Samuel Claggett Chew

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Samuel Claggett Chew (August 31, 1888 – January 16, 1960) was a scholar of English literature and drama who taught at Bryn Mawr College.

Education and teaching posts[edit]

Chew hailed from a prominent American family and was born in Baltimore. He received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins in 1909 and earned the doctorate there in 1913: while at the university, he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. As a young man, he came into contact with Horace Howard Furness, who served as a role model for him; the younger man dedicated his 1915 book, The Dramas of Lord Byron, to Furness. He revered the editor of The New Variorum Shakespeare for his "wisdom and benevolence and large-heartedness and sense of humor."[1]

Chew began his teaching career at the high school level at the Gilman Country School in Baltimore in 1909. For the next two years he was a fellow at Johns Hopkins while studying for his doctorate. In 1913 he taught at the Hotchkiss School in Salisbury, Connecticut.[2]

The academic institution to which he was to devote the majority of his professional life was Bryn Mawr College. Chew became an instructor in English there in 1914. Two years later he was promoted to the rank of associate professor. Later, he was made Mary Garrett Alumnae Professor of English. His position was named after an early proponent of women's right to vote. In total, he taught at the exclusive Pennsylvania women's college for more than 40 years.[3]

Since Chew was well known in scholarly circles and published extensively, he was often invited to lecture at other universities, among them the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, his alma mater Johns Hopkins, Western Reserve, and Harvard Universities. He also lectured at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. He was a visiting lecturer at Pomona College in 1954-55 and at the Claremont Graduate School from 1955 to 1957.[2]

Popular writing and book reviews[edit]

Chew was active as a critic and book reviewer. He wrote 3,000 book reviews in the field of English literature, many of them published in The New York Herald Tribune and The Nation. His last book review, concerning a two-volume edition of Coleridge's letters,[4] appeared was printed in the Herald Tribune the same day as his obituary.[5]

In 1925 Chew won first prize, offered by The Saturday Review of Literature, for the best discussion of the way in which Joseph Conrad might have finished his fragmentary novel titled Suspense.[2] He also wrote for Vanity Fair. This magazine offered prizes to those who could answer the dozens of questions Chew had assembled for the contest.[6]

The book that made him most well known for a popular audience was the anthology titled Fruit Among the Leaves. It included parts of famous books published by the D. Appleton & Company publishers on the occasion of their 125th year in business. The firm went out of business in 1973.[2]

He reviewed several of Thomas Hardy's works and corresponded with him.[7] Chew's 1921 book on Hardy, said one scholar, "enhanced Hardy's prestige".[8]

Acknowledgements upon retirement[edit]

Johns Hopkins University conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature in 1950. The next year he was elected to the American Philosophical Society; reviews of the era referred to Chew as an "eminent scholar".[9]

Erwin Panofsky, then teaching at Princeton, held a special lecture in honor of Chew's retirement from Bryn Mawr in 1954; the title was "Galileo as a Critic of the Arts".[10]

After his 1954 retirement as Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr, Chew continued to lecture occasionally at the college.[2]

Personal life[edit]

His wife was Lucy Evans Chew, a graduate from Bryn Mawr College in 1918. Shortly after her graduation, she married Chew. For the majority of their married life, the Chews lived in the Bryn Mawr area; Samuel died in Bryn Mawr Hospital. Mrs. Chew left 58 volumes of her diaries from the years from 1920 to 1968 to Bryn Mawr's archives.[11]

Book collector[edit]

Chew was a collector of rare books. He willed that two late medieval manuscripts from his collection be donated to the Bryn Mawr Library. One was a psalter he had purchased during a sabbatical in Europe in 1921; other books were given to him by his friend Howard Gray, a history professor at the same college.[12]

Major publications[edit]

  • The Dramas of Lord Byron, 1915.
  • Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist, 1921.
  • Byron in England, 1924.
  • The Crescent and the Rose (1937) was well received at the time of publication.[13] Among literary scholars, the book is "usually seen as the pioneering discussion" of Islam in early modern English drama.[14] It was reprinted five years (1965) after Chew's death and is still cited frequently.[15]
  • The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographical Study, 1947.
  • Literary History of England, 1948. Chew authored the fourth and last section: "Book IV: The Nineteenth Century and After".[16]
  • Chief Romantic Poets, 1950.
  • The Pilgrimage of Life, 1962. Mrs. Chew oversaw the final editing process after her husband died. He had worked on the project over the course of 20 years.[12]

He edited a volume of Tennyson's poems (titled Representative Poems) in 1941.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Chew, Samuel (October 25, 1922). "Book review of: Doctor Furness's Letters". The New Republic. pp. 21–22. ISSN 0028-6583.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Dr. Samuel Chew, Educator, 71, Dies. Ex-Bryn Mawr Professor, Expert in English Writings of 1800's". New York Times: 86. January 17, 1960.
  3. ^ "Dr. S.C. Chew Dies At 71". The Evening Sun. Baltimore. January 16, 1960.
  4. ^ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1956–1971). Griggs, Earl Leslie (ed.). Collected Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  5. ^ "Samuel Chew Dies; Author And Critic". New York Herald Tribune. January 17, 1960.
  6. ^ "The Ultimate Horror in Questionnaires". Vanity Fair. May 1927. p. 52.
  7. ^ Schwarz, Arthur L. (2006). Dear Mr. Cockerell, Dear Mr. Peirce: an annotated description of the correspondence of Sydney C. Cockerell and Harold Peirce in the Grolier Club archive. Cockerell, Sydney Carlyle, Sir, 1867-1962, Peirce, Harold, 1856-1932, Grolier Club. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press. p. 156. ISBN 1-904201-06-7. OCLC 75186046.
  8. ^ Patil, Mallikarjun (1997). Thomas Hardy : the poet (a critical study). New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. p. 122. ISBN 81-7156-701-0. OCLC 52117760.
  9. ^ Ford, Newell (Autumn 1952). "The English Romantic Poets. A Review of Research". Comparative Literature. 4 (4): 364–370, here 366. doi:10.2307/1768752. hdl:2027/mdp.39015016457122. JSTOR 1768752.
  10. ^ "Prof. Panofsky gives a Speech on Art History". The College News. Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. April 21, 1954. p. 1.
  11. ^ "Lucy Evans Chew diaries and papers". Tricollege Libraries. Retrieved 2021-02-07.
  12. ^ a b Iselin, Ronni (October 31, 1962). "Mrs. Chew Donates Books: BMC Gets Medieval Art". The College News. Ardmore and Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: 1.
  13. ^ Margoliouth, D. S. (1939). "Book Review: The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance. By Samuel C. Chew. New York: Oxford University Press, 1937". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland. 71 (1): 142–143. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00092285. ISSN 0035-869X. S2CID 161356063.
  14. ^ McJannet, Linda (2009). "Islam and English Drama: A Critical History". Early Theatre. 12 (2): 183–193, here 183. doi:10.12745/et.12.2.822. JSTOR 43500643.
  15. ^ Casellas, Jesús López-Peláez (2015). "Anthony Sherley's Spanish Writings and the Global Early Modern". Journal of World History. 26 (3): 549–579. doi:10.1353/jwh.2015.0035. JSTOR 43901775. S2CID 147936059.
  16. ^ Parry, John (January 1949). "Review of: A Literary History of England by Albert C. Baugh". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 48 (1): 147–149. JSTOR 27715010 – via JSTOR.
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