Halliwell-Phillipps

Halliwell-Phillipps, JAMES ORCHARD, a great Shakespearean scholar and antiquary, was born at Chelsea in 1820, the son of Thomas Halliwell. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and, yet an undergraduate, began that long career as an editor which he kept up almost till the close of life. His studies embraced the whole field of our earlier literature, plays, ballads, popular rhymes and folklore, chap-books, and English dialects, and its fruits remain in the publications of the old Shakespeare and Percy societies. As early as 1839 he was elected Fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian societies. Gradually he came to concentrate himself upon Shakespeare alone, and more particularly upon the facts of his life, the successive editions of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1848; 8th ed. 1889) recording the growing results of his discoveries. For many years he waged a brave warfare with fortune, but in 1872 he took over the management of the property his wife (died 1879) inherited from her father, Thomas Phillipps, and assumed his father-in-law's name. In his quaint house at Hollingbury Copse near Brighton he accumulated an unrivalled collection of Shakespearean books, MSS., and rarities of every kind, and dispensing hospitalities to scholarly visitors from all parts of England and America, as well as giving princely benefactions of books to Edinburgh University, Stratford, and Birmingham. Here he died, January 3, 1889. The privately printed Calendar (1887) of his collection embraced as many as 804 different items. By his will it was first offered, at the price of £7000, to the corporation of Birmingham; but it was not accepted. Apart from Shakespeare, his Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (1845) and Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847; 6th ed. 1868) will keep his name from being forgotten. His magnificent edition in folio of the Works of Shakespeare (16 vols. 1853-65) was published at a price prohibitive to most students.