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Francis James Child

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Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. As Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, Child also produced influential editions of English poetry.

Francis J. Child

Francis James Child (1825-1896), circa 1890. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Life[]

Overview[]

Child, born at Boston, was a professor at Harvard and a foremost student of early English, especially of ancient ballads in America. He edited the American edition of English Poets in 130 volumes, and English and Scottish Ballads. He was also a profound student of Chaucer, and published Observations on the Language of Chaucer, and Observations on the Language of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'.[1]

Youth and education[]

Child was born in Boston on February 1, 1825.[2]

He graduated at Harvard in 1846, taking the highest rank in his class in all subjects.[2]

Career[]

Child was a tutor in mathematics in 1846–1848; and in 1848 was transferred to a tutorship in history, political economy and English. After 2 years of study in Europe, in 1851 he succeeded Edward T. Channing as Boylston professor of rhetoric, oratory and elocution.[2]

Child studied the English drama (having edited Four Old Plays in 1848) and Germanic philology, the latter at Berlin and Göttingen during a leave of absence, 1849–1853; and he took general editorial supervision of a large collection of the British poets, published in Boston in 1853 and following years. He edited Spenser (5 vols., Boston, 1855), and for a time planned an edition of Chaucer, but contented himself with a treatise, in the 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.[2]

His largest undertaking, however, grew out of an original collection, in his British Poets series, of English and Scottish Ballads, selected and edited by himself, in 8 small volumes (Boston, 1857–1858). Thenceforward the leisure of his life — much increased by his transfer, in 1876, to the new professorship of English — was devoted to the comparative study of British vernacular ballads.[2]

He accumulated, in the university library, one of the largest folklore collections in existence, studied manuscript rather than printed sources, and carried his investigations into the ballads of all other tongues, meanwhile giving a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving.[2]

At last his final collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, initially in 10 parts (1882–1898), and then in 5 quarto volumes, which remain the authoritative treasury of their subject.[2]

Professor Child worked—and overworked—to the last, dying in Boston on September 11, 1896, having completed his task save for a general introduction and bibliography. A sympathetic biographical sketch was prefixed to the work by his pupil and successor George L. Kittredge.[2]

See also[]

  • Il Pesceballo

References[]

  • Atkinson, David. "The English Revival Canon: Child Ballads and the Invention of Tradition". The Journal of American Folklore: 114: 453 (Summer, 2001): 370-80.
  • Atkinson, David. The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002.
  • Cheeseman, Tom, and Sigrid Rieuwerts, editors. Ballads into Books: The Legacies of Francis James Child. Selected Papers from the 26th International Ballad Conference (SIEF Ballad Commission), Swansea, Wales, 19–24 July 1996. Berlin (etc.): Peter Lang Verlagsgruppe, (Second Revised Edition) 1999.
  •  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Child, Francis James". Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 135. . Wikisource, Web, July 6, 2025.
  • Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
  • Rieuwerts, Sigrid. "'The Genuine Ballads of the People': F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause". Journal of Folklore Research, 31: 1-3 (1994): 1-34.
  • Rudy, Jill Terry. "Considering Rhetoric's Wayward Child: Ballad Scholarship and Intradisciplinary Conflict." Journal of Folklore Research: 35: 2 (May 1998): 85–98.
  • Rudy, Jill Terry. "Transforming Audiences for Oral Tradition: Child, Kittredge, Thompson, and Connections of Folklore and English Studies." College English: 66: 5 (May 2004).

Notes[]

  1. ↑ John William Cousin, "Child, Francis J.," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910, 83. Web, Dec. 24, 2017.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Encyclopædia Britannica 1911, v.6, 135.

External links[]

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 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at: Child, Francis James

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