His father, Edward "Kit" Lyman Kittredge, participated in the California Gold Rush of 1849, been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across the desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family.

[1] Kittredge garnered highest honors and joined several clubs, wrote light verse, and won Bowdoin prizes for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek.

In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated undergraduate theatrical performance of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in the original Greek, attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University.

About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin.

Philology, especially in its early years, had been conceived as a "total science of civilization, an ideal originally formulated for the study of classical antiquity and then transferred by the German Romanticists to the modern languages.

[need quotation to verify][20] When the various modern language departments were introduced into American universities in the 1880s, speakers at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1883 had been concerned to counter the popular perception that "English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers", a mere "accomplishment", whereas when "a boy studies Greek you know he has worked hard".

[22] It had yielded the discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development.

A former Harvard graduate student, James H. Hanford,[23] reminisced how under Kittredge, Students were expected to talk in a scholarly way in the classroom and on a final examination about Grimm's or Verner's laws, the differentiating characteristics of Anglo-Saxon among the Teutonic languages, the changes in English phonology, inflection, and syntax from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century, the influence of Danish, French and Latin on the English language in its various periods.

The objective was the equipment of a man of real erudition, about whose professional and scientific status there should be no doubt and who could hold up his head in pride among his fellows in the older and more reputable field of classics ...

Source and background study, so decried by [later] critics of the philological regime, was conceived of both as a means of interpretation and as an independent contribution to cultural history.

The New Humanists were social and cultural conservatives who conceived of literary studies as leading to moral improvement by providing a guide to conduct and "humane insight" through an appreciation of and reflection on the timeless beauties of prescribed "great works."

Deeply suspicious of democracy, he envisioned the goal of a university education as the formation of a superior individual in whom the "will to restraint" would counter what he saw as the degenerate modernism he traced back to pernicious ideas of social progress initiated by Rousseau and his followers.

Kittredge and his students, on the other hand, situated the study of languages and literatures in their historical contexts, seeking to capture "the spirit of an age" and often ranging far afield of the traditional Western canon.

[27]For Babbitt, a self-proclaimed classicist, on the other hand, such disciplines as anthropology, folklore, and the medieval scholarship so dear to Kittredge, represented a dilution of the real goal of literary studies and a waste of time.

Meanwhile, although there was continued chafing against the supposed antiquarianism of the philological school in some quarters, Kittredge's prestige and influence continued unabated, and the extensive list of language requirements for a Harvard graduate degree in English literature, including Old and Middle English, Old French, and Gothic, stayed in effect until his retirement in 1936, after which these requirements, viewed as onerous, were dropped.

[31] With the coming of the Cold War in the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s disagreements between the historical and "literary appreciation" schools in English literature studies were subsumed by the ascendancy of the New Criticism which favored, like Kittredge, rigorous study of literary text, but sidestepped potential controversies over ideology by ruling out mention of historical context or social questions.

In consequence, the concept of philology itself fell into disrepute and never recovered, even after social engagement once again became respectable and the New Criticism gave way to Structuralism, Gender Studies, postmodernism, and the New Historicism.

Thus, the context of Kittredge's prestige and his place in the history of English literature studies became obscured and forgotten, a situation which in recent years some scholars are attempting to rectify.

As suggested previously, the philosophical methods and ideologies that informed the early history of English department organization deserve continued conversation and critique rather than simply being erased or ignored.

[33] The couple honeymooned in Europe, remaining for a year in Germany, which at that time was a mecca of graduate studies and the mother of distinguished philologists and folklorists.