Ballad editor, literary scholar, and a founder of the American Folklore Society. One of eight children in the family of a sailmaker in Boston, Child graduated from Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he subsequently became a tutor, first in madiematics, then in history and political economics. After study at the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen, he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and, finally in 1876, Harvard’s first professor of English. Renowned as a scholar, revered as a teacher, and admired as an administrator, when he was in Germany Child became a great admirer of the brothers Grimm and was thoroughly imbued with the scholarly techniques of the German philologists, whose methods, relatively new to the United States, he adhered to for the rest of his life. These methods allowed him to edit The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser and to publish a volume modestly entided Observations on the Language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, perhaps the first truly scientific analysis of the Middle English language. In addition, he lectured and wrote extensively on the works of Shakespeare, taught courses on the full range of English literature, and was constantly involved in the teaching of what today would be called composition. Among his students and colleagues were such influential scholars as George Lyman Kittredge, Francis Barton Gummere, and Phillips Barry. Despite the excellence of his literary work, Child is known primarily for his edition of the five-volume work titled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads ([1882–1898] 1965). Child’s approach to ballads was governed by his training in the methods of German philologists. Unlike such predecessors as Percy, Scott, and Jamieson, who also looked upon ballads as a part of the English literary heritage, Child subjected ballad texts to the same rigorous scrutiny he had applied to the poetry of Spenser and the language of Chaucer. In addition to reproducing every text exactly as he found it, Child attempted in his notes to set each text in its own narrative tradition and sought narrative parallels internationally, a practice followed in Scandinavia by such editors as Svend Grundtvig. Indeed, so close are the editorial techniques employed by Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads and Svend Grundtvig in Danmarks gamleFolkeviser (1853) that one must see Child and Grundtvig as intellectual collaborators, a fact borne out by their correspondence (Hustvedt 1930). Moreover, neither Child nor Grundtvig was a field collector, and Child’s edition of 305 ballad types, which he saw as definitive, derived with very few exceptions from manuscripts or books, as do most of Grundtvig’s 539 Danish types. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads has served in the English-speaking world as the definer of the ballad genre: Ballads are what appear in Child! Though folklorists often decry Child’s dependence upon manuscripts and printed materials, though ethnomusicologists lament his lack of attention to music, and though popularists question his apparent notion that ballad singing was dead when he began his editorial work, there is absolutely no doubt that Francis James Child laid the groundwork for ballad study in the 20th century.
W.Edson Richmond.
References
Child, Francisjames. [1882–1898] 1965. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. In. New York: Dover. ——. 1902. Ballads. The Universal Cyclopedia. New York: Appleton. ——. [1930] 1972. Letters on Scottish Balladsfrom Professor Child to W.W. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions. James, Thelma. 1933. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads of F.J.Child. Journal ofAmerican Folklore 46:51–68. Leach, MacEdward, and Tristram P.Coffm. The Critics and the Ballad. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 12–19. Hustvedt, Sigurd Bernhard. 1930. Francis James Child and Other Americans; and Appendix A: The Grundtvig-Child Correspondence. In Ballad Books and Ballad Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 205–229, 241–300.