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Horace Howard Furness

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Horace Howard Furness
BornNovember 2, 1833
DiedAugust 13, 1912(1912-08-13) (aged 78)
SpouseHelen Kate (Rogers) Furness
ChildrenWalter Rogers Furness
Horace Howard Furness Jr.
William Henry Furness III
Caroline Augusta (Furness) Jayne
Parent(s)William Henry Furness
Annis Pulling (Jenks) Furness
Signature

Horace Howard Furness (November 2, 1833 – August 13, 1912) was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century.

Life and career

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Horace Furness was the son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness (1802–1896), and brother of the architect Frank Furness (1839–1912). He graduated from Harvard University in 1854, embarked on a journey to Europe with Atherton Blight, and then studied in Germany.[1] After returning to the United States, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1858,[2] but his growing deafness interfered with the practice of law.[3]

In 1860, he joined the Shakspere [sic] Society of Philadelphia, an amateur study group that took its scholarship seriously. As he later wrote:

Every member had a copy of the Variorum of 1821, which we fondly believed had gathered under each play all Shakespearian lore worth preserving down to that date. What had been added since that year was scattered in many different editions, and in numberless volumes dispersed over the whole domain of literature. To gather these stray items of criticism was real toil, real but necessary if we did not wish our labour over the text to be in vain.[4]

As editor of the "New Variorum" editions of Shakespeare—also called the "Furness Variorum"—he collected in a single source 300 years of references, antecedent works, influences and commentaries.[5] He devoted more than forty years to the series, completing the annotation of sixteen plays.[6] His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865–1930), joined as co-editor of the Variorum's later volumes, and continued the project after the father's death, annotating three additional plays and revising two others.[7]

Nowhere, perhaps, has more labor been devoted to the study of the works of the poet than that given by Mr. H. H. Furness, of Philadelphia, to the preparation of the new Variorum edition. — Sir Sidney Lee[8]

He was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, a long-serving trustee (1880–1904), and chairman of the building committee for its library. Designed by his brother Frank, Horace selected the Shakepearean quotes for the 1891 building's leaded glass windows.[9] He was the advisor for doctoral student Emily Jordan Folger who, with her husband Henry Clay Folger, would co-found the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.[10]

An 1890 review in Blackwood's Magazine may indicate the esteem in which British critics held Furness's scholarship:

In what is called 'The Variorum Edition of Shakespeare,' America has the honor of having produced the very best and most complete edition, so far as it has gone, of our great national poet. For text, illustration (happily, not pictorial), commentary and criticism, it leaves nothing to be desired. The editor combines with the patience and accuracy of the textural scholar, an industry which has overlooked nothing of value that has been written about Shakespeare by the best German and French, as well as English commentators and critics; and what is of no less moment he possesses in himself a rare delicacy of literary appreciation and breadth of judgment, disciplined by familiarity with all that is best in the literature of antiquity as well as of modern times, which he brings to bear on his notes with great effect.[11]

New Variorum

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Horace Howard Furness in his brick library at "Lindenshade," c. 1910[12]
"Dr. Furness's House, West Washington Square, just before it was torn down." (1914), Joseph Pennell.

Volumes edited by Horace Howard Furness

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These volumes went through a number of reprints: the external links connect to the last online edition available.

Volumes edited by H. H. Furness, Jr.

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The Modern Language Association of America continues the "New Variorum" project with the goal of definitively annotating all 38 of Shakespeare's plays.[14]

Other works

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  • F. R. (1903). Philadelphia: privately printed. (A memorial of brother-in-law Fairman Rogers, signed H. H. F.)
  • Jayne, Horace H. F., ed. (1922). The Letters of Horace Howard Furness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Volume 1 · Volume 2
  • Haupt, Paul; Furness, H. H., eds. (1893–1904). The Sacred Books of the Old and New Testaments. A New English Translation. With Explanatory Notes and Pictorial Illustrations. Prepared by eminent Biblical scholars of Europe and of America. (Polychrome Bible). New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
  • Wellhausen, Julius (1898). The Book of Psalms : a new English translation. Polychrome Bible, part 14. Translated by H. H. Furness (psalms); John Taylor (notes); J. A. Paterson (appendix). New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
  • Records of a lifelong friendship, 1807-1882: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furness (1910), edited by H. H. F. (Horace Howard Furness). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin

