Word: tinkerers
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Trollope's Tinker...
...shall be remembered," Chauncey Tinker once remarked with a wave of his hand, "for my students. These are my jewels." Last week, four years after his retirement from teaching, old (72) Professor Tinker knew just how rich in jewels he was. Thirty-seven of them, who had gone on to become professors themselves, had written a book in his honor and handed it to him at a dinner. Appropriately, the book was a collection of their own scholarly essays on Tinker's Century. The title, affectionately lifted from Tink's old course, was The Age of Johnson (Yale...
...Chauncey Tinker got his first glimpse of Johnson's Age as a Yale undergraduate, class of '99. Before that, he had lived the peripatetic life of a minister's son (Maine to Colorado), and his great ambition was to be a conductor on the Boston & Maine railway. After Yale, he taught one year at Bryn Mawr and fell in love with a student-"a very beautiful girl." She married someone else, and Tinker settled into bachelordom...
...began his teaching of 18th Century literature. He found it easy to follow the rule he gave would-be scholars: "You must fall in love with your subject." In time, he came to know as much about Johnson and Boswell as any man alive. His own boots, including the Tinker edition of Boswell's letters, were milestones in 18th Century scholarship, outdated only by the further probings of Chauncey Tinker himself. It was he who, tracing the leads all the way to Ireland in 1925, first confirmed the existence of the great cache of Boswell papers that had been...
Polished Performance. As a writer, Tinker was never as prolific as he wished to be. Blinded in one eye when a boy, he had to guard his sight carefully. Once, when he thought he might lose it entirely, he began memorizing great chunks of poetry to be able to go on teaching. He looked upon teaching as an exacting art, and worked upon each lecture as if it were to be his first. Every lecture was a performance. Settled in a chair by his desk and crooking his neck around to peer through his one good eye, he seemed...