Morley, HENRY

Morley, HENRY, English author, was born in London, September 15, 1822, and educated at the Moravian School, Newwied-on-the-Rhine, and King's College, London, where he edited the King's College Magazine. After practising medicine at Madely, Shropshire, from 1844 till 1848, and keeping school for the next two years at Liscard, Liverpool, he settled down with some reluctance in London to literary work in connection with Household Words and the Examiner. Of the latter he was joint-editor from 1856 to 1859, and sole editor from that year till 1864. He was English lecturer at King's College for eight years previous to 1865, when he became professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London, an office which he resigned in 1889. For many years he was examiner in English to the university of London. In 1889 he contributed the article on English Literature to this work. He died 14th May 1894. His numerous writings include How to make Home Unhealthy (1850); A Defence of Ignorance (1851); Lives of Palissy (1852), Jerome Cardan (1854), and Cornelius Agrippa (1856); Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (1857), reprints of his essays in Household Words; two volumes of Fairy Tales (1859-60); English Writers to Dunbar (2 parts, 1864-66), worked up anew into the first 4 vols., 1887-89, of a projected complete history of English literature in 20 volumes; annotated editions of the Spectator (1868) and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1886); Tables of English Literature (1870); Clément Marot and other Studies (1871); A First Sketch of English Literature (1873); Library of English Literature (5 vols. 1876-82); and Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria (1881). No man has done so much to make classical literature (both English and foreign through English translations) accessible to the people as Henry Morley through his admirable series, Morley's Universal Library, embracing 63 volumes at a shilling each (1883-88); Cassell's National Library, embracing 209 volumes at the price of threepence each (1886-90); and the Carisbrooke Library, a series of half-crown volumes (1888 et seq.). See Life by H. S. Solly (1898).