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Harry Buxton Forman

London, 1842 - 1917, London

BiographyOxford Dictionary of National Biography: Forman, Henry Buxton [Harry] (1842–1917), bibliographer and forger.
"...However, the concept of a creative forgery was to be exploited by a team consisting of Forman himself and his acquaintance Thomas James Wise.
Forman and Wise first met in 1886, a connection made through the Shelley Society, and its publication programme of reprints and new works on the poet. In the next year they jointly printed a piracy from Dowden's Life of Shelley (1886) with a false imprint and an imaginary editor (Shelley's Poems and Sonnets, edited by ‘Charles Alfred Seymour’ [probably T. J. Wise] and printed in ‘Philadelphia’ [London, Richard Clay]). This was the forerunner of a clandestine publishing programme of some hundred piracies and forgeries, of which some sixty creative forgeries were the most novel. In broad terms, Forman was the editorial director, and Wise the production manager and sales director. This programme falsified the bibliography and thus the publishing history of Swinburne, Morris, Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Rossetti, Tennyson, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, and the Brownings. Its most remarkable achievement was to rewrite the literary history of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which was supposed to have appeared as a pamphlet privately published in Reading in 1847, rather than in the second edition of her collected poems three years later. The two conspirators gained both financially and in being able to announce new discoveries, often in their own bibliographies. In many cases these are still the standard works, being otherwise sound, so that the forgeries have had a very long life, and some may remain as yet undetected."
(Collins, J. F. R.. “Forman, Henry Buxton (1842–1917).” J. F. R. Collins In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Accessed July 14, 2015. www.oxforddnd.com).

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Last Updated8/7/24

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