1819-1860 OVERVIEW
Early History: Literary and Debating Societies
1810-1879
From the beginning, literary societies were part of the culture of the Western University. The first catalog printed for the newly charted institution in 1822 stated that, “with a view to encouraging oratory and general literature, your committees further suggest that it would be highly proper to encourage one or more societies, in the University, such as are usual, and so eminently beneficial in other colleges.” These student societies did much to promote literature, oratory and composition in an era before English had departmental status.
The oldest student club was the Thespians, organized in the Pittsburgh Academy around 1810 and disbanded in 1833 by order of the faculty, who were scandalized that the students had replaced Shakespeare with “modern vulgar comedies.”
In 1821, students from the Western University of Pennsylvania organized the Tilghman Literary Society in honor of William Tilghman, Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and a friend of the university. Every year, from 1821 to 1844, the members met to eulogize the chief justice “in speeches flowery but sincere.”
The Pittsburgh Philosophical and Philological Society was organized in 1827 by university alumni and fifteen clerks from mercantile houses in the city. It acquired eighty-four members in ten years. William W. Irwin, then the mayor of Pittsburgh, erected a building for the use of the club. Two debates were staged in 1827: “Are Critical Reviews Injurious to the Advancement of Literature?” and “Was the Chivalry of the Middle Ages Calculated to Improve the Moral Character of the World?”
George Woods served as fifth Chancellor of the University from 1855 to 1880. He gave primary attention to engineering and the sciences, and these programs grew substantially under his leadership. According to Starrett, “Except within the three literary societies, which flourished under faculty presentation, little attention was paid to the study of English literature or composition.” At this time there was a student-run College Journal and three literary societies:
The Philomathean Literary Society, which collected a library of 325 volumes, including an English encyclopedia, Irving, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, several histories, Macaulay, Dickens, and the English and American poets.
The Irving society, which also had a substantial library. The president of the Irving Society was John Milton Duff, “whose hair is buff and who never opens his mouth except at meals.” Duff became a physician and was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Western Pennsylvania Medical School.
The Franklin society, which was founded in 1879 and devoted primarily to elocution. Student-delivered speeches included such topics as “Wits of Queen Anne’s Day,” “Is a Limited Monarchy to be Preferred to a Democracy?” and “The Pleasures of Memory.”
A Pittsburgh Exchange
Charles Dickens, 1861
Agnes Lynch Starrett’s history of the university, Through One Hundred and Fifty Years: The University of Pittsburgh, lists this diary entry by Charles B. Scully, class of 1837:
Tuesday, March 29th [1842]—At 12 noon a remarkable event, a thing I never expected happened today. Went to the Exchange Hotel and was shown up to room No. 12, and on announcing our name to Mr. Putnam and Mr. D’Almaine, was introduced to Mr. Charles Dickens, the greatest author of our age. He gave us a cordial handshake. I wished him welcome and he thanked me most politely. I was then introduced to Mrs. Dickens, who very easily and in a friendly manner reached out her hand. I took a seat beside her and spoke of her fortune in having such good weather. She said this was a remarkable country of ours and she delighted in it. I told her she would admire its vastness even more when on the broad waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi. She hoped she would not be too nervous, as she was alarmed at the dreadful accidents upon our rivers from boiler explosions. I recommended her to take a boat with Evans’s safety valves, and she said she would.
Courses
The Western University of Pennsylvania organized a seven-year course of study divided into two parts: the classical, comprising four years of study, and the collegiate, accessible after the student passed the required examinations. In their first year, students studied grammar, Greek, Latin, and English; in the second, biography, the Old and New Testaments, mythology and geography; in the third, rhetoric, belles lettres and the history of “England and modern days”; and, in the fourth, belles lettres and English composition, Ovid, Vergil, the Greek poets and the “writings of English and American orators and poets.”
In the more advanced collegiate curriculum (four parts over three years), first-year students studied Cicero, Demosthenes, Xenophon, Vergil, Lucian, Homer and Horace, as well as geometry, trigonometry and surveying, the latter “laying the foundation for higher mathematics.” In the second and third years, courses included “intensified reading in classic authors,” declamation in ancient and modern languages, English composition and belles-lettres, and readings in English literature.
Faculty
Charles B. Maguire, Professor of Modern Languages and Universal Grammar, was one of Robert Bruce’s original faculty appointments in 1822. Maguire was from Country Tyrone, Ireland. He held a degree from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. In Rome, he served as Professor of Theology at the College of St. Isadore. In 1815, he was commissioned by the King of Bohemia to go to the court of Brussels to perform a religious office. During the Reign of Terror, it is said, he barely escaped the guillotine.
John Henry Hopkins, 1792-1868
The Rev. Joseph M’Elroy, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, was another of Robert Bruce’s 1822 faculty appointments. M’Elroy was a graduate of Jefferson College. He stayed only one year, leaving to serve as rector of the Scotch Church of New York City, a position he held for 54 years. M’Elroy was replaced by John Henry Hopkins, formerly a teacher in the academy.
John Henry Hopkins served from 1823 to 1831 as Professor of Belles Lettres. He later became the first Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Vermont and the eighth presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church. In 1857, he published The American Citizen, a defense of slavery on Biblical grounds. Starrett’s history of the university also includes a poem of Hopkins’ on the education of women:
I doubt the wisdom of the change
Which thrusts our females on a range
Of studies so severe and dry.
Their time ‘twere better to apply
In reading history, travels, poems,
From well-established standard tomes;
And learning every gentle art
Which gilds the home and cheers the heart.
