Online Encyclopedia

FRANCIS JAMES CHILD (1825-1896)

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Originally appearing in Volume V06, Page 135 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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FRANCIS JAMES CHILD (1825-1896)  ,
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American scholar and educationist, was born in Boston on the 1st of
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February 1825 . He graduated at Harvard in 1846, taking the highest rank in his class in all subjects; was tutor in mathematics in 1846-1848; and in 1848 was transferred to a tutorship in
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history,
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political
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economy and
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English . After two years of study in
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Europe, in 1851 he succeeded
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Edward T . Charming as Boylston professor of rhetoric, oratory and elocution . Child studied the English drama (having edited Four Old Plays in 1848) and Germanic
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philology, the latter at Berlin and
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Gottingen during a leave of absence, 1849-18J3; and he took general editorial supervision of a large collection of the
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British poets, published in Boston in 1853 and following years . He edited Spenser (5 vols., Boston, 1855), and at one time planned an edition of Chaucer, but
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con-tented himself with a
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treatise, in the
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Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1863, entitled " Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," which did much to establish Chaucerian grammar, pronunciation and scansion as now generally understood . His largest undertaking, however, grew out of an
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original collection, in his British Poets series, of English and Scottish
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Ballads, selected and edited by himself, in eight small volumes (Boston, 1857-1858) . Thence-forward the leisure of his life—much increased by his transfer, in 1876, to the new professorship of English—was devoted to the
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comparative study of British vernacular ballads . He ac-cumulated, in the university library, one of the largest
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folklore collections in existence, studied
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manuscript rather than printed
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sources, and carried his investigations into the ballads of all other tongues, meanwhile giving a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving . At last his final collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, at first in ten parts (1882-1898), and then in five
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quarto volumes, which remain the authoritative
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treasury of their subject . Professor Child worked—and overworked—to the last, dying in Boston on the 1th of September 1896, having completed his task save for a general introduction and bibliography . A sympathetic
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biographical sketch was prefixed to the
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work by his pupil and successor George L .

Kittredge .

End of Article: FRANCIS JAMES CHILD (1825-1896)
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