Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Gilman, Arthur (author)

GILMAN, Arthur, author, b. in Alton, Ill., 22 June, 1837. His ancestor, Edward Gilman, of an ancient Welsh family, emigrated from Norfolk, England, to Boston, Mass., in 1638. Arthur Gilman was educated in St. Louis and in New York, and is an honorary M. A. of Williams college. In 1857 he began active business as a banker in New York, but, his health becoming impaired, he removed in 1862 to the neighborhood of Lenox, Mass., where he engaged in philanthropic and educational work. In 1870 Mr. Gilman removed to Cambridge, Mass., and connected himself with the Riverside press. In 1871 he became one of the editors of the American tract society in Boston, and in 1876, together with his wife, devised a plan which subsequently took form as “The Society for the collegiate instruction of women,” familiarly known as “The Harvard annex,” of which Mr. Gilman has been executive officer ever since. Mr. Gilman's studies have been in the line of English literature and of history. He has written much for the periodical press, and has published in book-form “The Gilman Family traced in the Line of Hon. John Gilman, of Exeter, N. H.” (Albany, N. Y., 1869); “First Steps in English Literature” (Boston, 1870); “Kings, Queens, and Barbarians, or Talks about Seven Historic Ages” (1870); “First Steps in General History: A Suggestive Outline” (1874); “Shakespeare's Morals,” with brief collateral readings and Scriptural references (New York, 1879); “History of the American People” (Boston, 1883); “Tales of the Pathfinders” (1884); “The Story of Rome” (New York and London, 1885); “Short Stories from the Dictionary” (Boston, 1886); and “Story of the Saracens” (New York and London, 1886). He has also edited and contributed to “Boston, Past and Present” (Boston, 1873); “Library of Religious Poetry” (New York and London, 1880); “The Kingdom of Home; Homely Poems for Home Lovers” (Boston, 1881); “Magna Charta Stories” (Boston and London, 1882); “The Story of the Nations Series,” and an “Index to the Complete Edition of the Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge” (New York, 1884). He also edited “The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,” to which are appended poems attributed to Chaucer (3 vols., Boston and London, 1879). In this work the editor printed for the first time, for the general reader, the famous Ellesmere text of the Canterbury tales.—His wife, Stella Scott, b. in Alabama, is the author of “Mothers in Council” (New York, 1884).