Henry "Harry" Buxton Forman CB

Order of the Bath

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate mediæval ceremony for creating a knight, which involved bathing as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as Knights of the Bath...

 (11 July 1842 – 15 June 1917) was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

. In 1934 he was revealed to have been a major source of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors in partnership with Thomas James Wise

Thomas James Wise

Thomas James Wise was a bibliophile who collected the Ashley Library, now housed by the British Library, and later became known for the literary forgeries and stolen documents that were resold or authenticated by him....

 (1859–1937)

Early life

Henry Buxton Forman was born in Camberwell

Camberwell

Camberwell is a district of south London, England, and forms part of the London Borough of Southwark. It is a built-up inner city district located southeast of Charing Cross. To the west it has a boundary with the London Borough of Lambeth.-Toponymy:...

 ,south London on 11 July 1842, the third son of George Ellery Forman (born Plymouth in 1800, died London in 1869), a retired Royal Naval surgeon and his Sussex born wife Maria Courthorpe. At the age of ten months his family moved to Teignmouth

Teignmouth

Teignmouth is a town and civil parish in Teignbridge in the English county of Devon, situated on the north bank of the estuary mouth of the River Teign about 14 miles south of Exeter. It has a population of 14,413. In 1690, it was the last place in England to be invaded by a foreign power...

 in Devon

Devon

Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...

 and he was educated at a Royal Naval School in New Cross where Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse

Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...

 was a contemporary and lifelong acquaintance although not an intimate. Whilst at school he adapted the sobriquet Harry by which he was afterwards known. He returned to London in 1860 and lived with his brothersHis older brother Alfred William Forman, later a published poet was the first person to translate into English the librettos of several Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

's operas including Der Ring des Nibelungen(1877), Tristan und Isolde (1891), Parsifal (1899), and Tannhäuser (1919).He married the actressAlma Murray

Alma Murray

Alma Murray was an English actress, born in London, the daughter of an actor, Leigh Murray. Her father's real surname was 'Wilson'. His brother was Gaston Murray whose daughters often used the double-barreled stage-name 'Gaston-Murray' and were well-known performers with the D'Oyly Carte Opera...

 in 1876 in Stockwell

Stockwell

Stockwell is a district in inner south west London, England, located in the London Borough of Lambeth.It is situated south south-east of Charing Cross. Brixton, Clapham, Vauxhall and Kennington all border Stockwell...

 in south London after joining the Post Office at 18 years of age

Career as a civil servant

Harry Buxton Forman pursued a successful career in the Post Office starting as supplementary class clerk in the Secretary’s Office at St.Martin’s-le-Grand in April 1860. He served as acting surveyor of British Post Offices in the Mediterranean in 1883 and thereafter served as principal clerk from 1885 and second secretary advancing to controller of the packet services. In 1897 he received the CB for his services to the Post Office retiring in 1907 after 47 years' service. He attended as a representative of the United Kingdom four Postal Union Congresses – at Paris in 1880, at Lisbon in 1885, at Vienna in 1891, and at Washington in 1897. He was one of the earliest workers on behalf of the Post Office Library and Literary Association, and was its secretary for several years

Editor of Shelley and Keats

It is as an authority on the lives and works of Percy Shelley and John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

 that Forman is largely remembered. His literary endeavours began in 1869 with a series of anonymous articles in William Tinsley

William Tinsley

William Tinsley was a British publisher. The son of a gamekeeper, he had little formal education; but together with his brother Edward he founded the firm of Tinsley Brothers, which published many of the leading novelists of the time.-Life:Tinsley was born in the village of South Mimms, north of...

's eponymous Tinsley's Magazine later reprinted in 1871 as Our Living Poets. This resulted in a friendly relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and a fateful encounter with another poet Richard Hengist Horne, the subject of an early known forgery. This success resulted in regular articles for the London Quarterly Review and a series of articles including four on Ibsen in 1872.

