Harlan W. Hamilton, Author, 1902–1990

1970 Literature

Harlan Hamilton was fond of quoting the great Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Hamilton, who had devoted his life to 18th and early 19th century writing, admired men like Johnson, who had turned out their most memorable work, stomachs growling and weariness tugging at their temples, to meet a deadline.

When Hamilton looked out over his night school class in downtown Cleveland after World War II, he saw these same kind of men, men looking to better themselves, men looking for answers. Many of them had only recently mustered out of the army and were on the G.I. Bill. They were starting families or building a home in Parma-or, like young Carl Stokes, were eager to take on the problems of their own society. The summer Japan surrendered, the 45-year-old professor had been lured away from the University of Akron, where his scholarship and classroom skills had made him Pierce Professor of English Literature and chair of the English department, to head up the department at Western Reserve University's new downtown division, Cleveland College. In July 1947, he took on additional responsibilities as dean of the college's new school of arts and sciences.

The following summer, Hamilton, the author of a widely used textbook, Preface to Writing, and an authority on the emerging field of adult education, was sent to England and Scandinavia to study new developments in that field for WRU and The Plain Dealer. He saw the gathering of older, high-motivated students in an urban setting at this time in history as an exciting opportunity for educators. “The knowledge which mankind has accumulated in the past has a new relevance in this environment,” he said in the press release announcing his appointment. “The very clamor of downtown Cleveland gives immediate point to the work of the classroom and makes the whole liberal program alive and meaningful. I am indeed glad to have a part in this kind of education.”

Perhaps it was his empathy that drew Hamilton to an obscure and long-maligned 18th-century writer. Academia had dismissed William Combe (1742-1823) as a “hackwriter”-one who “accepted literary assignments much as drivers of hackney coaches accepted fares.” Hamilton decided to write a biography of Combe, in part to rectify the fact that, even in the late 1700s, the word, “hack,” had carried “strong overtones of contempt for the working literary man, [as] to some extent, it still does.” Today, Hamilton pointed out, such a person would be known as a free-lance writer, journalist, columnist, editor, publicist or ghostwriter. “Combe was all of these things before the words were invented.” In fact, for nearly half a century, he had been "the most productive and best-paid hackwriter in the trade.”

What made Combe an even more fascinating a character was the fact that he had taken elaborate measures to obscure the facts of his own biography. The son of an ironmonger, he had even managed, for a short time, to affect the life of a lord, dashing about in carriages with a retinue of servants and buying expensive clothes on credit. Even after a stint in debtor's prison (having a harpsichord delivered to his apartments had been the last straw), he never let it be known that he wrote for money; he claimed his political pamphlets and satirical narratives, which he rarely signed, had been penned for his own entertainment, their publication the farthest thing from his mind.

“When he died in 1823,” wrote Hamilton, “all the leading journals published memorials, several of them by writers who had known him for fifteen or twenty years.” His association with The Times of London had been even longer, over 37 years; and from 1803 to 1808, he had been its editor! Yet no one could write his biography. “Combe had successfully covered his tracks.” Now, almost 150 years later, Harlan Hamilton was on the case.

Born in 1902 in Rantoul, Illinois, and educated at Morgan Park Academy of the University of Chicago, he had earned his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College (1824), master's from Columbia University (1927) and Ph.D. from Cornell (1934). one of his teachers at Columbia, Professor Ernest Hunter Wright, suggested he look into Combe After doing his doctoral dissertation on this mysterious figure and writing a book about the more famous Samuel Johnson and the Profession of Letters, Hamilton had become interested in the crafts of writing and teaching and adult education. Then, in 1960, with the encouragement of his friend W. P. Jones, he spent his sabbatical in England sniffing around the faded tracks of William Combe, detective work to which Hamilton brought all his skill and passion. (Letters passed between Combe's friends would prove a treasure trove of information.) The result was Doctor Syntax: A Silhouette of William Combe, Esq. (1742-1823), the book that would win him the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature in 1970.

The title was a reference to Combe's most popular creation, a naive parson schoolmaster: “a skin-and-bone hero, a pedantic old prig, in a shovel-hat, with a pony, sketching tools and rattletraps,” who would encounter “such scrapes as travellers frequently meet with,” in a biting satire of the new aesthetic, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812). The book, which featured droll illustrations by the gifted caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, recounted the schoolmaster's misadventure in verse. Doctor Syntax is attacked by highwaymen, rescued by two passing damsels and charged by a bull, then mistakes a gentleman's house for an inn, where he shares a bed with a bandit. The book was a household favorite in many countries for over a century, though the author's name was unknown. The list of subscribers to The Tour and its two sequels included the Queen.

Drawing on an array of obscure documents, Hamilton pieced together “one of the oddest [stories] in the annals of literary history”: how this beloved character, modeled on an acquaintance, was created while Combe was doing a four-year stretch in the King's Bench Prison. The awarding of the Arts Prize to Hamilton in 1970, the year he retired, capped a distinguished scholarly career. Never having been in it for the money, he gave a series of lecture-performances that year on the characters of Laurence Sterne, with proceeds going toward the rehabilitation of Shandy Hall, where Sterne's masterpiece Tristram Shandy was written. Hamilton died in 1990.

— Dennis Dooley
Winner of the 1986 Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature