Francis James Child

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Francis James Child

Francis James Child (* 1. February 1825 in Boston , Massachusetts ; † 11. September 1896 ) was a US -American philologist and folklorist .

Child had been Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University since he was 26 . He became known as a collector of over 300 folk ballads , which came out under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads .

Life

Child was born the third of eight children to sailmaker Joseph Child and his wife Mary James Child in Boston. He attended Harvard College, graduated and was initially from 1846 to 1848 tutor of mathematics and 1849 of history and political economy. He borrowed money for a trip to Europe, took a leave of absence and studied from 1849 to 1851 in Berlin and philosophy and Germanic philology at the University of Göttingen .

Upon his return, Child was appointed "Boylston Professor". In 1855 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He was the editor-in-chief of British poets , a series that appeared in 150 volumes. Child brought out five volumes of poems by Edmund Spenser and the Observations on the language of Chaucer . Child finally became the first Harvard professor of English in 1876 and then devoted himself to teaching and studying literature. As a professor, he introduced many of his students to these poets as well as William Shakespeare and the Romantics.

In 1860 he married Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick with whom he had three daughters and a son.

Collection of English and Scottish ballads

Child was friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes , Henry James and William James and Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908). Child devoted many years to the study of traditional literature and oral traditions and the preservation of traditions and folk ballads. His first collection of these folk songs appeared in eight small volumes of the British Poets series in 1857/58 . His aim, however, was a comprehensive record of all known English and Scottish ballads, as well as their American and Canadian variants. He meticulously compiled manuscripts, wrote interpretations and tried to fathom the inconsistencies in the texts. He also had to come to terms with collectors such as Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery or the clergyman Sabine Baring-Gould .

For his second collection, which became known in English-speaking countries as Child Ballads , Child brought together 305 ballads, which were published in five volumes (or ten volumes in two sub-volumes each) between 1882 and 1898. Among them were the ballads of "Lord Randall", " Sir Patrick Spens " and several variations of the adventures of Robin Hood . The song about "Barbara Allen" has been reprinted and sung for generations. "Thomas the Rhymer" or "Tam Lin" had survived the centuries even without written records. Child systematically compared the British ballads with those in other languages, for example with Danish, Serbian or Turkish ballads.

Fonts (selection)

  • Editor and publisher: British poets. Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1856-1871, OCLC 609563082 ( babel.hathitrust.org ).
  • Observations on the language of Chaucer. (= Library of English literature. LEL 40030). Welsh, Bigelow, and Co., Cambridge 1862, OCLC 14926450 .
  • The English and Scottish popular ballads. Houghton, Mifflin and company, Boston 1882-1898, OCLC 457657823 .

Correspondence:

  • Francis James Child, William Walker: Letters on Scottish ballads from Professor Francis J. Child to WW. Bon-Accord Pr., Aberdeen 1930, OCLC 221231045 .
  • Francis James Child, James Russell Lowell, MA De Wolfe Howe, George William Cottrell: The scholar-friends. Letters of Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1952, OCLC 230415 .

literature

  • Charles Eliot Norton: Francis James Child. Boston circa 1897, OCLC 236235542 .

Web links

Wikisource: Child's Collected Ballads  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Francis James Child on harvardmagazine.com
  2. ↑ Collection: Francis James Child English and Scottish popular ballad research materials - MS Am 2349. hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu, accessed on December 11, 2018 (English, see under Additional Description - Biographical / Historical ).
personal data
SURNAME Child, Francis James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Philologist and folklorist
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1825
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH September 11, 1896
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts