![Item #248403 Autograph Letter, Signed (“Geo. Ticknor”) to Mr. [James S.] Wadsworth, concerning a place at school for Wadsworth’s son Charlie or “Tick”. George Ticknor.](https://jamescumminsbookseller.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/248403.jpg?width=768&height=1000&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1300483767)
Autograph Letter, Signed (“Geo. Ticknor”) to Mr. [James S.] Wadsworth, concerning a place at school for Wadsworth’s son Charlie or “Tick”.
Boston: 21 November 1852.
Price: $1,000.00
About the item
3 pp., on a single folded sheet. 1 vols. 8vo. Old folds. Fine. Tan half morocco clamshell.
Item #248403
Fine, substantial letter from the great American educator and author George Ticknor (1791-1871) to Mr Wadsworth concerning efforts Ticknor has made concerning the education of his young son Charlie (or “Tick”), proposing to place him with “my kinsman Eliot” as soon as possible. “Charlie spent last Saturday night with us and the whole of Sunday, except when he was with one of his New York teachers. We were so pleased with his material, mainly paintings — and from all I could learn from himself as well as from other sources, I think he is doing well. His love of books is quite strongly marked and I noticed his inquiries about some minutiae of learning that usually came later and are excellent symptoms both of his own coming scholarship and that f his teacher. I should like to have him smoke a little less, get to bed earlier and give up strong coffee — all on account of his nervous temperament … But I do not expect my experience to profit much, when I have profited so little by it myself.” Ticknor, a precocious Dartmouth graduate of the class of 1807, was a Boston patrician among whose students while he taught at Harvard were numbered James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and Henry David Thoreau. He is best remembered for his History of Spanish Literature, first published in 1849, and for being the guiding force behind the establishment of the Boston Public Library (which opened in 1854). Ticknor’s wife, Anna Eliot, was also from a prominent Boston merchant family. The recipient is James S. Wadsworth of Geneseo, N.Y., educated at Harvard and Yale, who married Mary Craig Wharton of Philadelphia in 1834; they had six children of whom the eldest was Charles. Wadsworth brought a contingent of troops from New York to Washington and served first as a volunteer on McDowell’s staff before being appointed brigadier general; he was killed in battle at the Wilderness in May 1864.
