Harry Buxton Forman facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Harry Buxton Forman
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| Born | 11 July 1842 Camberwell, London
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| Died | 15 June 1917 (aged 74) St. John's Wood, London
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| Occupation | antiquarian, book collector, bibliographer, poet, civil servant |
| Spouse(s) | Laura Sellé |
| Children | 3 |
Henry Buxton Forman (born July 11, 1842 – died June 15, 1917) was a writer and book expert from the Victorian era. He was known for his detailed lists of books by famous poets Percy Shelley and John Keats. However, in 1934, it was discovered that he had a secret plan with another book collector, Thomas James Wise. Together, they created and sold many fake first editions of books by well-known authors.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Harry Buxton Forman was born in Camberwell, south London, on July 11, 1842. He was the third son of George Ellery Forman, a retired Navy surgeon. When Harry was just ten months old, his family moved to Teignmouth in Devon.
He went to a Royal Naval School in New Cross. There, he met Edmund Gosse, who became a friend for life. While at school, he started using the nickname "Harry," which stuck with him. In 1860, at age 18, he moved back to London and began working for the Post Office.
Working for the Post Office
Harry Buxton Forman had a very successful career at the Post Office. He started as a clerk in April 1860. He traveled to the Mediterranean in 1883 to check on British Post Offices there. Later, he became a main clerk and then a controller of mail services.
In 1897, he received a special award (the CB) for his hard work. He retired in 1907 after working for the Post Office for 47 years. Harry also represented the United Kingdom at four international Postal Union meetings. He helped start the Post Office Library and Literary Association and was its secretary for many years.
Expert on Shelley and Keats
Harry Buxton Forman is best remembered for his deep knowledge of the poets Percy Shelley and John Keats. He started his writing career in 1869. He wrote articles that were later published as a book called Our Living Poets.
This led to him becoming friends with the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also met another poet, Richard Hengist Horne. Forman became very interested in the ideas of Auguste Comte, a French thinker. He met his wife, Laura Sellé, at a lecture about these ideas.
Many people who followed Comte's ideas admired Shelley and Keats. In 1876, Forman published an edition of Shelley's Poetical Works. He followed this with Shelley's Prose Works in 1880. He also edited the Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne in 1878. In 1883, he published a five-volume collection of Keats's poems and writings. He was very good at checking and correcting texts.
Forman also worked on a special collection of Shelley's first editions and rare writings. He published an Essay in Bibliography about Shelley in 1886. He also edited the Letters of Edward John Trelawny (1910) and a new version of Thomas Medwin's Life of Shelley. He carefully corrected Medwin's book to fix any mistakes.
He continued his work on Keats with other books, including Three essays by John Keats (1889). He also helped buy and set up the Keats and Shelley House in Rome. He gave many of his own books to this house.
His love for Shelley and Keats led him to work with other experts. He wrote articles about other poets like Thomas Wade and Charles Jeremiah Wells.
Creating Fake Books
In 1887, Harry Buxton Forman started working with Thomas James Wise, a book collector. This was the beginning of their secret plan to create many fake books. It started in 1886 when a book about Shelley was published. It included many poems that had never been printed before. Forman and Wise decided to print these poems separately. They pretended the book was from a made-up "Philadelphia Historical Society."
This was the start of a big, dishonest scheme. Over the next fifteen years, they created many fake books. They printed them in London but put false information on them about where they were printed. They often made fake early pamphlets that seemed to be privately published. Some of these fakes were of poets who were still alive, like Rossetti.
Many of these fake books were printed by a company called Richard Clay & Sons. This company also printed real copies of works by Robert Browning and Percy Shelley. Forman and Wise's fakes were "creative forgeries." This means they weren't copies of existing books. Instead, they were presented as rare books that "should have existed." They changed dates, places of publication, and publishers to trick collectors.
Forman and Wise made fake publications by many famous authors. These included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith, and William Thackeray. Forman and Wise sold many of these fakes to collectors all over the world. It took forty years for their trick to be discovered by John Carter. For example, at a book sale in New York in 1915, twenty-four of the books were fakes made by them.
The Reading Sonnets Forgery
One of Forman and Wise's most famous fakes was of the Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Forman had a lifelong interest in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's works. However, this didn't stop him from messing with one of the most famous love stories in Victorian England.
Elizabeth Barrett wrote these sonnets to Robert Browning during their courtship. They were first published in the second edition of her Poems in 1850. But in 1894, an earlier, "private" edition from 1847 started appearing in literary magazines. This fake edition came from Forman and Wise. It was printed in London but claimed to be from "Reading." These "Reading Sonnets" became a key clue when the fraud was exposed in 1934.
Later Life and Discovery
Forman became very ill in 1906 and retired from the Post Office in 1907. He no longer wanted to continue his dishonest partnership with Thomas Wise. However, he was too involved to completely break away. He still had several writing projects to work on.
In 1910, he published Letters of Edward John Trelawny. He also carefully copied notes from twenty-five notebooks that belonged to Shelley's son. This was a huge and detailed task. Most of these notebooks were later sold to collectors in the United States. This shows how popular Shelley was in the USA at that time. Forman's last book was a new edition of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Thomas Medwin. Medwin had added more to this book but hadn't published it. The picture of Shelley at the front of the book is actually a changed copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Head of Christ.
Forman died on June 15, 1917, after a long illness. His ashes were scattered on the River Teign, near where he grew up in Devon. He had written a poem about his funeral wishes.
How the Forgeries Were Discovered
Harry Buxton Forman was exposed as a forger in 1934. Two booksellers, Graham Pollard and John Carter, became suspicious. They started with Browning's "Reading Sonnets." They gathered more and more proof that the pamphlet was not real.
Scientists tested the paper and found it contained wood pulp. This type of paper wasn't used in England before 1874. Also, the style of the letters (typeface) showed it was from the late 1800s. Carter and Pollard cleverly traced the printing to Richard Clay and Sons. This led them to investigate other books sold by Herbert Gorfin, a well-known bookseller. When it became clear that Gorfin didn't know the books were fake, Pollard and Carter convinced him to reveal where he got them. This is how Thomas Wise and Harry Buxton Forman were finally revealed as literary forgers. Pollard and Carter published their findings in 1934 in a book called An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets.
