Ticknor was born on August 1, 1791 at Boston. He was the son of Elisha and Elizabeth (Billings) Ticknor, the widow of Benjamin Curtis, and was a descendant of William Ticknor who came from England to Massachusetts in or before 1646. William Davis Ticknor was a cousin.
His father, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1783, was a teacher before becoming a successful man of business in Boston. George's mother had also been a teacher.
He was fitted for college in the home circle and received a certificate of admission to Dartmouth before he was ten years old, after an examination which, in later life, he termed "perhaps a farce. " He did not enter Dartmouth until he was fourteen, but he was then admitted as a junior.
Graduating in 1807, Ticknor continued with a private tutor the study of Latin and Greek, which he had begun to cultivate at an early age.
After reading law in an office for three years, he was admitted to the bar in 1813, but he realized very soon that the law had no real attraction for him and that the ancient classics had a potent hold on his fancy. As the family fortune left ample opportunity for the purpose, it was decided that he should go to Europe for study.
After a journey through the Mid-Atlantic states he made a visit to "Monticello, " where he was cordially received by former President Jefferson. The latter may then have told him, as he later wrote, about the plans which eventually took form in the University of Virginia.
Ticknor set sail for England in 1815. Among his fellow passengers was Edward Everett; these two scholarly youths were probably the first to go from the United States to German institutions of learning for the express purpose of obtaining a university training more advanced than that possible at home. Ticknor's first visit to Europe lasted four years, and it took him to England, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Inspection of the pages of the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (2 vols. , 1876; new ed. , 1909) reveals the ease with which this American student penetrated into the aristocratic, literary, scientific, and generally scholarly circles of the different European centers to which his travels led him.
Among the scholars, scientists, and men of letters who received him were A. von Humboldt, Byron, Châteaubriand, Humphry Davy, Mme. de Staël, Miss Edgeworth, Goethe, A. W. and F. Schlegel, Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, J. H. Voss, and F. A. Wolf. With many of these notable personages he maintained a correspondence after his return to the United States, and no few of them he saw again on the occasion of later visits to Europe.
At the University of Göttingen, then the leading institution of higher learning in Germany, Ticknor remained in residence for twenty months (1815 - 17) attending lectures, reading assiduously, and forming invaluable personal relations with his various teachers. He ardently applied himself to the acquisition of a practical command of German and a good knowledge of its literature, but was not overimpressed with the worth of German philosophy. Greek also claimed his serious attention in this center of philological activity, and he would probably have continued his devotion to it but for the invitation which came to him before the end of 1816 to enter upon the duties of the recently founded Smith professorship of French and Spanish at Harvard College, with an added professorship of belles-lettres. "Here, " he says in a letter to his father of November 9, 1816, "is at once a new subject of study proposed to me, to which I have paid no attention since I have been here, and which I have not taken into the plan of my studies and travels in Europe. If I am to be a professor in this (Spanish) literature, I must go to Spain". His formal letter of acceptance of the post at Cambridge was written by him at Rome on November 6, 1817, so that he spent a year in consideration of the proposal.
From April to August 1817 he was in Paris, eagerly improving all opportunities of augmenting his knowledge of French and its literature; and from early October to the end of the spring of 1818 he visited various cities of Italy, spending most of his time in Rome, where he took private lessons in Italian. He passed some four months of 1818 in Madrid and made no little progress in Spanish under the guidance of some able tutors, among whom was the Orientalist J. A. Condé. Then, after a few weeks in Portugal, he sailed for England, en route for his native land.
Ticknor returned via Portugal and France to the United Kingdom, and thence home in June 1819.
Ticknor was superbly prepared to teach at Harvard. He knew several languages and literatures, had observed European modes of instruction, and was acquainted with many leading European intellectuals. He lectured on French and Spanish literature and supervised instruction by others of the French and Spanish languages. In 1823 Ticknor and a few colleagues began a partly successful attempt to reform Harvard's rigid organization and curriculum. He built up the staff in his modern language department, notably in 1825 by the appointment of Charles Follen as the first instructor in German at Harvard. The best students in Ticknor's department included later notables such as Francis James Child, James Russell Lowell, John Lothrop Motley, Charles Eliot Norton, and Henry David Thoreau. Having published several short essays and reviews earlier, Ticknor published ten essays between 1824 and 1831, six in the /North American Review/ and all demonstrating profound erudition. He took a variety of civic duties seriously. In 1826 he became a member of the board of visitors of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point and was also involved in a supervisory capacity with banks, hospitals, insurance companies, and schools in Boston.
