Altick, Richard D. 1915-2008 (Richard Daniel Altick)

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Altick, Richard D. 1915-2008 (Richard Daniel Altick)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born September 19, 1915, in Lancaster, PA; died February 7, 2008. Historian, educator, and author. Altick was fascinated by Victorian England, and he celebrated the era throughout his long teaching career, especially the nearly forty years he spent at Ohio State University from 1945 to 1982, and through more than forty books. His approach to Victorian literature, society, and culture was scholarly; his focus was in the margins that other scholars overlooked and general readers avidly embraced. Altick believed that one could learn much about society by looking at its entertainments and obsessions. Victorians seemed to be preoccupied by the sensational: freak shows, spectacular crimes, magic and self-operating mechanical devices called "automata," humor and satire. These topics became the subjects of several of his books. In The Scholar Adventurers (1950), Altick described the lengths to which people of his ilk would go in search of corroboration for their theses and details about their subjects. In The Art of Literary Research (1963), he explained how to find and interpret these documents and other data sources, but he also commented on the pleasure to be found in the art of discovery, a reward that made the sometimes tedious quest worthwhile. In his own scholarly works, such as The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (1991), Altick wrote of the rise of literacy in Victorian times and how the publishing industry and the purveyors of literature responded to it. He also produced several full-length studies of other topics dear to the hearts of Victorian readers, from Victorian Studied in Scarlet (1970) to The Shows of London: A Panoramic History, 1600-1862 (1978).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Altick, Richard D., Of a Time and Place: Remembering Lancaster, Archon (Hamden, CT), 1991.

Altick, Richard D., A Little Bit of Luck: The Making of an Adventurous Scholar, Xlibris (Philadelphia, PA), 2002.

Kincaid, James R., and Albert J. Kuhn, editors, Victorian Literature and Society: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1984.