Horace Howard Furness

Horace Howard Furness
Born	November 2, 1833 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	August 13, 1912 Wallingford, Pennsylvania
Spouse(s)	Helen Kate (Rogers) Furness
Children	Walter Rogers Furness Horace Howard Furness Jr. William Henry Furness III Caroline Augusta (Furness) Jayne
Parent(s)	William Henry Furness Annis Pulling (Jenks) Furness

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

Life and career

Horace Howard Furness in his library at "Lindenshade," ca. 1900.^[1]

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, then studied in Germany.^[2] After returning to the United States, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1859, 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. He devoted more than forty years to the series, completing the annotation of sixteen plays. 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.

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.^[5] 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.^[6]

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."^[7]

New Variorum

"Dr. Furness's House, West Washington Square, just before it was torn down." (1914), Joseph Pennell.

Other works

• F. R. (1903). Philadelphia: privately printed. (A slim memorial of Fairman Rogers, signed H. H. F.)
• Jayne, Horace H. F. (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.CS1 maint: Date format (link)
• 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

Family life

Helen Kate Furness, (c. 1880)

In 1860 he married Helen Kate Rogers (1837–1883), sister of Fairman Rogers and heir to an ironmaking fortune. She compiled a concordance to Shakespeare's poems, published in 1874.^[10] They had four children:^[11]

• Walter Rogers Furness (1861–February 7, 1914), who built Furness Cottage at the Jekyll Island Club, Georgia, where the family vacationed each year from 1889 to 1895. He became a partner in the architecture firm of his uncle, Frank Furness in 1896. He was permanently blinded in one eye after a ball hit him during a game of racquets in 1898, and from then on his life became worse and worse. descending into raging alcoholism. His wife, Helen Key Bullitt, died aged 47 in January 1914 and he died a month later aged 53 after a heart attack.^[12]
• Horace Howard Furness Jr. (1865–1930), who continued his father's work on the Variorum Edition. Author of a play, The Gloss of Youth : an imaginary episode in the lives of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher (1920).
• William Henry Furness III, (1866-1920), an explorer and ethnologist, died unmarried.
• Caroline Augusta Furness (b. 1873), also an ethnologist, she married Horace Jayne and died from a heart attack in 1909. Their children were Kate Furness Jayne and Horace H. F. Jayne, an art historian and museum director.

Honors

Furness was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society on April 16, 1880.^[13] He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University, University of Halle, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and University of Cambridge.^[14] He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905.^[15]

Legacy

• 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.^[16]
• Another son, William Henry Furness III, was one of the University of Pennsylvania medical students depicted in Thomas Eakins's painting The Agnew Clinic (1889).^[17] He undertook anthropological expeditions with Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. and Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., and wrote books and articles about Borneo and Southeast Asia.
• W.H. Furness III donated the land for the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania,^[18] built on the former grounds of the family's country house, "Lindenshade."

• 
  "Lindenshade", Wallingford, Pennsylvania (built c. 1873, demolished 1940), attributed to Frank Furness.
• 
  The University of Pennsylvania Library (1891), now the Fisher Fine Arts Library.
• 
  Leaded glass fanlight over the main entrance to the University of Pennsylvania Library.
• 
  Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia.
• 
  Helen Kate Furness Free Library, Providence Road & Furness Lane, Wallingford, PA.

References

Further reading

• Chapman, John Jay (1915). Memories and Milestones. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, pp 45-60.
• Gibson, James M. The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story: Horace Howard Furness and the New Variorum Shakespeare (New York: AMS Press, 1990)
• Jusserand, J. J. (1917). With Americans of Past and Present Days. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 319-332.
• Repplier, Agnes, "Horace Howard Furness," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1912.
• Williams, Talcott, "Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness: Our Great Shakespere Critic", The Century Magazine, November 1912.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Horace Howard Furness

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Horace Howard Furness.

•  "Furness, Horace Howard". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
• The Horace Howard Furness collection on the Great Central Fair, containing Furness' papers and ephemera from the U.S. Sanitary Commission's Great Central Fair in 1864, are available for research use at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
• The Furness Library and the papers of the Furness family are located at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.