| William Davis Ticknor | |
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 William Ticknor |
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| Born | August 6, 1810 Lebanon, New Hampshire, U.S. |
| Died | April 10, 1864 (aged 53) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Publisher |
William Davis Ticknor (August 6, 1810 – April 10, 1864) was an American publisher in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and a founder of the publishing house Ticknor and Fields.
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Life and work
Ticknor was born to William and Betsey (Ellis) Ticknor, prosperous farmers in Lebanon, New Hampshire. His cousin was the famous writer and historian George Ticknor. He worked on the family farm during the summers and attended the district school during the winters. In 1827 at age seventeen he left home and went to Boston.
He was first employed in the brokerage house of his uncle Benjamin. When his uncle died a few years later he was offered a position at the Columbian Bank, a position he held for a year or two. In 1832 he went into partnership with John Allen forming the publishing house of Allen and Ticknor which operated out of the Old Corner Book Store. The following year Allen withdrew and Ticknor carried on the house under the name William D. Ticknor and Company, which would remain the legal name of the firm until his death.
On December 25, 1832 he married Miss Emeline Staniford Holt. They had 7 children together only 5 surviving until adulthood. Their 3 sons Howard Malcolm, Benjamin Holt and Thomas Baldwin all graduated from Harvard and entered into their father’s firm. During the Civil War his son Benjamin Holt Ticknor enlisted in the Forty-Fifth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers and was commissioned as second lieutenant of Company G until May 1863. He was then commissioned as second lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery. He was later commissioned at captain of Company E and was in command of the recruiting camp at Readville, Mass. He resigned from service shortly after his father’s death.
In 1845 the imprint of the firm was changed to Ticknor, Reed and Fields after John Reed and James Thomas Fields were admitted as partners. It continued under this imprint until 1854 when John Reed withdrew and the name was changed to the well known Ticknor and Fields.
With the widely varying but well matched talents of the two partners Ticknor and Fields grew to become one the leading publishing houses in the 19th century. Ticknor was the first American publisher to pay foreign authors for the rights to their works beginning with a check to Tennyson in 1842. From the Old Corner Book Store Ticknor and Fields published the works of Horatio Alger, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The firm also published the Atlantic Monthly, Our Young Folks, and the North American Review.
Shortly after the firm was contracted for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter Ticknor became a close friend and advisor to Hawthorne. In the spring of 1864 Hawthorne’s health was failing so Ticknor accompanied him on a trip to restore the former’s health. During this trip Ticknor contracted pneumonia and died at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia on April 10, 1864 with Hawthorne at his side. The sudden loss of Ticknor was devastating to the already failing health of Hawthorne who would die barely more than a month later on May 19. Ticknor was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery with the truly distinguished of both the literary and business circles showing up to pay their final tribute.
During his life Ticknor was very involved in the Baptist church, he was a director of the Boston Lyceum, treasurer of the American Institute of Instruction, a trustee of the Perkins Institute, and a leading member of the School Committee, was a resident member of New England Historic Genealogical Society.
References
Further reading
- Ticknor, Caroline.(1913).Hawthorne and His Publisher, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
- The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (1916). Boston: Published by the Society
- Fiske, John. (1889). Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, New York: D. Appleton and Company
External links
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