• Source: Thomas James Wise

Thomas James Wise (7 October 1859 – 13 May 1937) was a bibliophile and probable literary forger and thief who collected the Ashley Library, now housed by the British Library.




Collecting career


Wise began collecting books as a schoolboy, spending his pocket money at the barrows in Farringdon Street. He was a keen collector of first editions in original condition. His interests were poetry followed by drama and his collection dating back to Elizabethan publications was an exhaustive representation.
His collection was funded by selling duplicates and acting as an agent for wealthy collectors such as John Henry Wrenn. Wise was given an honorary M.A. degree by the University of Oxford and elected an honorary Fellow of Worcester College for his services to bibliographical science. He became a member of the Consultative Committee of the Friends of the Bodleian and was elected President of the Bibliographical Society in 1922–1924.




Forgeries and thefts


Wise became a noted bibliographer, collector, forger, and thief. He parlayed his international reputation as a collector of books and an exposer of forgers and forgeries into a career in creating and selling forgeries. He privately printed nearly 300 works of English authors, some of which were debunked as forgeries by Carter and Pollard.
In 1934 his reputation was damaged by the publication of "An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets" by John Carter and Graham Pollard. In their writing and exposé, Carter and Pollard were astute in their use of irony. Carter and Pollard proved that a large number of rare first-edition pamphlets from 19th-century authors which depended solely on Wise's published works for their authenticity were fakes. Wise and a fellow bibliophile Harry Buxton Forman had been involved in the fabrication and sale of many of the same pamphlets to collectors. Forman and Wise's crimes are generally regarded as one of the most notorious literary scandals of the twentieth century.
Shortly after Wise's death the Library was sold to the British Museum by his widow for £66,000. The works were compared with the British Museum's former collection at which point it was discovered that over 200 book leaves were missing and 89 of these matching leaves were found in the Wise volumes. John Henry Wrenn had built up a drama collection (housed in the University of Texas) and Wise had helped with supplying these volumes. Fannie Ratchford, Rare Book Librarian at the
University of Texas, took suspected copies in the Wrenn library to England, where she was able to help the museum check copies to see how many stolen leaves were to be found. Sixty of these books were also found to have been completed with thefts from the British Museum library.
A detailed scientific investigation by David Foxon was published by the Bibliographical Society in 1959 with the conclusion that Wise must have known that some of the book leaves added to his collection were stolen and that it was probable that he had taken the leaves himself; "In general it seems likely that Wise would not have risked sharing his guilty knowledge with an emissary but would have made the thefts himself; the rest of this study is written on that assumption."
A particularly noteworthy forgery, which he authenticated as genuine and original, was an edition of E. B. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese said to have been privately printed in Reading in 1847.




Personal life


In 1890 Wise married Selina Fanny Smith (aged 22) and they moved into 52 Ashley Road, Hornsey Rise (leading to the name of the "Ashley Library"). By 1895 Selina deserted her husband on the grounds that he was fully devoted to his book collection rather than their marriage. In 1897 they were formally divorced and Wise moved to St George's Road in Kilburn, northwest London (now Priory Terrace).
Wise remarried in June 1900 to Frances Louise Greenhaigh and dedicated the final volume of the Ashley Library catalogue to her.




Publications


Wise's published works included detailed bibliographies of Tennyson, Swinburne, Landor, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, the Brownings, the Brontës, Shelley and Conrad. He was the copyright owner and co-editor of the Bonchurch edition of Swinburne's works.




Legacy


The bulk of his personal papers — consisting of 33 document boxes (13.86 linear feet), and 2 galley folders — are at the Harry Ransom Center of The University of Texas at Austin. They are housed off site and require advance requests for examination. Another collection is at the Firestone Library at the Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. It includes 0.2 linear feet, 1 half-size archival box.




References






= Notes

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= Citations

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= Sources

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Barker, Nicolas; Collins, John; Carter, John (1983). A sequel to An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets by John Carter and Graham Pollard: the forgeries of H. Buxton Forman & T.J. Wise re-examined (Print). London; Berkeley, CA: Scolar Press. ISBN 978-0-85967-639-7.
Bonner, Gerald (31 July 2013). "Forgery: Instances of literary forgery". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
Carter, John; Pollard, Graham (1934), An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets, London New York: Constable & Co., C. Scribner's Sons, ISBN 978-0-8383-1261-2
Carter, John; Pollard, Graham; Mitchell, Stewart (September 1934). "An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets". The New England Quarterly. 7 (3). The New England Quarterly, Inc./jstor: 602–606. doi:10.2307/359689. JSTOR 359689. (subscription required)
Carter, John; Pollard, Graham; Barker, Nicolas; Collins, John (1983) [1934]. An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets by John Carter and Graham Pollard: the forgeries of H. Buxton Forman & T.J. Wise (2d ed.). Scolar Press. p. 441. ISBN 9780859676373.
Collins, John F. R. (1992). The Two Forgers: a biography of Harry Buxton Forman & Thomas James Wise. New Castle, Delaware, U.S.A: Oak Knoll Books. ISBN 978-0-938768-29-6.
Dearden, James S. (1969). "Wise and Ruskin," The Book Collector 18.no.1 (spring): 45–56.
Foxon, D. F. (18 October 1956). "Forger And Thief; New Chapter in Cautionary Tale of Thomas J. Wise". The Times. p. 11.
Foxon, David Fairweather (1959), "Thomas J. Wise and the pre-Restoration drama: a study in theft and sophistication", Transactions: Supplement, 19, Bibliographical Society (Great Britain), OCLC 1470724
Gearty, Thomas J., Jr. "Thomas J. Wise: A Brief Survey of his Literary Forgeries." The Courier 11.1 (1973): 51–64.
Hone, Joseph (2024). The Book Forger (Print). Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9781784744670.
MacDonald, Dwight (10 November 1962). "The First Editions of T.J. Wise". The New Yorker. p. 168. (subscription required)
Maggs, Frank Benjamin; Wise, Thomas James (1965). The Delinquent Bibliophile: Thomas James Wise and the foundation of the Ashley Library. Radlett Literary Society. OCLC 24596991., British Library 2718.cc.62
Ratchford, Fannie. “The Wise Forgeries.” Southwest Review 25, no. 4 (1940): 363–77.
Ricks, Christopher (28 February 1985). "The Case of the Crooked Bookman". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 11 February 2015.(subscription required)
Special Collections Department (21 December 2010). "Forging a Collection; Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman, the Two Forgers". University of Delaware Library, Special Collections. Retrieved 28 January 2011.
Wrenn, Harold B.; Wise, Thomas J. (1920). A Catalogue of the Library of the Late John Henry Wrenn (PDF). Austin: The University of Texas Austin. Retrieved 13 February 2015. at Internet Archive




= Further reading

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Ratchford, F. E., ed. (1973) [1939]. Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn (reprint ed.). W. G. Partington, Forging Ahead.
Wise, Thomas J. (1959). Centenary Studies.
John (Francis Rodney) Collins: The two forgers : a biography of Harry Buxton Forman & Thomas James Wise, Aldershot : Scolar Press, 1992, ISBN 0-85967-754-0
Joseph Hone: The Book Forger: The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world, London, UK : Chatto & Windus, 2024, ISBN 978-1-78474-467-0




External links


Works by Thomas James Wise at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Thomas James Wise at the Internet Archive
Thomas James Wise letters. Available online through Lehigh University's I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera.
"Thomas James Wise (1859–1937)". Library Thing. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
A Bibliography of books by Thomas James Wise (6 June 2012) 33 works at Open library
The Two Forgers cover
Archival Material at Leeds University Library

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