin College)
George Washington Hosmer
Josiah Moore
John Owen (A.B. Bowdoin College)
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•
•
•
•
•
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Ephraim Peabody (A.B. Brown University)
Allen Putnam
George Putnam
John Turner Sargent
David Southard
Oliver Stearns
(In these early years of the divinity school there were no formal class graduations, as students would be in the
habit of remaining until they wrangled the offer of an appropriate pulpit.)
NEW “HARVARD MEN”
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1836
October: Harvard College language instructor Pietro Bachi –a low-status “native informant” sort despite his
being a master of numerous modern European languages, whose mind in the language classrooms was
constantly available as a play-mate for the privileged college lads– donated a piece of black coral from the
Mediterranean Sea to the Boston Society of Natural History.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came home from his 2d extended privileged sojourn in Europe for the study of
various modern European languages, to take over the position of George Ticknor as Smith Professor of French
and Spanish Languages and Literatures at Harvard. He reflected upon his plight:
Perhaps the worst thing in a College Life is this
having your mind constantly a play-mate for boys.
He rented one room of the Craigie House, the high-status historic old mansion at 105 Brattle Street in
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Cambridge.
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Two-thirds of the Longfellow House is in Minnesota!
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1840s, 1850s: In this timeframe several scientists were glimpsing chromosomes under the microscope, but not having
the slightest clue what it was that they were looking at.
Laura Dassow Walls has pointed out in SEEING NEW WORLDS: THOREAU AND HUMBOLDTIAN SCIENCE that to
enact the agenda of exploration and investigation being recommended by Alexander von Humboldt would
require an army of workers — which on the continent of North America was indeed created, in the form of the
tax-funded Corps of Topographical Engineers established by the federal government of the United States of
America.
There were in the first half of the 19th Century a multitude of Congress-sponsored scientific expeditions and
the control of our new federal government was extended in this manner over much of North America.
Geological or natural history surveys funded by state governments had begun in North Carolina in 1823, and
by the end of the 1830s such surveys had been initiated by 13 states. In addition the federal government had
been funding or assisting with exploration since the expedition of Lewis and Clark, but throughout the 1840s
and 1850s the great reconnaissance of the American West was being conducted by Army officers. Lieutenant
John Charles Frémont led only three of these numerous expeditions across the western regions of the North
American continent. Between 1840 and 1860, the US government published 60 enormously expensive multivolume double-folio or oversize treatises on the American West, in addition to 15 treatises on global naval
expeditions and uncounted reports of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Very little of our incessant contemporary
dialog about the “free enterprise system” dates back to that era, and the cost of all this seems to have amounted
to from 1/4th to 1/3d of the annual federal budget without having in any way set off alarm bells in the minds of
the ideologues of the right of the political spectrum!3 Since Humboldt was very much in touch with these
activities, a number of the explorers, scientists, and artists of the period may safely be characterized as
“Humboldt’s Children”:4 personages such as Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Edwin Church, John
Charles Frémont, and Professor Thomas Nuttall. However, Louis Agassiz would also need to be characterized
as having been a protégé of Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, Professor Asa Gray, and Arnold Henri Guyot.
Humboldt corresponded with and was visited by American scientists such as vice-president of the Boston
Society of Natural History Charles T. Jackson, academic scholars such as Harvard professor George Ticknor,
and popular writers such as Washington Irving (to whom in this year we were offering the position of Secretary
of the Navy).
Dr. Augustus Addison Gould of Massachusetts General Hospital became a corresponding member of the
3. NASA, eat your heart out.
4. Goetzmann, William H. NEW LANDS, NEW MEN, AMERICA AND THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF DISCOVERY. NY: Viking, 1986
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Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, of the National
Institute in Washington DC, and of the American Statistical Association. He published a pioneering work in
the United States on the geographical distribution of species, “Results of an Examination of the Shells of
Massachusetts and their Geographical Distribution,” in the Boston Journal of Natural History (Volume 3,
Art. xviii, pp. 483-494).
James Ellsworth De Kay became First Vice-President of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York.
