Felix Emanuel Schelling

Background

Felix Emanuel was born on September 3, 1858 in New Albany, Indiana, United States. His family background was cosmopolitan.

His father, Felix Schelling, had left the Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where he was born, and the profession of medicine, to which he had been trained, to become a teacher of music. Coming to America after the revolutions of 1848, he married in Louisville, Rose, the daughter of George Busby White of Cambridge, England. Ultimately, after some years in the East and in Europe, he became director of the St. Louis Conservatory of Music. He wished both his sons to become musicians, and the younger, Ernest Henry Schelling, achieved international renown as a concert pianist, composer, and conductor.

Education

Felix, the elder son, studied music with Henry C. Timm and became a gifted pianist, but decided against becoming a professional performer. Owing to frail health and the mobility of the family, he had received his early schooling from tutors and from his mother. He entered the University of Pennsylvania as a sophomore, received his A. B. degree in 1881, and continued in the graduate and law schools, receiving an LL. B. in 1883 and an A. M. in 1884.

Career

Schelling began a law practice but abandoned it in 1886 to become an instructor in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

The task of reorganization was entrusted to him in 1888. Among his startling innovations was a course in modern novelists (at that time Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Austen, Eliot, and Hawthorne) and, somewhat later, the appointment of a specialist in American literature. Under his direction the department became large and powerful, assuming in the humanities the dominance formerly held by the classics department.

Among the books was an inspired anthology, A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (1895), and a graceful study, The English Lyric (1913); among the articles, one that changed the contours of seventeenth-century literary history: "Ben Jonson and the Classical School" (1898). His interest in typological and generic studies in the drama was indicated by his The English Chronicle Play (1902). The interest bore fruit in his best-known work, Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642 (2 vols. , 1908). A more charming book, and more indicative of his gifts as a writer, is English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare (1910).

He produced several anthologies and editions, including the Everyman Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (2 vols. , 1910) and Typical Elizabethan Plays (1926). In 1923, after thirty years of tenure of the John Welsh Centennial Professorship of History and English Literature, twenty of his former students issued the Schelling Anniversary Papers. Later he held a professorship established in his name, and in 1935 an appreciation and bibliography was issued by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

His last years were spent as an invalid in Mount Vernon, New York. He died at Mount Vernon at the age of eighty-seven of myocarditis.

Achievements

• Felix Emanuel Schelling was the real creator of a department of English language and literature in University of Pennsylvania in the modern sense. Schelling introduced a Ph. D. program, complete with the Germanic seminar, and set an example in creative scholarship by becoming the first American student of English Renaissance literature and drama to be taken seriously in England. He was the author and/or editor of over thirty books on Elizabethan literature, his famous works: A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (1895), English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare (1910), Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642 (1908).

Works

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• book

  • English Literature During the Lifetime of Shakespeare

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642: A History of the Drama in England from the Accession of Queen Elizabeth to the Closing of the Theaters, to Which Is PR

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics;

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • A Book of Seventeenth Century Lyrics;

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Ben Jonson and the Classical School

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Membership

Schelling was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of the American Philosophical Society and of the Modern Language Association of America.

Personality

Schelling was tall and lean, with aristocratic mien and deportment. The diversity of his talents and interests, and the intensity of his devotion to arts and letters, were formidable. There was a Renaissance ruthlessness as well as courtliness about his manners, and association with him could be abrasive.

Connections

On March 7, 1886, Schelling married Caroline, the daughter of James Alexander Derbyshire, a Quaker of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A daughter, Dorothea Derbyshire, was born in 1890, a son, Felix, in 1895. The daughter became the wife of Prof. Joseph Seronde of Yale, the son an artist and art teacher. Schelling's wife died in 1935. Later he was cared for by the artist Gertrude Bueb, who in 1939 became his wife.

Father:

Felix Schelling

Mother:

Rose (White) Schelling

Spouse:

Caroline Derbyshire

Spouse:

Gertrude Bueb

son :

Felix Schelling

father-in-law:

James Alexander Derbyshire

Grandfather:

George Busby White

Daughter:

Dorothea Derbyshire

Brother:

Ernest Henry Schelling

teacher:

Henry C. Timm

References

• Who was Who in America: Vol. 2 1943-1950