Buxton Forman became interested in the philosophy of free thinking as expounded in the works of Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

 (1798–1857) and he met his wife Laura Sellé, the daughter of the musician Dr William Christian Sellé

William Christian Sellé

William Christian Sellé DMus was a Victorian doctor of music, composer and for forty years Musician in Ordinary to her Majesty Queen Victoria.-Biography:...

 at a positivist lecture also attended by George Eliot

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...

 with whom he became acquainted. Many positivists looked to Shelley and Keats as examples of free thinking and in 1876 Buxton Forman published an edition of the Poetical Works of Shelley, followed in 1880 by Shelley's Prose Works. In 1878 he edited the Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, and in 1883 the Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats which eventually ran to four volumes. He proved a gifted textual editor although the criticism is that he included too much trivial matter. He also contributed to the study of Shelley with an uncompleted Shelley Library that included a number of first editions and rare writings( as well as a number of his own passed- off forgeries). Other Shelley related material included an Essay in Bibliography in 1886,the Letters of Edward John Trelawny (1910), and Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin was an early 19th century English poet and translator, who is chiefly known for his biographies of his cousin Percy Bysshe Shelley and his recollections of his close friend Lord Byron.-Early life:...

’s Life of Shelley, the latter work being scrupulously re-edited to remove many of Medwin’s inexactitudes.

He followed up his edition of Keats' poetic works with Three essays by John Keats (1889), Poetry and Prose by John Keats: a book of fresh verses and new readings (1890), and a one-volume edition of the Poetical Works of John Keats (1906). He took an active interest in the purchase and establishment of the Keats and Shelley House in Rome, and presented to it a large number of his books.

His passion for Shelley and Keats resulted in collaborative work with others and articles on a number of minor poets such as Thomas Wake and Charles Jeremiah Wells

Charles Jeremiah Wells

Charles Jeremiah Wells was an English poet.-Life:He was born in London, probably in the year 1798. He was educated at Cowden Clarke's school at Edmonton, with Tom Keats, the younger brother of the poet, and with RH Horne...

. He contributed articles on Wade and Horne and verses of his own in W R Nicol and TJ Wise's Literary Anecdotes of the 19th Century (1805–1896) and for A H Miles's Poets and Poetry of the 19th Century Forman made and prefaced the selections from Wade, Wells, Horne, and William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

.

Literary forgeries

In 1887 an association with a London commodity broker and book collector Thomas James Wise saw the first of many illegal printings by Wise and Buxton Forman. The origins began in November 1886 when Edward Dowden published a biography of Shelley. It printed a considerable number of poems for the first time that Forman and Wise decided to print separately as Poems and Sonnets inventing the Philadelphia Historical Society as a cover. It was the start of a full scale conspiracy with numerous forgeries over the next fifteen years that were printed in London with templates that stated otherwise. They specialised in early pamphlets, supposedly privately published, of poets some of whom such as Rossetti and Swinburne were still living. Many of the forgeries were printed by the firm of Richard Clay & Sons who had printed legitimate facsimile issues of works by Robert Browning and Percy Byshee Shelley These were "creative forgeries" in that they were not copies of works that existed but were presented as works that could or should have existed. Dates, places of publication, publishers (as distinct from printers) led the collecting world to believe in the ‘rare private’ editions. Buxton Forman and Wise forged publications by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both England and the United States during her lifetime. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband, Robert Browning, shortly after her death.-Early life:Members...

, George Elliot

George Elliot

George Elliot may refer to: *George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans , English novelist*George Elliot , British naval officer and Member of Parliament for Roxburghshire 1832–1835...

, John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

, Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

, Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith

George Meredith

George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.- Life :Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two...

 and William Thackeray and many others. Many of these forgeries were sold by Buxton Forman [though there is little published evidence of sales by Forman] and Wise to collectors across the English speaking world and it would be forty years later that their fraud would be discovered by John Carter

John Carter (Author)

John Waynflete Carter was an English author, diplomat, bibliographer, book-collector, antiquarian bookseller and Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society of London. After attending Eton College, he studied classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first...

