James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (review)

James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps is known chiefly as a book collector and the publisher and editor of a sixteen-volume limited-edition folio of Shakespeare's plays. He viewed himself as a literary archaeologist, and to this end he amassed one of the largest private collections of Shakespeareana ever assembled, the bulk of which is now housed at the Edinburgh University Library. In addition to writing more than six hundred books, articles, editions, and catalogs, he was also instrumental in developing Stratford-on-Avon as a permanent memorial to Shakespeare.

Marvin Spevack, himself the author of the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare and A Shakespeare Thesaurus, refers to his new work as "a documentary life." The bulk of the documents upon which Spevack relies to construct his biography consists of more than sixteen thousand letters, the overwhelming majority of which are written to Halliwell-Phillipps, and of a daily, somewhat mundane journal kept by his wife, Henrietta. Despite the limited nature of his source material, Spevack's biography provides readers with both a rich cultural context for Halliwell-Phillipps's work and an engaging picture of bookish society in mid-nineteenth-century England.

Part 1 begins with a tentative account of Halliwell-Phillipps's youth, but because Spevack has so little information available to him, this chapter consists primarily of a catalog of the dozens upon dozens of articles, essays, and pamphlets that Halliwell-Phillipps had published, most of which were in the field of the history of science and mathematics. Such enumeration can make for tedious reading, but Halliwell-Phillipps's prodigious output during his brief stint at Cambridge astounds us. This section of the book culminates in a fascinating discussion of the British Museum Affair, a national scandal during which Halliwell-Phillipps was accused of stealing manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been a student, and "donating" them to the British Museum Library. The charges were eventually dropped, but not before his reputation was severely and, in Spevack's mind, unfairly tarnished. Nowhere is Spevack's scholarly empathy with Halliwell-Phillipps more evident than it is here.

In part 2 Spevack details Halliwell-Phillipps's career as a Shakespeare biographer and editor. His Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, itself a documentary biography, remains a work from which scholars still draw. Spevack spends much time on the critical assessment of his subject's works, providing a lucid and entertaining account of Halliwell-Phillipps's role in the midcentury war of words between the Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette, two of London's most prestigious literary journals. The remaining parts of the biography detail Halliwell-Phillipps's life as a leading fund-raiser for and organizer of the Stratford-on-Avon Center and his eventual withdrawal from public life.

Throughout the book, Spevack juxtaposes chapters on Halliwell-Phillipps's professional life with chapters on his family life. He embellishes many of these chapter endings with literary epigrams that serve as synecdoche for what Spevack views as the essential tension structuring Halliwell-Phillipps's life, and it is this tension that provides the thematic and structural frame for the biography. At the end of chapters on Halliwell-Phillipps's professional life, Spevack writes a variation on the following sentence: "The way was to be long and thorny" (228); at the beginning of chapters on familial life, he riffs on the sentence: "They were, in short, a happy family" (231). Halliwell-Phillipps's career was rife with controversy, and his personal life was by no means free from it either. It is true that he enjoyed a long and happy marriage, but he and Henrietta were deeply estranged from his father-in-law, the antiquary Sir Thomas Phillips, whose name and baronetcy Halliwell curiously assumed after his...