Necrology

John Walter Bicknell '35

Jan. 22, 1913-Jan. 14, 2006

John Walter Bicknell ’35, emeritus professor of English at Drew University and a noted scholar of Victorian literature, was born on January 22, 1913, in Mansfield, MA. The son of the Rev. John Bicknell and the former Nellie L. Smith, he spent much of his early life in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where his parents served as Congregationalist educational missionaries and his father was principal of Jaffna College. Young John Bicknell attended Kadai School in South India and prepared for college at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he captained the soccer team. He entered Hamilton in 1931, joined Alpha Delta Phi, went out for football, and lettered in baseball and soccer. He also participated in productions of the Charlatans, wrote for The Continental, and enthusiastically sang with Professor Fancher’s Choir. He accompanied the Choir on its travels for concerts at such unlikely places as Sing Sing penitentiary, and his voice was among those heard from coast to coast when the Choir sang on Alexander Woollcott’s radio show.

Elected to Quadrangle, DT, and the journalism honorary Pi Delta Epsilon, and awarded the Squires Prize in Philosophy, John Bicknell received his B.S. degree with honors in philosophy in 1935. However, he remained on the Hill for another year to assist in the department of public speaking and earn an M.A. in English. He then planned to return to Ceylon to be with his parents and teach, but “Cupid intervened.” He had met Evangeline N. Foster in January 1936, and they were married on June 16 of that year in Utica. Following a honeymoon in Ceylon and a year of graduate study in English at Columbia University, John Bicknell accepted appointment as an instructor at St. Lawrence University at $1,600 per annum. The Bicknells remained in New York’s North Country until 1943, when John was called to active duty by the U.S. Navy. He served as a meteorology instructor through the end of World War II and was released in 1946 as a lieutenant (j.g.).

After the war, he was for two years a free-lance writer before resuming his graduate studies at Cornell University. Awarded his Ph.D. in English literature in 1950, he stayed on at Cornell to teach until 1954, when he began his long and distinguished career at Drew University as an associate professor. Promoted to full professor in 1957, he also chaired Drew’s English department from 1957 to 1971. In addition, he was instrumental in establishing the university’s graduate program in English and served as acting dean of Drew’s graduate school in 1967-69.

A man of letters above all, John Bicknell was a widely recognized authority on the “eminent Victorian” Sir Leslie Stephen, now perhaps best remembered as the father of Virginia Woolf. Called “the doyen” of Stephen studies, Professor Bicknell found time after his retirement in 1978 to devote himself to the major project of compiling and editing the two-volume Selected Letter of Leslie Stephen, published by the Macmillan Press in 1996. In addition, he provided the entries on Stephen for standard reference works, and his scholarly articles and book reviews appeared in leading literary journals.

In 1979, the year after his retirement, John and Evangeline Bicknell moved permanently from Madison, NJ, to their longtime summer place in Little Deer Isle, ME. There, while continuing his scholarly work, John , with his passion for singing, participated in local choruses and choirs. And just two days before his final illness, he was on stage in the front row with the Cabin Fever Singers. Besides gardening and chopping wood, he also helped local schools with their English and music programs, and he was a volunteer at a local music lending library. In 1983, the Bicknells returned for the first time since their honeymoon to John’s boyhood home in Sri Lanka, where he was later elected a trustee of the Jaffna College Funds.

John W. Bicknell, a devoted alumnus and class correspondent for this magazine, died in Little Deer Isle of heart and lung failure on January 14, 2006, a week before his 93rd birthday. Predeceased in 2001 by his wife of 65 years, and a son, Christopher N. Bicknell, in 2000, he is survived by three sons, J Anthony, Eugene W., and Jonathan Bicknell; three daughters, Martha Bicknell Goss K’71, Edith L. Bicknell, and Evangeline B. Dollemore; and 18 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

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