Charles Townsend Copeland was an American college professor known for more than half a century to students as "Copey".
Background
Charles Townsend Copeland was born on April 27, 1860 in Calais, Maine, United States. He was the eldest child of Henry Clay and Sarah Lowell Copeland. Henry Copeland apparently did well in the lumber business, but the family fortune began to ebb after the panic of 1873.
Education
Copeland entered the Calais High School at thirteen. His one important teacher, Laura Burns, guided him in English (he excelled in punctuation) and remained a friend to whom he was attached throughout her life. Copeland entered Harvard in the autumn of 1878. He received the A. B. cum laude.
Bowdoin gave him Doctor of Letters degree in 1920.
Career
After one year of teaching in a boys' school in New Jersey and one year in the Harvard Law School, Copeland began reviewing books and plays for the Boston Advertiser, and later on for the better-paying Post. It was a liberal course in the journalism of opinion, for Boston then was rich in theaters, and over a ten-year span a novice critic could manage to see most of the great actors and actresses of the day: Booth, Jefferson, Salvini, Bernhardt, Modjeska, Irving, Coquelin aîné, Janauschek, and others. Young Copeland formed a lasting friendship with Minnie Maddern Fiske and later wrote a brief biography of Edwin Booth.
Copeland wrote well, developed a starchy individual style, and never sought to popularize or write straight journalese.
In 1893 he returned to Cambridge, this time for good. In the golden age of Harvard, just before and after the turn of the century, Copeland began teaching English with the rank of instructor at the age of thirty-three. He remained on that lowest rung, correcting daily themes among other chores, for seventeen years. An assistant professor in 1910, he waited seven years more for an associate professorship, and another eight before he succeeded Le Baron Russell Briggs in 1925 as Boylston professor. He was then sixty-five.
President Eliot thought Copeland lazy, and his occasional innocent errant ventures in Boston did not help him up the academic ladder; but in retrospect it seems beyond reason that the advancement of one of Harvard's greatest teachers was so slow.
His famous English 12--Dean Briggs's rival course was English 5--became his living monument. It had been founded by Barrett Wendell in 1884, but it was all Copey's from 1905 on; and when he retired in 1928, a partial roster of his students who had ultimately made their way in the lonely vale of letters included talents as diverse as Van Wyck Brooks, Lee Simonson, Maxwell E. Perkins, Conrad Aiken, Heywood Broun, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Magowan, John Reed, Frederick L. Allen, Walter Lippman, Paul M. Hollister, Oliver La Farge, Robert Benchley, Gilbert Seldes, S. N. Behrman, John Dos Passos, Brooks Atkinson, Malcolm Cowley, Bernard DeVoto, Lawrence Spivak, J. Donald Adams, Stanley Kunitz, Granville Hicks, W. L. White, Corliss Lamont, Robert Sherwood, Walter D. Edmonds; and, from Radcliffe, Helen Keller, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Rachel Field. Those enrolled in English 12 had to read their thousand-word compositions week by week, on schedule, aloud to Copeland for criticism. In his canon, fine exposition depended on the beginning and end of sentences, of paragraphs, and of chapters; these were crucial points--the focal points of emphasis. At any long, entangled Jamesian utterance, "Eschew the swag-bellied sentence" had, like his every critical remark, to be written clearly by the student in the margin. His single charge to each of them good or fair was to write "out of life. "
At least one bellwether story actually emerged from English 12 itself: "The End of the Towpath, " by Walter D. Edmonds. Copey sent it to Scribner's Magazine, where it was published in 1926, the forerunner of Edmonds' many stories and novels concerning the Erie Canal. Copey offered several other vastly popular courses, in which the enrollment sometimes reached as high as 250: Dr. Johnson and his Circle; Sir Walter Scott; The English Letter Writers; and a course concerned with Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Keats, which he finally abandoned.
He wrote no poetry, but he had and professed a poet's love of the sound of words, the reaction of one exacting syllable upon another, the appropriate but unexpected phrase, the dramatic turn of ironic speech, perfection in dialogue from Boswell to Hemingway. Even a stranger at one of his vastly popular public readings could sense this at once simply by the way in which the small man with the cavernous voice would assemble passages from the King James Version; from Shakespeare, Dickens, Fielding, Cowper, Kipling, Borrow, Hudson, de la Mare, Swift, Leacock, Benchley, James Stephens, or Keats.
He would speak of "the cool cucumber innuendo" in Lytton Strachey; "groundswell" under passages in poems that pleased him.
Copeland had lived for a short while in Grays Hall at the south end of the Harvard Yard, moved to Stoughton in 1896, and then, in 1904, to Hollis 15, the famous address where both Emerson and Robert Frost's father had lived before him. There he remained, with gas light and no telephone, surrounded by books, paintings, watercolors, photographs, and other Persian apparatus (his oft-quoted phrase), until old age and the need of physical care forced him to relocate in 1932 to a fifth-floor apartment on Concord Avenue in Cambridge.
Just after the turn of the century the Harvard Lampoon's parody number of the Harvard Crimson listed among fake Faculty Notes: "Professor Copeland will keep late hours tonight. " The late hours toward the end of Copeland's career were kept within the precinct of the College Yard--and by the only man with professorial rank who lived inside it. To the fortunate few, those Monday or other evenings with Copey alone at home in Hollis 15, or sometimes with a guest of honor, remain vivid, if nothing short of sacred, in memory. Unlike Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale, who traveled widely, lectured everywhere, and knew so many in the world of letters, Copey did his fishing from the bank. The guest was usually unannounced, but Copey relied upon a far-flung network of devoted friends to deliver their captures one at a time: Walter de la Mare, H. M. Tomlinson, John Barrymore, Christopher Morley, John Mason Brown, Julian Street, Robert Frost, Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Vincent Benét, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Waldo Peirce, Heywood Broun, Rollo Walter Brown, Henry Beston. Copey was fifty-seven when America entered World War I. Forthwith he set himself up as a volunteer recruiting sergeant, as J. Donald Adams has said. His personal reward was that his students and former students overseas should write him regularly. They did; and several scrapbooks of these letters, read and read aloud to others as they arrived, were proudly preserved. Few teachers in wartime ever kept in touch to such a degree, and on so large a map, as he.
Copey's Victorian biography of Booth is forgotten today; and of the several books which he edited or assembled in collaboration, only one, the excellent Copeland Reader, was a conspicuous success. The Copeland Translations failed. He never managed to write his memoirs, much less One Way of Teaching, whereby we may have lost a little masterpiece.
Copeland died in a hospital in Waverly, Massachussets, in 1952. He was cremated and his ashes buried in Calais.
Views
Quotations:
"I care more for my work, my teaching, than for anything else. "