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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extensive manuscript materials in the Ticknor Collection at Dartmouth College now make it possible to complete one of the remarkable cultural, scholarly, and personal records of early American letters—the story of George Ticknor's long and devoted pursuit of Goethe. Ticknor's stature as a literary pioneer is, with this further evidence, markedly increased, and there is new light cast on the beginnings of significant American acquaintance with Germany's great poet.
1 Four other sources contribute to the picture: the pertinent passages of the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston, 1876)—abbreviated LLJ—the chapter on Ticknor in Orie W. Long's Literary Pioneers (Cambridge, 1935)—abbreviated LP—my article on Ticknor's Werter in Comparative Literature, i (1949), 360-372—abbreviated CL—and the edition, just published, of that translation. The MSS. which furnish the remaining and major portion of this study are part of a large collection of Ticknor materials given to Dartmouth in 1943 by the late William Dexter of Boston, a descendant of George Ticknor. The main sources on Goethe are the MS. of Ticknor's European journals (abbreviated TJ i when cited from the incomplete, serially paginated typescript, 8 vols. of which are available; MsJ i, with volume number, when cited from the 18-vol. pen-and-ink original; the Roman numeral refers to the diary of the first journey, there being another set from Ticknor's second trip), together with several volumes of studies and notes made at Göttingen, and the whole of his large library of books on Goethe, German literature, and Germany.
2 See CL, passim, and George Ticknor's Sorrows of Young Werter (Chapel Hill, 1952).
3 Orie W. Long, Thomas Jefferson and George Ticknor (Williamstown, Mass., 1933), p. 13.
4 Goethes Briefwechsel mit … Sartorius, ed. E. von Monroy (Weimar, 1931), p. 162.
5 “Goethe's Reputation in America,” in Essays on Goethe, ed. W. Rose (London, 1949), p. 218.
6 See esp. H. S. Jantz, “German Thought and Literature in New England, 1620-1820,” JEGP, xli (1942), 1-45.