Harry Buxton Forman
| Harry Buxton Forman | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
11 July 1842 Camberwell, London |
| Died | 15 June 1917 (aged 74) St. John's Wood, London |
| Occupation | antiquarian, book collector, bibliographer, poet, civil servant |
| Spouse(s) | Laura Sellé |
| Children | Three |
| Parent(s) | George Ellery Forman and Maria Courthorpe |
Henry "Harry" Buxton Forman CB (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. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
Henry Buxton Forman was born in Camberwell, 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 in Devon and he was educated at a Royal Naval School in New Cross where Edmund Gosse 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 brothers in in south London after joining the Post Office at 18 years of age.
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.
It is as an authority on the lives and works of Percy Shelley and John Keats that Forman is largely remembered. His literary endeavours began in 1869 with a series of anonymous articles in William Tinsley's eponymous Tinsley's Magazine later reprinted in 1871 as Our Living Poets. This resulted in a friendly relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti 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.
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