A Sanskrit Reader : Text, Vocabulary and Notes

Charles Rockwell Lanman

Charles Rockwell Lanman Charles Rockwell Lanman was born in Norwich, Connecticut, the eighth of the nine children of Peter Lanman III and Catherine (Cook) Lanman on July 8, 1850. His mother died when he was three years old, and his aunt Abigail (Abby) Trumbull Lanman helped raise him. His Aunt Abby was an artist, and as one of two legatees of the estate of her great uncle American Revolutionary War artist John Trumbull, inherited many of Trumbull's Revolutionary War period paintings and sketches.[1] At age ten, a young Charles Lanman read a copy of the Journal of the American Oriental Society containing a translation of a textbook of Hindu astronomy, which sparked his interest in Sanskrit. Lanman graduated from Yale College (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1871, was a graduate student there (1871–1873) studying Greek under James Hadley and Sanskrit under WD Whitney and eventually earning his doctorate at Yale in 1873.[2] He also studied Sanskrit under Weber and Roth and philology under Georg Curtius and August Leskien in Germany (1873–1876). He married Mary Billings Hinckley on July 18, 1888 at Beach Bluff, Massachusetts. She was descended from Thomas Hinckley, the last governor of Plymouth Colony. Professor Lanman spent his sabbatical year with his new wife in India on a one-year honeymoon. As he travelled across India in 1889 he bought for Harvard University some 500 Sanskrit and Prakrit books and manuscripts, which, with those subsequently bequeathed to the university by Fitzedward Hall, make the most valuable collection of its kind in America, and made possible the Harvard Oriental Series, edited by Lanman.[3] Upon their return from India, in 1890, the Lanmans built a home at 9 Farrar Street in Cambridge where he lived until his death.[4] Charles and Mary Lanman had six children.