Richard Grant White (May 23, 1822 – April 8, 1885)[1] was one of the foremost literary and musical critics of his day. He was also a prominent Shakespearean scholar, journalist, social critic, and lawyer. He was born and died in New York City.[2]
Early life
White was born on May 23, 1822, in New York City. He was born to Richard Mansfield White (1797–1849) and Ann Eliza (née Tousey)[a] White (1802–1842),[3] and was eight in descent from John White, a puritan who was one of the founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut.[1] His father, a shipping and commission merchant, was from a wealthy old New England family that lived in New York City.[4] The elder White also served as secretary of the Allaire Iron Works company.[5]
He studied medicine, with Dr. Alfred C. Post, and read law, with Judge Woodruff, and was admitted to the Bar in 1845.[1][3] White, who was brought up as a patrician New Yorker, expected to receive a sizable inheritance from his father. The inheritance never materialized as his father was forced into bankruptcy and died in poverty in 1849 when his business was ruined by the advent of steam-powered shipping.[4]
With no inheritance allowing a life of leisure, White worked as a lawyer and became one of the foremost literary and musical critics of his day. He had a distinguished career in journalism and literature as an editorial writer and musical critic for The Courier and Enquirer, continuing when it merged into The New York World. He wrote many books and articles for the leading American magazines, and contributed to Appleton's and Johnson's Cyclopedias. Words and Their Uses was one of his most noted books.[3] White also authored several prominent national hymns.[10] In an editorial in the New York Times after his death, it was written:[11]
By the death of Mr. Richard Grant White American literature loses an interesting writer and a variously accomplished man. Mr. White's Shakespearean studies are, perhaps, the most satisfactory results of his scholarship; more so, certainly, than his labors in verbal criticism. In these latter an extreme sensitiveness led him to regard every difference of opinion as almost a personal offense, and by reason of this peculiarity of temper his abilities were rated by the reading public less highly than they really deserved.[11]
While White wrote on a wide range of subjects, his essay "The Public-School Failure" from December 1880 established him as a prominent and controversial social critic.[c][12][13] His essay prompted several responses,[14][15] including from the New York Times, which wrote in February 1881, "It is a libel, pure and simple, made up of an exaggerated statement of some of the poorest results contained in the report with some touches of false coloring. Mr. White's conclusions on the first count are, therefore, vitiated. His argument that the theory of public schools is false is a 'medley of fallacies.'"[16]
As one of the most acute students and critics of Shakespeare, White's scholarship was recognized and praised by scholars not just in the United States but in England, France, and Germany.[1] He published two editions of Shakespeare's works and other works, including Essay on the Authorship of the Three Parts of Henry VI (1859), and Riverside Shakespeare (1883 and 1901):[17] and "Shakespeare's Scholar". He also wrote books on subjects, such as 'Revelations: A Companion to the New Gospel of Peace " and a civil war satire, "The New Gospel of Peace, According to St. Benjamin". He was a vice-president of the New Shakespeare Society of London, England and edited a twelve-volume edition of Shakespeare from 1857 to 1865.
Personal life
On October 16, 1850, he was married to Alexina Black Mease (1830–1921), the daughter of Charles Bruton Mease and Sarah Matilda (née Graham) Mease, a Charleston family who was then living in New York.[4] At the time of their wedding, both the bride and groom were painted by Daniel Huntington.[4] In 1860, they were temporarily living at Ravenswood in Long Island.[5] They had two children:[3]
Richard Mansfield White (1851–1925), who was named after his father.[4]
England Without and Within (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 1881; London: Sampson Low & Co., 1881)[23]
The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys (1884), a novel
Recent exemplifications of False Philology with contributions by Richard Grant White / by Fitzedward Hall. (This was a critique of Words and their uses.)[24]
National Hymns, How They are Written and How They are Not Written (1861)
References
Notes
^White's mother's maiden name was either Tousey or Towsey.
^His great-grandfather was Moses White, himself the eldest son of Deacon Isaac White, who was born in Upper Middletown in 1727 and was a hatter by trade who married Huldah Knowles of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1749.[6]
^White relies in part on Zachariah Montgomery's book, The Poison Fountain for some arguments against public education.
^ abA Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time Vol. VIII: "Literature of the Republic Part III—Continued, 1835–1860", Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchison, 1889, pp. 3–19 (Google Books)
^Archives, Episcopal Church General Convention Commission on; Hobart, J. H. (1804). Archives of the General Convention. Privately printed. p. 323. Retrieved March 21, 2018.
^Baldwin, Charles C. (2012). Stanford White. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 15. ISBN9781468462227. Retrieved March 21, 2018.
^"Benjamin Thaw Too Ill to be Told of His Brother's Crime". New York Times. June 26, 1906. Retrieved October 9, 2010. Social and financial circles in Pittsburg were greatly shocked to-night by the news from New York that Harry K. Thaw had shot and killed Stanford White. The Thaws have for years been social leaders here. Harry Kendall Thaw, the husband of Florence Evelyn Nesbit, over whom Thaw and White are said to have quarreled, has for some years been the black sheep of the Thaw family.
^The book is "one of the most veracious and vivid pictures of English life ever drawn by an outsider" (The Spectator, Aug. 13, 1881, p. 1052). Other favorable reviews in English publications include a notice in The Athenaeum (Aug. 13, 1881, p. 205) and Grant Allen in The Academy (Aug. 27, 1881, pp. 153-4).