1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oxenford, John

OXENFORD, JOHN (1812–1877), English dramatist, was born at Camberwell on the 12th of August 1812. He began his literary career by writing on finance. He was an excellent linguist, and the author of many translations from the German, notably of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1846) and Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe (1850). He did much by his writing to spread the fame of Schopenhauer in England. His first play was My Fellow Clerk, produced at the Lyceum in 1835. This was followed by a long series of pieces, the most famous of which was perhaps the Porter’s Knot (1858) and Twice Killed (1835). About 1850 he became dramatic critic of The Times. He died in Southwark on the 21st of February 1877.

Many references to his pieces will be found in The Life and Reminiscences of E. L. Blanchard (ed. C. Scott and C. Howard, 1891).