James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: Life and Works Book

The life of the prolific Halliwell-Phillipps—whose vast collections can be found in the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Edinburgh U. Library and the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford—affords a panoramic as well as a personal view of Victorian literary theory and practice, the book trade, and popular education. "From beginning to end, his life was colorful as well as productive: his exclusion in the mid-1840s from the British Museum Library for purportedly stealing manuscripts ... caused a national uproar," writes Spevack (also author of the Harvard concordance to Shakespeare). He enraged the eminent collector Sir Thomas Phillipps when he eloped with his daughter, and later was in the thick of a key controversy over the direction of literary studies.

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