George Lyman Kittredge

Early life and education

Kittredge was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 28, 1860. His father, Edward "Kit" Lyman Kittredge, had participated in the California Gold Rush of 1849, had been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across the desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family. Their precocious and bookish son George attended The Roxbury Latin School, which then had about a hundred pupils. George consistently led his class in marks and won a scholarship to Harvard, which he entered in 1878.

As a freshman, George lived at home in Boston and walked to Harvard every day to save money. Kittredge garnered highest honors and joined several clubs, wrote light verse, and won Bowdoin prizes for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek. He also became a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine. In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated undergraduate theatrical performance of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in the original Greek, attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University. In 1882, Kittredge was elected Ivy Orator, and charged to deliver a humorous speech to his graduating class. Graduating with Kittredge that year was Philadelphian Owen Wister, who authored the first Western novel, The Virginian.

Career

Lack of money prevented Kittredge from immediately pursuing graduate studies. From 1883 to 1887, he taught Latin at Phillips Exeter Academy. About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin.

Harvard University

Kittredge joined the faculty at Harvard as an instructor in the autumn of 1888. He was soon promoted and in 1896 succeeded Professor Francis James Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages, which included languages other than Latin or Greek. He and Child had shared the teaching of Harvard's English 2 course of William Shakespeare, which Kittredge took over solely in 1896 following Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad scholarship, Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see the project through to publication and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore, serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society. Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad.

English 2, a Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became well known at the university, was a lecture course of about 275 Harvard students. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf. In the German department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions, which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson, a Celticist, English Metrical Romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, and Child's ballad course.

Kittredge's students included Francis Peabody Magoun , Oscar James Campbell Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John A. Lomax, whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge later supported, and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon, James Madison Carpenter, William S. Burroughs and Stith Thompson. Among the most popular of Harvard's teachers throughout his career, Kittredge's students affectionately nicknamed him "Kitty". Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941, in Barnstable, Massachusetts.

Radcliffe College

Women were not admitted to Harvard University until several decades after Kittredge's lifetime, but Kittredge made trips to Radcliffe College to teach a Shakespeare course for women that was similar to Harvard's English 2.

Scholarship

Kittredge's edition of Shakespeare was the standard well beyond his death and continues to be cited occasionally. He was also arguably the leading critic of Geoffrey Chaucer of his time and is considered largely responsible for introducing Chaucer into the canon of college English. His essay on "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" (1912) has traditionally been credited with introducing the idea of the "marriage group" in the Canterbury Tales, though he was not the originator of this phrase. Through his historical researches Kittredge also identified Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur (1485), and hitherto an obscure figure, with a knight and member of Parliament who served with the Earl of Warwick, a discovery that paved the way for further researches into Malory by Edward Hicks, to whose 1928 book on Malory's turbulent career Kittredge supplied the introduction. Kittredge's work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was influential as well.

Kittredge also collected folk tales and songs, writing extensively on the folk lore of New England and on the New England witch trials. He also wrote and co-wrote introductory Latin and English grammar text books. While still teaching at Phillips Exeter he undertook the general editorship of popular English masterpieces for the general public published by the Atheneum Press. At Harvard he collaborated with E. S. Sheldon in editing eleven volumes of the Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, which appeared in 1907, and was a founding member and supervisor of the Harvard University Press. His popular book, written in collaboration with J. B. Greenough, Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901) met with great success and served as a storehouse for teachers. Kittredge was also responsible for the revision of the English used in a translation of the Psalms for the Jewish Publication Society, issued in 1903.

According to his biographer, "Neither Child nor Kittredge, trained classicists and able linguists, had themselves bothered to undergo the limitations of a Ph. D. degree". There is a widely circulated story that when asked why he did not have one, Kittredge was supposed to have replied, "But who would examine me?" However, according to Clifton Fadiman, "Kittredge always maintained that the question was never asked, and if it had been he would never have dreamed of answering in such a manner." On May 17, 1932, during a lecture tour of England, Oxford University conferred on him a D.Litt. honoris causa.

Burdened with no illusions about his erudition, or the lack of it in others, he famously remarked, "There are three persons who know what the word 'Victorian' means, and the other two are dead."

Influence on literary studies

Kittredge and Child belonged to the philological school of scholarship pioneered in 19th century German universities. Philology, especially in its early years, had been conceived as a "total science of civilization, an ideal originally formulated for the study of classical antiquity and then transferred by the German Romanticists to the modern languages.

When the various modern language departments were introduced into American universities in the 1880s, speakers at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1883 had been concerned to counter the popular perception that "English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers", a mere "accomplishment", whereas when "a boy studies Greek you know he has worked hard". Philology "met the desire for facts, for accuracy, and for the imitation of the scientific method which had acquired such an overwhelming prestige" in the United States. It had yielded the discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development. A former Harvard graduate student, James H. Hanford, reminisced how under Kittredge,

Students were expected to talk in a scholarly way in the classroom and on a final examination about Grimm's or Verner's laws, the differentiating characteristics of Anglo-Saxon among the Teutonic languages, the changes in English phonology, inflection, and syntax from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century, the influence of Danish, French and Latin on the English language in its various periods. But these phases of language development were closely associated with the entire cultural history of which they were a part. The philologist is the person who makes his approach to the past through the phenomenon of language. "In the beginning was the word."

The objective was the equipment of a man of real erudition, about whose professional and scientific status there should be no doubt and who could hold up his head in pride among his fellows in the older and more reputable field of classics ... Source and background study, so decried by [later] critics of the philological regime, was conceived of both as a means of interpretation and as an independent contribution to cultural history.

Undergraduate Shakespeare students were required to read six plays extremely slowly and to virtually memorize the texts. "It is the purpose of this course", Kittredge used to remark, "to find out what Shakespeare said and what he meant when he said it." Where Professor Child had often been imposed on in the classroom by students who took advantage of his extremely sweet nature, Kittredge's dramatic classroom manner kept his students on the edge of their seats – lateness, wearing of hats, yawning, and coughing (one student was permanently expelled from the class for this offense) were strictly forbidden. His manner with his graduate students was entirely different. With them he was extremely collegial and invited them to his home for weekly fireside gatherings. There, in dim light, the students read papers which, with his encouragement, would often form the nucleus of subsequent dissertations.

Personal life

In 1886, Kittredge married Frances Eveline Gordon, the daughter of Nathaniel Gordon and Alcina Eveline Sanborn. Her father was a lawyer and philanthropist who had served as president of the New Hampshire Senate and was a deacon in the Second Church of Exeter, New Hampshire. The couple honeymooned in Europe, remaining for a year in Germany, which at that time was a mecca of graduate studies and the mother of distinguished philologists and folklorists. Kittredge had already studied German and, although not formally matriculated, attended courses at the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen, in Old Icelandic and other subjects. In 1887, he published an article for "a learned German periodical" on "A Point In Beowulf." The couple had three children: Francis Gordon (1887–1973), Henry Crocker (1890–1967), and Dora (1893–1974).

Major works

Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Troilus, 1894.

Professor Child, 1897.

Chaucer and Some of his Friends, 1903.

Arthur and Gorlagon, 1903.

The Mother Tongue, 1902, with Sarah Louise Arnold.

Notes on Witchcraft, 1907.

Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage, 1912.

An Advanced English Grammar, with Exercises, 1913.

Chaucer and his Poetry, 1915.

A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight, 1916.

The Old Farmer and His Almanack, 1920.

Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1929.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1936.

The Old Teutonic Idea of the Future Life (the Ingersoll Lecture, 1937)

Legacy and Honors

Kittredge was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1898. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1901. In 1905, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.