John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (review)
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John Payne Collier (1789–1883) is primarily known (to those who know him at all) as a forger of inscriptions and annotations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English books and manuscripts. Those who are not aware of his other accomplishments may wonder why he deserves this massive two-volume work of impressive scholarship, the product of fifteen years' meticulous research and impeccable writing. But once they have read some distance into the Freemans' superb thousand-page biography (supplemented by a 350-page record of his publications), they will understand. Collier was one of the leading mid-nineteenth-century scholars of Renaissance English literature, editing and publishing for the first time a number of documents relating to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and writing prolifically on many literary subjects. The story of Collier's career naturally raises the intriguing psychological question of why a respected scholar [End Page 157] would wish to risk tarnishing his reputation by fabricating historical evidence. Attempting to solve this enigma is not, however, the main reason for studying Collier, as the Freemans realize.
The real reason is that his many activities and wide acquaintance open up a detailed picture of Victorian intellectual life. As the Freemans say, his life "mirrors nineteenth-century literary culture in multiple aspects: the worlds of publishing and publicity, newspaper journalism, literary societies, theatres and clubs, librarianship and bibliophily, and above all the reawakening of public interest in the English literary past." What the Freemans have achieved is a major demonstration of the role that the history of scholarship can play in cultural history. (The depth of Arthur Freeman's knowledge of the world of Victorian scholarship is further glimpsed in his letter on the new Oxford DNB in the Times Literary Supplement of February 11, 2005.) For some periods and fields, the history of scholarship has not been neglected; but the history of literary and historical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is in need of far more attention than it has yet received. I hope that the Freemans' great work will be an inspiration to others.
G. Thomas Tanselle retired in 2006 as senior vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is coeditor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville, and his other publications include Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, Textual Criticism Since Greg, Literature and Artifacts, Royall Tyler, and The Life and Works of Fredson Bowers.
