James Orchard Halliwell

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, born James Orchard Halliwell (June 21, 1820 - January 3, 1889), was an English Shakespeare scholar, antiquarian and collector of English children's poems and fairy tales. The son of Thomas Halliwell, he was born in London and was educated privately and at Jesus College in Cambridge. He devoted himself to the study of antiques, especially early English literature. Starting at age 16, between 1836 and 1837, he wrote 47 articles in the Parthenon. A weekly journal of English and foreign literature, art and science, in 1839 he edited The Travels of Sir John Mandeville; in 1842 he published the Report on European Manuscripts in the Chetam Library, in addition to the recently discovered 15th century metric novel (Torrent of Portugal). In Cambridge, in 1841, Halliwell dedicated his book Reliquae Antiquae to Sir Thomas Philip, the famous bibliomaniac. Philips invited Halliwell to stay on his estate, Middle Hill. There Halliwell met the daughter of Phillips Henrietta, with whom he soon proposed marriage. However, around the same time, Halliwell was accused of stealing manuscripts from Trinity College in Cambridge. Although Philip's suspicions were never pursued, he woke up and he refused to consent to the marriage. This led to the flight of the couple in 1842. William A. Jackson (1905-1964), a bibliographer and professor at Harvard, also claims that Halliwell stole the extremely rare 1603 Hamlet quartet from Philip, removed the title page (marked Philippe) and later sold it . Phillips refused to ever see his daughter or Halliwell again. In 1842, Halliwell published the first edition of Nursery Rhymes of England, followed by Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Rhymes, which contained the first printed version of The Three Little Pigs. and the version of the Christmas song "Twelve Days of Christmas." Since 1845, Halliwell was expelled from the British Museum library due to suspicions of his possession of some manuscripts that had been removed from the library of Trinity College in Cambridge. He published privately an explanation of this issue in 1845. Holliwell also had a habit that bibliophiles hated to cut seventeenth-century books and paste the parts he liked into notes. During his life, he destroyed 800 books and made 3600 waste. In 1848, he published his Shakespeare's Life, illustrated by John Thomas Blythe (1835-1911), which had several editions; In 1853-1865 Shakespeare's luxurious folio edition was released, limited to 150 copies, with full critical notes. After 1870, he completely abandoned textual criticism and devoted his attention to elucidating the features of Shakespeare's life. He compared all available facts and documents related to him, and exhausted the information that can be found in local records in his Essays on Shakespeare's Life. He played an important role in the purchase of the New Place for Stratford Corporation. in Avon, and in the formation of the Shakespeare Museum there. He adopted the name Philip in 1872 at the behest of the grandfather of his first wife, Henrietta Philips. He was actively interested in the Camden Society, the Percy Society, and the Shakespeare Society, for which he edited many early English and Elizabethan works. He died on January 3, 1889, and was buried in Patcham Graveyard, near Hollingbury in East Sussex. His home, Hollingbury Cops, near Brighton, was full of rare and curious works, and he generously donated many of them to the Chetam Library, Manchester, the Pennance Morrabe Library, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Edinburgh library.