Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Wright, William Aldis
WRIGHT, WILLIAM ALDIS (1831–1914), Shakespearian and Biblical scholar, born at Beccles 1 August 1831, was the second son of George Wright, baptist minister there, by his second wife, Elizabeth Higham, sister of Thomas Higham [q.v.], the engraver. After education at the Northgate house academy and from 1847 at the Fauconberge grammar school, Beccles, he was admitted in 1849 to Trinity College, Cambridge, and was eighteenth wrangler in 1854. He taught in a school at Wimbledon in 1855, returned to Cambridge, and, on the removal of the religious tests, graduated B.A. in 1858 and M.A. in 1861. His first publication was an essay on Herrick in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for September 1856. He found regular employment on (Sir) William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1860–1863), and made his name as a scholar by his contributions to it, by his edition of Bacon's Essays (1862), and by the part which he played with Henry Bradshaw [q.v.] in the exposure of the falsehoods of Constantine Simonides [Guardian, 3 September 1862, 26 January and 11 November 1863]. In 1863 he was appointed librarian of Trinity College, but could not be elected fellow till October 1878, when the university commission of 1877 had removed the last disabilities of dissenters. He was senior bursar from June 1870 (when he resigned the librarianship) to December 1895, and vice-master from February 1888 till his death at Cambridge, 19 May 1914. He had occupied the same rooms in Nevile's Court since 1865. Although one of the great figures in the university, he took no part latterly in its politics, and he neither taught nor lectured. Few undergraduates ventured to speak to him, and even the younger fellows of his college were kept at a distance by the austere precision of his manner. His old-fashioned courtesy made him a genial host, but his circle of chosen friends was small.
Wright's edition (Golden Treasury series) of Bacon's Essays foreshadowed his later work in the accuracy of its text and the concise learning of its notes, and remains a model edition of an English classic. He insisted on keeping the old spelling and punctuation, and was the first to point out emphatically that editors of Elizabethan texts must expect variations in different copies of the same issue. He had used ten copies of the text which he reprinted, and found that some of the sheets were in three stages. He thus anticipated much that is supposed to be recent in editorial methods. He showed that the older punctuation was ‘rhetorical and not grammatical’ in a memorandum (unpublished) On the use of the Comma in the Annexed Book (i.e. the copy of the Prayer Book annexed to the Act of Uniformity of 1662), which he presented in 1894 to the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses.
In 1863, after the publication of the first volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare, Wright succeeded John Glover as joint-editor with William George Clark [q.v.], and brought out the remaining eight volumes from 1863 to 1866. He was solely responsible for the second edition (1891–1893), which remains the great monument of his industry and accuracy. But he was not responsible for its plan. In conversation he admitted the disadvantages of a modernized text, and said that an editor who knows his business is better without a colleague. While the Cambridge Shakespeare was in progress, he edited with Clark the Globe Shakespeare (1864); and when it was complete he edited with him in the Clarendon Press series The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Macbeth, and Hamlet between 1868 and 1872. Thereafter he carried on the series alone, and added thirteen plays between 1874 (The Tempest) and 1897 (1 Henry IV). Besides presenting a mass of new material he was the first editor to give due attention to the Elizabethan usage of words. Every later editor has recognized the value of this series. It was in his nature to be silent about poetic beauty and dramatic genius; but learning, accuracy, and common sense combined to make him our greatest Shakespearian scholar since Edmund Malone.
In 1864 Wright undertook to collaborate with John Earle [q.v.] and Henry Bradshaw on an edition of Chaucer which ultimately became the Oxford Chaucer, edited by Walter William Skeat [q.v.]; but he retired in 1870, partly under the pressure of new duties. In 1867 he printed privately the Clerk's Tale from MS. Dd. 4.24 in the University Library, Cambridge. His other publications during the busy years of his librarianship were an abridgement of the Dictionary of the Bible, called the Concise Dictionary (1865); The Bible Word-Book, begun by Jonathan Eastwood [q.v.], (1866, second edition 1884); the Clarendon Press edition of Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1869), and the Roxburghe Club edition of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode (1869). In 1868 he edited with W. G. Clark and John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor [q.v.] the first number of the Journal of Philology, and he continued as editor till 1913.