James Thompson was the first of Heman Dyer’s faculty appointments in English. He joined the faculty in 1846 as Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. According to Starrett, at the Western University’s one hundred and tenth anniversary celebration in 1897, the Reverend M.B. Riddle said of Thompson, “It was in the Western University of Pennsylvania that I first met a great teacher. I never can forget what I owe that one man, and I would send my boy four thousand miles to get as good a teacher.”
Charles Elliott
Charles Elliott was recruited to the University of Pittsburgh in 1847 as a Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. He received his BA from Lafayette College (1840), his A.M. and D.D. from Ohio University (1861), his LL.D. from Hanover College (1891), and his B.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary (1841). He left Pittsburgh in 1849, when the university was closed after the fire, and he went on to a distinguished career at Miami of Ohio, where a building carries his name. When he left Pittsburgh after the fire, he donated several books of “modern literature” to the library, including Carlyle’s Essays, Burke’s Essays on the Sublime and the Beautiful, Emerson’s Essays, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Audubon’s Birds in the Rockies, Borrow’s Bible in Spain, some novels by Dickens, and some English poetry.
George Upfold
Dr. George Upfold was president of the Western University Board of Trustees. According to Starrett:
Dr. Upfold …emphasized that the University would have no help from the state and that some professors would teach without pay. He set the example himself by giving his services in the teaching of literature and composition….
G.F. Gilmore taught English and classics in the preparatory department.
Students
Among the first students at the Western University was Wilkins Tannehill, who referred to himself as a “backwoodsman” and whose Sketches of the History of Literature from the Earliest Period to the Revival of Letters in the Fifteenth Century was published in 1827. Tannehill served as Mayor of Nashville from 1825 to 1827.
Thomas Mellon
He was grandmaster of the Masons of Tennessee and raised money for a number of small Masonic colleges.
Thomas Mellon, the founder of the Mellon Bank and the patriarch of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was a student at the Western University from 1834 to 1837. In his autobiography, Thomas Mellon and His Times, he remarked, “An excellent literary society, ‘the Tilghman,’ possessed of a fair library, was attached to the college, and to its weekly exercises I feel that I owe nearly as much in the way of educational advantages as to my college studies.”
Footnotes
Early History: Literary and Debating Societies
1810-1879
From the beginning, literary societies were part of the culture of the Western University. The first catalog printed for the newly charted institution in 1822 stated that, “with a view to encouraging oratory and general literature, your committees further suggest that it would be highly proper to encourage one or more societies, in the University, such as are usual, and so eminently beneficial in other colleges.” These student societies did much to promote literature, oratory and composition in an era before English had departmental status.
The oldest student club was the Thespians, organized in the Pittsburgh Academy around 1810 and disbanded in 1833 by order of the faculty, who were scandalized that the students had replaced Shakespeare with “modern vulgar comedies.”
In 1821, students from the Western University of Pennsylvania organized the Tilghman Literary Society in honor of William Tilghman, Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and a friend of the university. Every year, from 1821 to 1844, the members met to eulogize the chief justice “in speeches flowery but sincere.”
The Pittsburgh Philosophical and Philological Society was organized in 1827 by university alumni and fifteen clerks from mercantile houses in the city. It acquired eighty-four members in ten years. William W. Irwin, then the mayor of Pittsburgh, erected a building for the use of the club. Two debates were staged in 1827: “Are Critical Reviews Injurious to the Advancement of Literature?” and “Was the Chivalry of the Middle Ages Calculated to Improve the Moral Character of the World?”
George Woods served as fifth Chancellor of the University from 1855 to 1880. He gave primary attention to engineering and the sciences, and these programs grew substantially under his leadership. According to Starrett, “Except within the three literary societies, which flourished under faculty presentation, little attention was paid to the study of English literature or composition.” At this time there was a student-run College Journal and three literary societies:
The Philomathean Literary Society, which collected a library of 325 volumes, including an English encyclopedia, Irving, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, several histories, Macaulay, Dickens, and the English and American poets.
The Irving society, which also had a substantial library. The president of the Irving Society was John Milton Duff, “whose hair is buff and who never opens his mouth except at meals.” Duff became a physician and was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Western Pennsylvania Medical School.
The Franklin society, which was founded in 1879 and devoted primarily to elocution. Student-delivered speeches included such topics as “Wits of Queen Anne’s Day,” “Is a Limited Monarchy to be Preferred to a Democracy?” and “The Pleasures of Memory.”
A Pittsburgh Exchange
Charles Dickens, 1861
Agnes Lynch Starrett’s history of the university, Through One Hundred and Fifty Years: The University of Pittsburgh, lists this diary entry by Charles B. Scully, class of 1837:
Tuesday, March 29th [1842]—At 12 noon a remarkable event, a thing I never expected happened today. Went to the Exchange Hotel and was shown up to room No. 12, and on announcing our name to Mr. Putnam and Mr. D’Almaine, was introduced to Mr. Charles Dickens, the greatest author of our age. He gave us a cordial handshake. I wished him welcome and he thanked me most politely. I was then introduced to Mrs. Dickens, who very easily and in a friendly manner reached out her hand. I took a seat beside her and spoke of her fortune in having such good weather. She said this was a remarkable country of ours and she delighted in it. I told her she would admire its vastness even more when on the broad waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi. She hoped she would not be too nervous, as she was alarmed at the dreadful accidents upon our rivers from boiler explosions. I recommended her to take a boat with Evans’s safety valves, and she said she would.