Graham Henry Pollard

Background

Henry Graham Pollard was born on March 7, 1903, in Putney, England. He was the son of Albert Frederick, a constitutional historian at University College, London, and Catherine Susanna (Lucy) Pollard.

Education

After studying at Shrewsbury School, Pollard had studied history for one year at University College, London before winning a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford in 1921, obtaining a third-class degree in history in 1924.

Career

Even whilst Graham was a student, he was well-known as a book collector, and bought part of a booksellers' business (Birrell and Garnett) in London. He became managing director in 1927, with the company producing many noted catalogs in the 1920s and 1930s, some of which were to become standard works of reference. Pollard's knowledge of his subject was displayed in his contributions to The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and in his lectures and articles. With John Carter, he wrote An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), exposing the prominent book collector Thomas J. Wise as a fraud.

In 1939, the bookshop partnership ended and Pollard became a special lecturer at University College, London before joining the Board of Trade in 1942; whilst this was supposedly a temporary appointment, he remained until retirement in 1959. He maintained his bibliographical interests, publishing an edition of The Earliest Directory of the Book Trade by John Pendred (1785), and lecturing in Cambridge shortly before his retirement. During his retirement, he was president from 1960 to 1962 of the London Bibliographical Society, and was Reader in Bibliography at the University of Oxford in 1961, lecturing on the book trade in medieval Oxford. He also lectured in the United States in 1973 and received a volume of essays published in his honor by the Oxford Bibliographical Society in 1975.

Achievements

• The bibliographer Graham Pollard was best remembered as half of the team that uncovered one of the largest examples of widespread literary forgery in all of English literature. With his associate John Carter, Pollard helped prove that Thomas J. Wise - once considered to be the world’s foremost authority on nineteenth-century literary minutiae - had, in fact, produced forged copies of small works by famous British Victorian authors, including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Charles Swinburne, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In their monograph An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, Carter and Pollard destroyed Wise’s reputation as a scholar.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Early bookbinding manuals

    (An annotated list of technical accounts of bookbinding to...)

  • An Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets 1934

Politics

It was alleged that Pollard spied on the Communist Party for Maxwell Knight and the British security services.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• “Pollard was a most careful scholar, and he had a thorough grounding in the work of previous bibliographers.” - Turner
  
  “An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets proved that bibliographical theories could be applied to practical problems. Esther Potter quotes Sir Frank Francis as remarking that the entries, compiled by Pollard for the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, on newspapers and periodicals are ‘literally astonishing in their scope.’ A reader can find similar astonishment in all of Graham Pollard’s work.”

Connections

In 1924, Graham married Kay Beauchamp, pioneering Communist and women's rights campaigner, but their marriage was dissolved in 1972.

Father:

Albert Frederick Pollard

Mother:

Catherine Susanna (Lucy) Pollard

ex-wife:

Kay Beauchamp

References

• Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 201 Twentieth-Century British Book Collectors and Bibliographers