In 1870, when Wright became bursar of his college, he also became secretary to the Old Testament revision company. Of its 794 meetings from June 1870 to May 1885, he attended 793. His work on Smith's Dictionary of the Bible had made him highly proficient in Hebrew, a study which he had begun as a schoolboy; but he had the rarer qualification of knowing sixteenth-century English. None of the revisers could have had greater respect than he had for the English of Coverdale, and he is understood to have been largely responsible for the conservatism of the revision. All his official papers, showing every stage of the revision, are now in the Cambridge University Library. While engaged on the revision, he edited Generydes for the Early English Text Society (1873–1878) and ten plays of Shakespeare in the Clarendon Press series. He also contributed to Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (1875–1880) and Dictionary of Christian Biography (1877–1887). In 1887 he completed for the Rolls Series his edition of the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which he had been forced to lay aside in 1870.
From 1889 to 1903 Wright edited, as literary executor, the writings of his friend Edward FitzGerald, a pleasant duty which was accompanied till 1895 by his laborious task as bursar, and varied by his exacting revision of the Cambridge Shakespeare and by his editing of separate plays, as well as of a Facsimile of the Milton MS. in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (1899). He brought out FitzGerald's Letters and Literary Remains in three volumes in 1889, and published the Letters by themselves, with additions (Eversley series) in 1894, the aim of the collection being ‘to let FitzGerald tell the story of his own life’. Letters to Fanny Kemble followed in 1895, Miscellanies (Golden Treasury series) in 1900, and More Letters in 1901. All were combined in the final edition of FitzGerald's Letters and Literary Remains (7 vols., 1902–1903). Wright took care never to come between the author and the reader, but his notes give the information that the reader requires. In all respects he provided an example of how a contemporary ought to be edited.
Till his first serious illness, two years before his death, Wright's energies were unwearied. His work after the age of seventy continued to show the same wide range; in quality it never varied. For the Pitt Press (of which he was a syndic from 1872 to 1910) he edited Milton's Poems with critical notes (1903), the English Works of Roger Ascham (1904), and the Authorized Version of the Bible as printed in the original two issues (5 vols., 1909). In 1905 he brought out the third edition of Bishop Westcott's History of the Bible (undertaken at Westcott's request in 1901) and a Commentary on the Book of Job from a Hebrew MS. in the Cambridge University Library. Then he turned to Anglo-Norman and presented the Roxburghe Club with an edition of the long-lost Trinity College MS. of Femina (1909). For his last work he fittingly chose an edition of the six English translations of the Psalms from Tyndale to the Revised Version, and produced his Hexaplar English Psalter in 1911, at the age of eighty. In the same year he contributed to the second Lord Tennyson's Tennyson and his Friends an account of James Spedding [q.v.]. Since 1871 he had been engaged on an edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and had succeeded in tracing all but a few of the quotations. Before his death he distributed many of his books among the Cambridge libraries, and by his will he left £5,000 to the University Library, and £5,000 to the library of his college.
The amount of Wright's work is the more remarkable seeing that he suffered from writer's cramp and had to learn to use his left hand; but he allowed nothing to interfere with his methodical habits, and faced all his tasks with an iron will. As an editor he held it his duty to present his material in such a way that it would speak for itself. He distrusted theories and intuitions, and all the short cuts that cleverness is tempted to adopt. ‘Ignorance and conceit’, he said, ‘are the fruitful parents of conjectural emendation’, and he would quote the rabbinical saying, ‘Teach thy lips to say “I do not know”’. He never forgot that he was the servant rather than the master of his material, and consistently, throughout a career of over fifty years, was the most impersonal of our great editors. A superficial reader may find his work dry, and may even think of him as a mere scholiast, but every worker in the same fields continually finds that Wright has taken account of facts which others have failed to see, and every one learns to trust him. His one mistake was over the Squire Papers (Academy, 11 April and 2 May 1885; English Historical Review, April 1886); FitzGerald had believed in their authenticity, and for once Wright's judgement was misled by friendship. In conversation, as in his writings, he might seem to be incapable of any display of sentiment, but the friends who were permitted to get behind his somewhat rigid sincerity found a warm heart and great depth of feeling. He never married.
He received the honorary degrees of LL.D., Edinburgh (1879), D.C.L., Oxford (1886), and Litt.D., Dublin (1895). The portraits by Walter William Ouless at Trinity College (1887), and by William Strang in the Fitzwilliam Museum (1910), fail to convey his vigour. The best likeness is the photograph by A. G. Dew-Smith of Trinity College (1894).
[The Times, 20 May 1914; Morning Post, 20 May 1914; Cambridge Review, 27 May 1914; Journal of Philology, 1914, pp. 299–304; Admissions to Trinity College, Cambridge, vol. iv; S. K. Bland, Memorials of George Wright, 1875; G. W. Prothero, Memoir of Henry Bradshaw, 1889; Letters of Alexander Macmillan, 1908; C. L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan, 1910; private information; personal knowledge.]