. The extent of the forgeries was such that the Brayton Ives sale in New York in 1915 contained twenty four forgeries, for example.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Reading Sonnets

Forman and Wise’s most famous forgery is of The Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a lifelong literary passion of Buxton Forman, (that bore fruit in editorship by Forman of ‘ Aurora Leigh’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her Scarcer Books in 1896), but apparently not deep enough to stop him tampering with the most celebrated literary love story of Victorian England. The sonnets were written by Barrett Browning to Robert Browning during their courtship and their intensity were of lasting literary interest. The first appearance of the poems was in the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems in 1850. However in 1894 an earlier 1847 private edition began to appear in literary journals. This originated from Forman and Wise and was published in London (although it had a Reading frontispiece) having been printed by the firm of Richard Clay & Sons.The so named Reading Sonnets proved to be the achilles heel of the conspiracy when the fraud was exposed in 1934.

Final years

Forman was seriously ill in 1906 with an undisclosed malady and he retired from the Post Office in 1907. He no longer wished to continue his illegal partnership with Thomas Wise but was in too deep to disassociate with him completely. He had several literary projects to occupy him. He published Letters of Edward John Trelawney in 1910.He transcribed the Shelley Note Booksfrom twenty five notebooks inherited by Sir Percy Shelley from his mother. This was a prodigious exercise in patient and meticulous transcription. Most of the note books ended up being sold to American collectors a striking indication of the popularity of Shelley at the turn of the twentieth century in USA His last book was The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin was an early 19th century English poet and translator, who is chiefly known for his biographies of his cousin Percy Bysshe Shelley and his recollections of his close friend Lord Byron.-Early life:...

, a new edition that Medwin had extended but left unpublished.The frontispiece portrait of Shelley is in fact a copy of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

's Head of Christ with slight alterations.

Forman died after a long illness on 15 June 1917 and his ashes were sprinkled on the River Teign that flowed near his Devon childhood home.He left his funeral instructions in a published verse:

Let the prison'd litch-fire batten on the tissues

Leaving naught but ashes, clean and grey and pure

Gather, friends, the handful that from the furnace issues,

Cushion them in crane-bill, and bear them to the Moor.

Ashes of her poet, bear them to one land,

Take them up to Dartmoor and strow them through his own land,

Rush them through the harbour and lose them in the Main!

Exposure as a forger

The exposure of Harry Buxton Forman as a forger in 1934 was driven by two book sellers Graham Pollard and John Carter. They became suspicious of Browning's Reading Sonnets and began to gather more and more evidence that the pamphlet was not as it purported to be. Chemical analysis of the paper showed that it contained a chemically constituted wood pulp, a process that was not used in England before 1874.In addition the typeface in minor respects indicated a late 19th Century use and via some sterling detective work Carter and Pollard traced the publishing source to Richard Clay and Sons. In turn this led to further investigation into various publications being offered for sale by Herbert Gorfin,a prominent bookseller. When it became apparent that Gorfin knew nothing of the forgeries Pollard and Carter persuaded him to expose the source of the publications. Thus Thomas Wise and Harry Buxton Forman were outed as literary forgers. Pollard and Carter published their findings in 1934 in ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets’

Forman Bibliography (selected)

• Our Living Poets, Tinsley’s Magazine articles, London (1869)
• Our Living Poets: An Essay in Criticism, Tinsley, London (1871)
• Poetical works of Shelley, edited by H Buxton Forman (1880)
• Prose Works of Shelley, edited by H Buxton Forman (1880)
• Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, (1878)
• Poetical Works and Other & Writings of John Keats (1880)
• An Essay in Bibliography (1886)
• Three Essays by John Keats (1889),
• Poetry and Prose by John Keats: a book of fresh verses and new readings (1890),
• Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood (1893)
• The Building of the Idylls; a Study in Tennyson (1896)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her scarcer books (1896)
• The Books of William Morris, edited by H. Buxton Forman (1897)
• The Life Poetic by William Morris (1897)
• Sordello, Robert Browning (1902)
• Poetical Works of John Keats (1906).
• Letters of Edward John Trelawny , edited by H.Buxton Forman, OUP (1910),
• Note Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1911)
• Life of Shelley,Thomas Medwin, edited by H. Buxton Forman. OUP, (1913)
• Hitherto Unpublished Poems and Stories by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1914).