Gamaliel Bradford (biographer)

For other people with this name, see Gamaliel Bradford.

Gamaliel Bradford VI
Born(1863-10-09)October 9, 1863
Boston, Massachusetts, US
DiedApril 11, 1932(1932-04-11) (aged 68)
Wellesley, Massachusetts, US
Occupationbiographer
SpouseHelen Hubbard Ford
Children2
Signature

Gamaliel Bradford VI (October 9, 1863 – April 11, 1932)[1] was an American biographer, critic, poet, and dramatist. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the sixth of seven men named Gamaliel Bradford in unbroken succession, of whom the first, Gamaliel Bradford, was a great-grandson of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. His grandfather, Dr. Gamaliel Bradford of Boston, was a noted abolitionist.[2]

Gamaliel Bradford VI was the son of Gamaliel Bradford V, a banker, writer, and reformer, and Clara Crowninshield Kinsman. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was three, and he was in part reared by his aunt, Sarah Hickling Bradford.[3]

Early life

Bradford enrolled at Harvard in 1882 but withdrew because of ill health. He continued his education privately but is said to have been educated "mainly by ill-health and a vagrant imagination."[4] In 1886, he married Helen Hubbard Ford. It was an exceptionally happy marriage. Helen Bradford "not only took the best care of him in every domestic aspect; she also understood his work and had almost as great an interest in it as he did."[5] The couple had two children.[6] As an adult, Bradford lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts.[7]

Career

"Widely read in several languages and consumed by an almost Elizabethan passion for fame, Bradford attempted virtually every type of creative writing known in his time."[8] Though he wrote poetry and novels, Bradford is best known for what he called "psychography", a style of life-writing developed by Lytton Strachey and typified by the earlier French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.[9] It featured biographies organized topically rather than chronologically with "emphasis not on the events of the subject's life but upon a description and analysis of the subject's character and personality."[10]

Although Bradford wrote book-length studies of Robert E. Lee, Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin, and D. L. Moody, his characteristic form was a shorter study of magazine-article length, collected and published as books, seven or eight to a volume.[11] Confiding to his journal about his work on Moody, Bradford wrote, "I must try above all to enter into Moody's own state of mind and inner life, to see the world as he sees it and interpret it as he interprets it. But all that time, as always, there is and must be the play of my own spirit above and beyond all this."[12]

Personal life

When in 1930 a high-school girl wrote Bradford for information about himself for an assignment, he replied:

"I am fearfully old. I have blue eyes. I am an invalid most of the time and ill tempered all of the time. I like cats and dislike children. My house is full of books, but they are all old books, and I read the same over and over, and know nothing of all the nonsense that goes on in the world. I belong to the Victorian age, which you have heard your grandmother tell about, when people wore long hair and long skirts and retired instead of going to bed and mostly pretended to be better than they really were. Now they pretend to be worse, but I don't see that it makes very much difference, because it is all pretty much pretending anyway."[13]

Though this reply is playful, Bradford was indeed both a political and cultural conservative who could be shy and self-absorbed even while being flattered and lionized.[14] Bradford struggled with ill health throughout his life, and he was rarely able to write more than two hours a day. Noted for his kindliness, he "had an immense correspondence and a multitude of friends, including established writers like Robert Frost."

Temperamentally religious, Bradford believed Darwin—a good man "with largeness and sweetness of soul"—to be "The Destroyer" of faith, one who left God "no more than an amiable possibility" with the result that the popular acceptance of his doctrine was "devastating." Bradford was shrewd enough to realize that acceptance of Darwinism sounded the death knell of traditional Christianity, and he was unable to find any modernist version of religion that satisfied him.[15]

Bradford died on April 11, 1932, in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.[16] His manuscripts, including his unpublished works, are in the Houghton Library, Harvard. Though he wrote an autobiography, it is no longer extant.[17]

Bibliography

Articles

References

  1. ^ "Gamaliel Bradford" Encyclopædia Britannica: History & Society:
  2. ^ Mathews, James W. (1991). "Dr. Gamaliel Bradford (1795-1839), Early Abolitionist" (PDF). Historical Journal of Massachusetts. 19 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 19, 2017. Retrieved September 20, 2017.
  3. ^ Edward Wagenknecht, "Bradford, Gamaliel," American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  4. ^ Braithwaite, William Stanley, ed.. Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1919: and Year Book of American Poetry. Small, Maynard & Company. 1919. p.301.
  5. ^ Wagenknecht, Edward (1982). Gamaliel Bradford. Boston: Twayne. p. 19. ISBN 0-8057-7355-X.
  6. ^ The children were Sarah Rice Bradford (1 July 1892 – September 23, 1972) and Gamaliel Bradford VII (18 June 1888 – 8 August 1910), a Harvard graduate and Boston banker for Norman Wait Harris who shot himself at the Kendall Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after an engaged woman refused to marry him instead. "YOUNG BRADFORD A SUICIDE.; Gamaliel, 3d, Shoots Himself In Hotel -- Young Woman Refused to Wed Him". The New York Times. August 9, 1910. Retrieved April 26, 2024.; Bradford, Gamaliel VI. "Gamaliel Bradford VI Papers" (PDF). The Wellesley Historical Society. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
  7. ^ The building and student newspaperThe Bradford Archived October 12, 2009, at the Wayback Machinefor the Wellesley High School (where Sylvia Plath received her secondary school education. Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. were named after Gamaliel Bradford. The town changed the name of the building to Wellesley High School, but the newspaper maintains Bradford's name.
  8. ^ Edward Wagenknecht, "Bradford, Gamaliel," American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  9. ^ Colby, Frank Moore; Sandeman, George. Nelson's Encyclopaedia, p. 341.
  10. ^ Edward Wagenknecht, "Bradford, Gamaliel," American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  11. ^ Edward Wagenknecht, "Bradford, Gamaliel," American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  12. ^ Journal, March 23, 1925 in Wagenknecht, 85.
  13. ^ Bradford to Dorothy Whitney, January 28, 1930, in Wagenknecht (1982), 160.
  14. ^ Wagenknecht (1982), 160-69.
  15. ^ Edward Wagenknecht, "Bradford, Gamaliel," American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999); Wagenknecht (1982), 142-46.
  16. ^ "Gamaliel Bradford Dies in Wellesley". The Boston Globe. Wellesley (published April 12, 1932). April 11, 1932. p. 17. Retrieved March 27, 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
  17. ^ Wagenknecht (1982),"Preface."
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