Thomas Randolph Price

Background

He was born on March 18, 1839 in Richmond, Virginia, United States, was named for his father; his mother, Christian Elizabeth (Hall), was the grand-daughter of the second bishop of Virginia, Richard Channing Moore

Education

In 1858 Price received the degree of A. M. from the University of Virginia, where he had formed what was to be a lifelong friendship with Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. After dutifully pursuing the study of law for a year more in the University, he received from his father the freedom and the means to follow his bent toward the study of literature.

At Berlin from 1859 he studied Latin with Benary and Haupt, Greek with Boeckh, Sanskrit and comparative grammar with Bopp and Steinthal; at Kiel he attended lectures of Curtius. In Greece in the spring of 1861 he was occupied less at the university than with topography, archeology, and the modern language.

Career

When he was about to receive his doctorate, he sacrificed his studies to Virginia, ran the blockade on Christmas Eve, 1862, became a member of J. E. B. Stuart's staff, was transferred later to the bureau of engineers, and was about to be commissioned major when the war ended. Later in Richmond he was teaching at the University School. He was professor of Greek and Latin in Randolph-Macon College, 1869-70, having previously collaborated on the first part of Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar (1867); in 1870 he became professor of Greek and English and from 1876 to 1882 was professor of Greek in the University of Virginia, where his last task was an essay, at once scientific and charming, on "The Color-System of Vergil". He was professor of English in Columbia University from 1882 until his death.

His own writing was so firm and finished that students readily appreciated its lucid order. In a wider sense form controlled all his teaching of literature.

He died May 7, 1903.

Achievements

• Thomas Randolph Price was the author, who concentrated on forms itself, its capacity, its adaptation, its significance as a stage in linguistic consciousness or in artistic development. His most famous works: "The Color-System of Vergil" and "Language versus Literature at Oxford". Besides, his lectures on the technique of the English paragraph were sounder, larger, and more practical than anything published up to that time. His sucess was in his unique method - to kindred minds keenly suggestive.

Works

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• book

  • The construction and types of Shakespeare's verse as seen in the Othello

    (This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)

Views

His consistent purpose was to realize for American youth the educational values of philology. He believed, philology comprehended the whole field of expression in words; and each of its aspects depended on all the others. In his rebuttal of J. Churton Collins' "Language versus Literature at Oxford" he urged that the true study of literature was the study, not of theories about relations of history and philosophy and aesthetics, but of the meaning and significance of the great works of literature themselves.

He was a penetrative critic of Ibsen, his keenest interest was in dramaturgy. He interrogated the art, not the artist.

Connections

On December 26, 1867, he married Lizzie Triplett. They had a daughter.

Mother:

Christian Elizabeth (Hall)

Spouse:

Lizzie Triplett

ancestor:

Richard Channing Moore

Friend:

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve