Biography:

Chauncey Brewster Tinker. (1876-1963) Professor of English Litterature at Yale, and the worlds leading Boswell scholar prior to Pottle. Tinker was the first Boswell researcher to visit Malahide Castle (July 1925) and see some of the Boswell papers, later to be acquired by Ralph Isham.

Chauncey Tinker was born in Auburn, Maine, USA on October 22nd, 1876, the son of clergyman Anson Phelps Tinker, and Martha White. Chauncey was probably named after a friend of his father called Chauncey Bunce Brewster - Anson and Chauncey Bunce were both members of the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale (Link).

Chauncey B. Tinker appears to have graduated from East Denver High School in June 1895 (Link), and he was admitted to Yale that same year (Link). He became a BA in 1899, MA in 1900 and finally got his Ph.D. in 1902. Instructor at Yale (1903-1908), Assoicate Professor, Yale (1908-1913), Professor of English Litterature, Yale (1913-1945), Keeper of Rare Books at Yale University Library (1931-) and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1949-1951). He died on March 10th, 1963 and is buried at Grove Street Cemetary, New Haven.

Tinker published two major Boswellian works before the Malahide and Fettercairn papers surfaced. In 1922 came his excellent biography Young Boswell, and in 1924 he published the first collection of Boswell's correspondence (other than that of Boswell and Temple, which had been published as early as 1856), the two volume work Letters of James Boswell. In his 1948 essay collection Dionysos in Doubt: Collected Articles and Addresses (1948), Tinker describes Boswell as having remained an inveterate journalist to the end and, no doubt, presented himself at the gate of Heaven, notebook in hand (p. 16). Apart from this small quote, Dionysos is not about Boswell, but about as diverse subjects as Samuel Johnson, the Brontë sisters, Shelley, A. E. Housman, Trollope and ancestor worship.

Apart from the two books about Boswell, and Dionysos, Tinker also wrote books such as Select Translations of Old English Poetry (1902, with Albert S. Cook), The Salon and English Letters: Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society in the Age of Johnson (1915), Nature's Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (1922), The Wedgwood Medallion of Samuel Johnson -A Study in Iconography (1926), The Good Estate of Poetry (1929) and Painter and Poet - Studies in the Literary Relations of English Painting (1938)

Interesting litterature:

Most of the titles mentioned above are available from Questia, The Internet's Largest Library, and/or the Abebooks used books search engine.