James Thomas Fields Biography

James Thomas Fields, poet, editor, and publisher, was born the son of a ship's captain at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His father died when he was two and he and his younger brother George were raised by their mother. From an early age, Fields read widely and received as good an education as possible. But a lack of money prevented his attending college, and in 1831 he went to work in Boston at Carter and Hendee's Bookstore (later called the Old Corner Bookstore). Fields soon became an active participant in the literary and social life of Boston: he regularly attended the Reverend William Ellery Channing's church; his rooms became a place for socials attended by such people as Edwin Percy Whipple and Longfellow; and he joined the Boston Mercantile Library Association. His poetic aspirations were also fulfilled when his verses were printed in the Portsmouth Journal, Knickerbocker Magazine, The Token, New Hampshire Book, Rufus W. Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, and Whittier's anti-slavery annual, The North Star. In 1831 the bookstore had taken over by publishing firm of Allen and Ticknor, with William D. Ticknor soon emerging as sole proprietor. By 1840 Fields was taking an active role in both the bookstore and Ticknor's publishing firm, and his successful ventures publishing English authors, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, whom he introduced to American audiences, made the firm much money. Ticknor recognized Fields's business and publishing acumen and in 1843 made him a junior partner. Fields capped his success with a trip to Europe in 1847, but was deeply grieved when his mother died soon after his return. In 1849 public recognition of Fields's ability came when Ticknor changed the firm's imprint to "Ticknor, Reed, and Fields." More successes followed in 1849, when Fields's Poems was published and he joined the short-lived Town and Country Club organized by Bronson Alcott. The next year he married Eliza Willard but she died of turberculosis after a year. Fields left his mourning for another European trip, returning in 1852 after arranging for William Thackeray to make an American lecture visit.

In 1854, Fields's professional and private lives peaked: he became a full partner in the firm, now called "Ticknor and Fields," and he married Annie Adams, buying a house at the foot of fashionable Beacon Hill, which became the center of the best-known literary salon in America. During the 1850s, Fields continued to bring major authors into his firm's fold and in 1858 he received a much-cherished honorary Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. The next decade was also a period of great activity for Fields. In 1860 the firm took over the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, edited by James Russell Lowell. When Lowell resigned in 1861, Fields himself became editor, a post he held for five years before turning it over to William Dean Howells. When Ticknor died in 1864 while on a walking tour with Hawthorne, Fields became senior partner and moved the firm's location to Tremont Street, at the corner of the Boston Commons. Also in that year the firm took over the prestigious North American Review and Fields was admitted to the most famous conversational group in New England, the Saturday Club. Following a dispute with Ticknor's son, Fields in 1868 bought him out and changed the firm's name to "Fields, Osgood, and Company." However, a long business life and tired Fields, and, after an 1869-1870 trip to Europe, he retired from publishing and the firm became "James R. Osgood and Company." Fields now embarked on a career as a successful lecturer, talking on his wide reading and his many literary friendships. At his death in Boston in 1881, he left his wife an estate of $150,000. Fields's own literary achievement is small; his biographer calls his poetry full of "humor, nostalgia for the countryside, and sweetly sentimental vignettes of death and children." His most popular work was Yesterdays with Authors, a volume recollecting his friendships with some of the most famous writers of the day. It was as a publisher that Fields excelled. His firm eventually became the authorized American publisher of Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, Leigh Hunt, Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thoreau, and Whittier. His relations with authors were always very friendly, personal, and, above all, honest. In the early days, when American publishers reprinted English authors without paying royalties, a legal practice in the absence of an internatioal copyright agreement, Fields always paid for the privilege of reprinting. Although later errors in judgment and the impersonality of the rapidly growing firm sometimes contributed to misunderstandings, such as one with Hawthorne's widow, Ticknor retained a high place in the estimation of his authors.