Thomas James Wise

Thomas James Wise 1859-1937, English bibliographer and book collector. His famous Ashley Library of rare editions and manuscripts was acquired by the British Museum in 1937. His many bibliographies and catalogs of the works of English literary figures included those on Shelley, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Conrad, Coleridge, and Robert Browning. Wise also privately printed nearly 300 works of English authors, some of which were exposed by John Carter and Graham Pollard as forgeries in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934).

Bibliography: See Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn (ed. by F. E. Ratchford, 1944); W. G. Partington, Forging Ahead (1939, repr. 1973); and Thomas J. Wise: Centenary Studies (1959).

Wise, Thomas James (1859–1937), bibliographer, collector, and editor who formed the Ashley Library (see libraries). The publication of An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets (1934), by J. Carter and G. Pollard, proved that many rare pamphlets whose authenticity depended on Wise's statements were in fact forgeries, notably an edition of E. B. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese said to have been published in Reading in 1847.