Henry Theodore Tuckerman was an American writer, essayist and critic.
Background
Henry Theodore Tuckerman was born on April 20, 1813 in Boston, Massachusetts to Henry Harris Tuckerman (1783–1860) and Ruth Lyman Keating (1787–1823). His parents had the following children: Elizabeth Tuckerman Heath (d. 1847), Henry Theodore Tuckerman, Lucy Keating Tuckerman (1820–1880), Ruth Keating Tuckerman (1821–1896), and Charles Keating Tuckerman (1821–1896). His sister Ruth married Rudolph Bunner, Jr. (1813–1875), the son of Rudolph Bunner (1779–1837), a U. S. Representative from New York.
His first cousins included Edward Tuckerman (1817–1886), the botanist, Samuel Parkman Tuckerman (1819–1890), the composer, and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873), the poet.
Education
The elder Tuckerman, a prosperous merchant, sent his son to the Latin School and thence to Harvard, where, however, the young man remained for only two years.
Harvard in 1850 gave him the honorary degree of M. A.
Career
Ill health caused him to seek relaxation in foreign travel, and he spent the years 1833-34 mostly in Italy, where he began his lifelong, romantic devotion to literature and art.
Upon his return he published The Italian Sketch Book (1835). The years 1836-38, passed again in Italy and Sicily, resulted in a travel romance, Isabel, or Sicily, a Pilgrimage (1839).
Tuckerman now determined upon a literary career, and with his return to Boston started contributing poems and essays to periodicals. For a time in 1843 he edited the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion, but in 1845 he removed to New York City, where he settled down to a quiet literary and social life.
A brief visit to England in 1852-53 was the basis of a small volume, A Month in England (1853), which embodied reflections on English life and art.
In his essay "New England Philosophy" (The Optimist), he decries the national spirit of commercialism, which carries with it "want of serenity" and of poetic feeling. His works of travel, in their emphasis on the picturesque and on the historic and literary associations of European life, as well as in their quiet, leisurely style, show the influence of Irving and sometimes of Sterne.
As a literary critic, Tuckerman is best understood in the light of his essay on Hazlitt (Characteristics of Literature, second series), where he finds the function of the critic that of feeler and sympathizer, as well as that of analyst. Following more or less Hazlitt's critical manner are his Thoughts on the Poets (1846) and the two series of Characteristics of Literature (1849, 1851).
Always fascinated by pictorial art and sculpture, Tuckerman produced in 1847 Artist-Life, or Sketches of American Painters, which twenty years later he expanded into a significant volume, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (1867).
His interest in biography found expression in The Life of Silas Talbot (1850), Mental Portraits (1853), Essays, Biographical and Critical (1857), and The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (1871).
Characteristic familiar essays are collected in The Optimist (1850) and The Criterion (1866), and a series of Irvingesque sketches in Leaves from the Diary of a Dreamer (1853).
A volume of Poems (1851) shows many of the traits discernible in his prose--love of retirement, interest in art, fascination with the historic and literary associations of Italy, and indulgence in sentiment that sometimes passed into sentimentality.
Perhaps his work of greatest lasting importance is America and Her Commentators: with a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United States (1864).
Tuckerman entered freely into the social life of New York, having as friends such men as Washington Irving, Dr. John W. Francis, and Fitz-Greene Halleck.
His love of the city of his adoption is evinced in his edition (1865) of Dr. Francis' Old New York. Representing with Rufus W. Griswold and Evert A. Duyckinck the easy, romantic scholarship of the forties and fifties in America, he readily passed in his day for a man of genius, having even a small English audience.
He died in New York City and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachussets.
Personality
He was of a quiet and retiring nature.
