(Prose and Verse. 236 pages.)
Prose and Verse. 236 pages.
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editor philologist teacher scholars
William James Rolfe was born in Newburyport, Massachussets, United States. He was the eldest child of John and Lydia Davis (Moulton) Rolfe and eighth in descent from Henry Rolfe, who, with his wife and son, emigrated from England in 1635 and settled in Newbury. His father was a hatter. Rolfe spent an active, happy boyhood in Haverhill and Lowell.
Rolfe graduated from the Lowell High School, learned proofreading from the editor of the Lowell Daily Courier, spent a year in the counting-room of a cotton-mill, and attended Amherst College for three years as a member of the class of 1849. During the long winter vacations he taught country schools to defray his expenses. He greatly enjoyed his years at Amherst, but in 1848 he departed, feeling that it would be a waste of time to stay longer. He always cherished a strong affection for his college and received honorary degrees from it in 1865 and 1887.
After serving a short apprenticeship at Kirkwood Academy in Maryland, he was for twenty years a schoolmaster in his native state: first as principal and sole teacher in Day's Academy, Wrentham (1848 - 52) a strenuous but educative experience and afterward as principal or master of the Dorchester High School (1852 - 57), the Lawrence High School (1857 - 61), the Salem High School (1861 - 62), and the Cambridge High School (1862 - 68). What made his work significant was his introduction into the school curriculum of regular instruction in English literature. He had felt keenly the lack of such instruction in his own youth and found a sympathetic response among his pupils. For several years he did not realize that he was the pioneer of a sweeping reform in American secondary education. His work, however, came early to the attention of Cornelius Conway Felton and Francis James Child and won their approbation, and in 1859 Harvard College conferred on him the honorary degree of A. M. In 1868 Rolfe retired from regular teaching and made the first of his many voyages to Europe. For the rest of his long life, he continued to live in Cambridge, devoting himself to various literary activities, but chiefly to the preparation of school books. He taught in the summer sessions of several universities, was president of the Martha's Vineyard Summer Institute (1882 - 88) and of the Emerson College of Oratory, Boston (1903 - 08). Until well advanced in years he was an enthusiastic traveler and tramper. In particular, he had an intimate and affectionate knowledge of every trail and summit in the White Mountains. Thanks to methodical habits of work and to the care with which he guarded his not too robust health, he accomplished an astonishing amount of work. He had the passion for accuracy and thoroughness of a born textual critic, but because these qualities were expended on the editing of school books Rolfe has not received quite the recognition that he deserves. He was appreciated, however, by Child and H. H. Furness in the United States and by Tennyson, Browning, Furnivall, and Halliwell-Phillipps in England. In 1907 he reckoned that he had written or edited 144 volumes in addition to his voluminous contributions to newspapers and periodicals. His first venture was A Handbook of Latin Poetry (1866), edited in collaboration with J. H. Hanson. This was followed by a series of science textbooks done in collaboration with J. A. Gillet and by the Satchel Guide for the Vacation Tourist in Europe (1872), which underwent annual revisions for many years. From 1869 to 1893 he was co-editor with J. R. Nichols of the Boston Journal of Chemistry and its successor, Popular Science News. He produced a long series of school editions of various English classics: The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (12 vols. , 1895 - 98) and the "Cambridge edition" of The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1898); The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (1888), based on a thorough, and much needed, collation of the original editions; and two school editions, each in forty volumes, of Shakespeare (1871-84 and 1903 - 06). No other editions of Shakespeare have been so widely used in the United States, and the originality, pithiness, and sound scholarship of his annotations have been often praised. A true child of his time, Rolfe idolized Shakespeare and expurgated what he wrote. His innumerable notes on Shakespeare, published for the most part in the Critic, the Literary World, and the Nation, are always exact and pointed. He also published A Life of William Shakespeare (1904). The original manuscript of this work was stolen, and Rolfe rewrote it completely The last of his characteristic letters to the Nation was published June 30, 1910; the last to the New York Evening Post appeared on July 7, the day of his death.
(Prose and Verse. 236 pages.)
book
He had the passion for accuracy and thoroughness of a born textual critic, but because these qualities were expended on the editing of school books Rolfe has not received quite the recognition that he deserves.
He was married July 30, 1856, to Eliza Jane Carew, of Dorchester, who had been one of his pupils. She died March 19, 1900. Their three sons outlived him. Rolfe died at the home of a son on Martha's Vineyard and was buried in Newburyport. Sound of mind and happily occupied to the end, he seems not to have anticipated death at the age of eighty-two.