Honors

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Furness was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society on April 16, 1880.[15] He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University, University of Halle, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and University of Cambridge.[16] He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905.[17]

Personal

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Helen Kate Furness, (c. 1880)

In 1860 Furness married Helen Kate Rogers (1837–1883), heir to an ironmaking fortune and sister of University of Pennsylvania instructor Fairman Rogers. She compiled a concordance to Shakespeare's poems, published in 1874.[18] They had four children:[19]

Horace and Kate Furness inherited her family's Philadelphia city house, at the SW corner of Locust Street & West Washington Square. Frank Furness altered the house in 1873, and designed the 1909 office building that replaced it.[22] He also designed their country house, "Lindenshade" (c. 1873, demolished 1940) and its many expansions, including the 1903 fireproof brick library.

Legacy

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  • Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named for him.
  • Horace Jr. donated his father's Shakespearean collection to the University of Pennsylvania, whose Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library honors both father and son.[23]
  • William Henry Furness III donated the land for the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania,[24] built in 1916 on the former grounds of his parents' country house, "Lindenshade."

References

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  1. ^ Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies, Volume 1, p. 311.
  2. ^ "A Catalogue of Members of the Pennsylvania Bar Association; admitted Between June 1, 1855-1861". Law Association of Philadelphia. 1861.
  3. ^ Lang, Harry (1995). Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 136. ISBN 0313291705.
  4. ^ Horace Howard Furness, "How did you become a Shakespeare Student?" Shakespeariana, vol. 5 (October 1888), pp. 439-40.
  5. ^ Jean Jules Jusserand, "Horace Howard Furness," With Americans of Past and Present Days (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), pp. 322-323.
  6. ^ Jacob I. Kobrick, Furness-Bullitt Family Papers (Collection 1903), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, p. 2.(PDF)
  7. ^ John Woolf Jordan, A History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Its People, Volume 2 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1914), pp. 670-671.[1]
  8. ^ Sir Sidney Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1899), p. 285.[2]
  9. ^ Following a 6-year restoration, Frank Furness's University of Pennsylvania Library was rededicated in 1991, on the occasion of its centennial, as the Fisher Fine Arts Library.
  10. ^ Joseph Quincy Adams and Paul Cret, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington (Amherst College, 1933).
  11. ^ Quoted in "Horace Howard Furness," Dictionary of Literary Biography (Thomson Gale, 2005-06)
  12. ^ Historic American Buildings Survey PA.23-WALF.2A-5, Library of Congress.[3]
  13. ^ "The New Variorum Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Julius Caesar". Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved January 26, 2017. (Online version of the full text)
  14. ^ Shakespeare Variorum Handbook: A Manual of Editorial Practice.
  15. ^ "List of Members of the American Philosophical Society Elected Since the Publication of the Fourteenth Volume". Front Matter. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 15 (3). American Philosophical Society: i–x. 1881. ISSN 0065-9746. JSTOR 1005422.
  16. ^ Horace Howard Furness from Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
  17. ^ Deceased Members Archived 2011-07-26 at the Wayback Machine from American Academy of Arts and Letters.
  18. ^ "Mrs. Horace Howard Furness" (1874). A concordance to Shakespeare's poems. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.
  19. ^ Jayne 1922, Vol. 1, pp. xxiv-xxxv.
  20. ^ McCash, June Hall (1998). The Jekyll Island Cottage Colony (illustrated ed.). University of Georgia Press. pp. 79–88. ISBN 9780820319285.
  21. ^ Wm. H. Furness III is the student at the top center of the painting, leaning sideways to get a better look.File:Thomas Eakins, The Agnew Clinic 1889.jpg
  22. ^ 700 Locust Street, from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings.
  23. ^ Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library
  24. ^ Helen Kate Furness Free Library

Further reading

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