Ticknor resigned from Harvard in 1835 and was replaced by his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his professorship. Although he had initiated a system of more pragmatic instruction in his department, he was depressed by the lack of progress, and even opposition, elsewhere in the institution. In 1835 he returned to Europe, this time accompanied by his wife and two daughters, and was welcomed as an accomplished academician. The next three years were marked by travel, social triumphs, and intellectual stimulation. Highlights included renewing acquaintances with August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Alexander von Humboldt, attending theaters in Dresden and elsewhere, inspecting Spanish holdings in Vienna's Imperial Library, and buying rare Spanish books wherever he could find them.
In his later years, Ticknor completed his premier scholarly achievement, the History of Spanish Literature. He used the manuscripts of his lectures on Spanish literature at Harvard and the Spanish sections of his 14, 000-volume personal library as the basis for his pioneering study. In its final form, this enormous survey has seventy-one chapters, exhaustive annotations, eight appendices, and totals 1, 797 pages. It is divided into three "periods": from the earliest written material to the beginning of the sixteenth century, with emphasis on old ballads and drama, chronicles, and schools of poetry; from the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, stressing Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, and romantic fiction; and from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, featuring Philip V, the Inquisition, and the theater.
Ticknor's thesis in the History of Spanish Literature is complex. He reasons that the history of French literature had been thoroughly discussed and that the French court writers had divorced themselves and therefore their writings from the mainstream of the French people. Ticknor indicates, however, that Spanish literature was a challenge and, unlike French literature, reflected the morality, sense of loyalty, chivalric honor, and religious extremism of typical Spaniards, while simultaneously promoting in the readers a delight in coarse and violent language and behavior. Ticknor expresses not only his intellectual response to the best Spanish writings but also his dismay at the deleterious effects on the Spanish populace of monarchical and religious despotism and bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. Throughout, he endeavors to show that his treatment of Spanish literature should enable general readers as well as scholars to understand the character of the Spanish people. His indirect purpose was to show, or imply, his preference for American civil liberty and morality. His three-volume history was published in New York and London in 1849 (2d ed. , 1854; 3d expanded ed. , 1863; 4th, expanded ed. , 1872). Most reviews were ecstatic, with one critic in London noting that hardly six experts in Europe were qualified to evaluate it. It was soon translated into Spanish (4 vols. , 1851-1856), German (1852; 2 vols. , 1867), and French (3 vols. , 1864-1872).
In 1852 Ticknor was appointed to a committee to establish the Boston Public Library. Aided by Everett, who was by that time a successful politician and then president of Harvard (1846-1849), Ticknor wrote most of a planning report and saw to its wide distribution. Joshua Bates, a Boston-bred banker in London, read a copy and promptly became the library's chief financier with a pledge of $50, 000. In 1853 Ticknor tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Boston Athenaeum to merge with the planned Boston library, which opened in 1854--with 12, 000 volumes in two small rooms. In June 1856 Ticknor went once more to Europe, armed with lists of needed purchases suggested by experts, and conferred for fourteen months with librarians and book dealers in England, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. In 1860 Ticknor donated 2, 400 of his own books to the Boston library and many more soon thereafter.
More creatively, in 1864 Ticknor published the Life of William Hickling Prescott, a biography of the eminent scholar-historian William Hickling Prescott, who was one of Ticknor's closest friends. Writing the biography provided a comforting distraction from reading war dispatches. His election in 1865 as president of the board of trustees of the Boston Public Library, of which he had been a member, enabled him to do something positive once more. He was instrumental in planning a new and more substantial building for the library and its move into it. He died in Boston two months before the new building opened. In his will he bequeathed his personal collection of books to the library.
Ticknor was a Boston patrician, beautifully educated to be a productive scholar-teacher and a helpful colleague of fellow conservatives. His most enduring scholarly monument is his History of Spanish Literature. His greatest public service was the role he played in establishing the Boston Public Library. Together they reveal his lifelong desire to serve the American public in ways he thought best. The study of Spanish literature would nourish inquiring minds. The library would help prevent an uneducated democracy from impeding the progress and prestige of the United States.
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In his last few years, Ticknor expressed grave fears for the future of his country. He hated slavery but felt that abolition of it would destroy the Union. He wrote a pamphlet praising Daniel Webster in 1831, idolized him in succeeding years, was active with other conservative Bostonians in efforts to appease the South, and in 1860 supported the Constitutional Union party. When conflict proved inevitable and the Civil War began, Ticknor viewed President Abraham Lincoln's policies with alarm, fearing that the Constitution would be destroyed. He inveighed against emancipating southern slaves and supported George Brinton McClellan's bid for the presidency in 1864.
Ticknor was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1821.
In 1821 he married Anna Eliot, the daughter of Samuel Eliot, a wealthy merchant and banker. The couple had four children, two of whom died in infancy.
(1757–1821)
(1753–1819)
(1800–1885 (m. 1821))
(1823–1896)
(1827–1834)
(1833–1880)
(1825–1825)
(1780–1870)