His CATALOGUE OF THE ANIMALS BELONGING TO THE STATE OF N.Y. AS FAR AS THEY HAVE BEEN FIGURED
AND DESCRIBED (made May 7, 1839) appeared on pages 7-14 of the FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE MADE JANUARY 24, 1840 (484 pages, New York Assembly Document
#50) and was reviewed in the American Journal of Science (Volume 40:73-85). (His “Report of the zoological
dept” appeared on pages 15-36 of that same document.)
1854
May:
The family of the William Jackman who had become the author of a captivity-and-escape narrative sold their
land claim near Madison, Wisconsin and traveled overland to Prairie Du Chein, where they boarded the War
Eagle and traveled on the Mississippi River to Prescott, Wisconsin.
A formal “conversation” was staged in Waldo Emerson’s study, between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, with
Bronson Alcott and Emerson as two of the conversants, the audience consisting of young Harvard men,
primarily from the Harvard Divinity School. Among these was Edwin Morton of Plymouth. Emerson opened
the event by stating with confidence that literature could be, in America, a young man’s occupation and breadwinner. There followed a consideration of various Harvard professors and tutors, such as Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Jones Very, James Walker, etc.
1871
January 26, Thursday: An armistice was signed between Germany and the French Republic.
A meeting of 21 Rugby teams at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London created Rugby Union Football.
Giulio Ricordi wrote to Giuseppe Verdi that he recently met with Arrigo Boito. He reported that Boito would
be thrilled to write the libretto to a projected Nerone to be composed by Verdi. Verdi would not create the opera
but this would be the beginning of a working relationship between the two.
George Ticknor died in Boston at the age of 79.
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1963
Theodore Rawson Crane edited THE COLLEGES AND THE PUBLIC, 1787-1862 (NY: Columbia UP).
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
This handy collection of seminal historical essays on the American University is
a rich source for research and understanding. Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the
Late Peter Carr,” William B. Roger’s “On The University of Virginia,” William
Manning’s “The Key of Liberty” and other historical documents are annotated
elsewhere in this bibliography, but Theodore Rawson’s Crane introduction is also
worth noting. Although Professor Crane’s historical methodology may be somewhat
dated, it is still a well-written summary of the history of American colleges from
1787-1862. Crane sees the American university, especially in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, as key institution, as it stood between the tug-andpull of the old and new world. Of particular interest is Crane’s observation that
colleges in the United States developed piecemeal and by many overambitious fits
and starts, against, he writes, “the background of a chronic shortage of adequately
prepared students, willing to invest time and money in academic studies and to
sacrifice countless immediate rewards.” Consequently, early American universities
had to create educational “bargains” to attract students and admit underprepared
students to shuck off charges that they were catering solely to the aristocracy.
Against this environment and the suspicion of many early Americans against
intellectuals, George Ticknor and others attempted to transplant European-style
scholarship, while James Marsh, the transcendentalist president of the University
of Vermont, rearranged course offerings to permit free electives and departmental
specialization. Gradually, however, the traditional “classical curriculum,”
captured in the Yale Report in 1828 came to dominant American institutional
pedagogy until the 1850s, when Francis Wayland and Henry Phillip Tappan’s attempt
to modify the university steered it on a course similar to the modern day university
(see entries on the Yale Report and Francis Wayland for more information).
[Shawn Gillen, February 1992]
As part of this, an essay by President Francis Wayland of Brown University was republished that had been
entitled “Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System,” and in which he had railed against the incompetence of
the faculty, the apathy of the students and the trustees, and the general low quality of American institutions of
education — his pleas, like those of George Ticknor, for an expanded curriculum, a system of electives, and
faculty salaries tied to student fees, were simply being ignored!
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,
such as extensive quotations and reproductions of
images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great
deal of special work product of Austin Meredith,
copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will
eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some
of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button
invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap
through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—
allows for an utter alteration of the context within
which one is experiencing a specific content already
being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin
Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by
all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any
material from such files, must be obtained in advance
in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”
Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please
contact the project at <[email protected]>.
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until
tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”
in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: April 17, 2013
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a
human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we
have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of
the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What
these chronological lists are: they are research reports
compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules
which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.
To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a
button.
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious
deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules
stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and
then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of
the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely
resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and
love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,
and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes
available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the
creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out
of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking
and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of
a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and
upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge.
Place your requests with <[email protected]>.
Arrgh.
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