| Synopsis: |
This is the first book-length presentation of the life and works of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips (1820-1889), the eminent Shakespearean scholar and author, whom critics of widely diverse orientation recognize as the greatest contributor of his age to our knowledge of Shakespeare's life and times. Halliwell was a man of prodigious energy and wide interests. Some six hundred publications deal not only with Shakespeare and early modern literature but also with mathematics, lexicography, the history of science, archaeology, dialectology, history and theology. He was a founder or council member of the Shakespeare Society, Percy Society, Camden Society, among others, as well as a member of numerous local, national and international organizations. Before the age of 20 he was Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In the course of his career he received many other honours, at home and abroad: at age 18, he was the youngest Fellow ever elected to the Royal Society, and he became the first honorary member of the Shakespeare Society of New York.Also noteworthy were his efforts to establish Stratford-upon-Avon as a fitting memorial to Shakespeare, beginning with his purchase of Shakespeare's house, New Place, and continuing with his promotion of its library and museum. From beginning to end, his life was colourful as well as productive: his exclusion in the mid-1840s from the British Museum Library for purportedly stealing manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge (where he had been a student), caused a national uproar, as did his involvement toward the end of the century, along with Algernon Swinburne, in a controversy with F.J. Furnivall and his New Shakespeare Society over the direction of literary studies. Very Victorian was Halliwell's long conflict with his father-in-law, the renowned collector Sir Thomas Phillips, who was enraged and unforgiving because Halliwell had eloped with his daughter. Halliwell's life affords a panoramic as well as a personal view of Victorian literary theory and practice, the founding and organization of scholarly societies, popular education, the book trade, and, not the least interesting, the domestic everyday of England in the 19th century. |