Edward Tyrrel Channing Explained

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Edward Tyrrel Channing (December 12, 1790 – February 8, 1856) was an American rhetorician. He was a professor at Harvard College, brother to William Ellery Channing and Walter Channing,^[1] and cousin of Richard Henry Dana Sr.

Early life and education

Channing was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the son of William and Lucy (Ellery) Channing. In 1807, he graduated from Harvard College.^[2]

Career

Channing began the practice of law in Boston, but devoted his attention chiefly to literature. From 1818 - 1819 he was the second editor of the North American Review after William Tudor (1779-1830), and remained a regular contributor through much of his life.

From 1819 - 1850, he taught at Harvard as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, the position held by John Quincy Adams from 1806 - 1809. (Joseph McKean had served as the second Boylston Professor.) His students included the noted authors and speakers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, Wendell Phillips, and Henry David Thoreau. Channing was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1823.^[3]

Personal life

Channing married Henrietta Ellery in 1826.

Death and legacy

He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1856, at age 65. A memorial volume of his lectures was published in 1856 akong with a memoir of Channing by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Selected works

• An oration, delivered July 4, 1817, at the request of the selectmen of the town of Boston, in commemoration of the anniversary of American independence, Boston: printed by Joseph T. Buckingham, Congress-Street, 1817.
• Lives of William Pinkney, William Ellery, and Cotton Mather, Boston : Hilliard, Gray; London : R. J. Kennett, 1836.
• Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1856.
• "Life of William Ellery," in The Library of American Biography, edited by Jared Sparks, vol. 6 New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848. 89–159.
• Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College, Boston, 1856. Facsimile ed., introd. Charlotte Downey, 1997, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, .

References

• Dorothy C. Broaddus, Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston, University of South Carolina Press, 1999..

Notes and References

1. Web site: Edward Tyrrel Channing: portrait in quarter profile of Harvard professor, ca. 1853. UMass Amherst.
2. Appletons' states "like his brother Walter, became involved in the college rebellion of 1807, and was not graduated with his class, but afterward received his degree." See Channing, William Ellery. 1900.
3. Web site: Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter C. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. September 13, 2016.