Henry Buxton Forman (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.
Early life
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 Rotherhithe born wife Maria Courthope. 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 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 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.
Buxton Forman became interested in the philosophy of free thinking as expounded in the works of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and he met his wife Laura Sellé, the daughter of the musician Dr William Christian Sellé at a positivist lecture also attended by George Eliot 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 ran to five volumes. He proved a gifted textual editor although the criticism he printed included much that is trivial. 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'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 Wade and Charles Jeremiah Wells. He contributed articles on Wade and Horne and verses of his own in W R Nicoll and T J 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.