Joseph Ritson

Joseph Ritson 1752-1803, English antiquarian and scholar, b. Stockton-on-Tees. An industrious student of English literature, he attacked Thomas Warton's scholarship in Observations on Warton's History (1782) and disputed the originality of Bishop Percy's Reliques. He criticized Dr. Johnson, George Steevens, and Malone as editors of Shakespeare, and in 1802 he compiled a catalog of English poets from the 12th to the 16th cent.

Bibliography: See biography by B. H. Bronson (1938).

Ritson, Joseph (1752–1803), literary antiquary, and a friend of Sir W. Scott, who consulted him while working on his Border Minstrelsy. Ritson was a man of an irritable and bitter nature, exacerbated by ill health, which expressed itself in his attacks (often justified) on the works of fellow scholars: he challenged T. Warton's History of English Poetry (1782) and also Dr Johnson's and Steevens's edition of Shakespeare. In 1783 he published A Select Collection of English Songs containing strictures on Percy's Reliques, accusing Percy of corrupting texts. He published Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads Now Extant Relative to That Outlaw (1795), with illustrations by Bewick, and Ancient English Metrical Romances (1802), as well as several popular collections and anthologies of songs, children's verses, fairy- stories, etc. He became increasingly odd in later life and finally insane. (See also primitivism and ballad.)