quiæ Antiquæ,’ 1841 (prepared with Thomas Wright, and reissued in 1845). Phillipps invited him to his house at Middle Hill, Broadway, Worcestershire, and Halliwell, soon a frequent guest there, fell in love with Phillipps's eldest daughter, Henrietta Elizabeth Molyneux. Phillipps indignantly refused his consent to their marriage, but it took place despite his opposition at Broadway on 9 Aug. 1842. Phillipps never forgave either Halliwell or his daughter, and declined all further intercourse with them. The newly married pair, for many years in straitened circumstances, took up their residence first with Halliwell's father in London, and afterwards at Islip, Oxfordshire, of which place Halliwell published a history in 1849. In 1844 a serious charge was brought against him. Several manuscripts from his Cambridge collection were purchased about 1843 by the trustees of the British Museum from Rodd, the bookseller, to whom Halliwell had sold them in 1840. In 1844 it was discovered that many of these manuscripts had previously belonged to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had been missing from that library for five or six years. That the manuscripts were abstracted from Trinity College admitted of no doubt, and Whewell, the master of Trinity College, demanded their restoration at the hands of the trustees of the British Museum. Sir Henry Ellis, the chief librarian of the Museum, began an investigation, and on 10 Feb. 1845 issued an order forbidding Halliwell to enter the Museum until the suspicions attaching to him were removed. After many threats of actions at law on the part of all the persons interested, the matter dropped; the manuscripts remained at the Museum; but the order excluding Halliwell from the Museum was not rescinded. Halliwell asserted in a privately printed pamphlet (1845) that he bought the suspected manuscripts at a shop in London, and his defence proved satisfactory to his friends.
Meanwhile, besides his labours for literary societies, Halliwell produced ‘Nugæ Poeticæ’ from fifteenth-century manuscripts (1844); and Sir Simonds D'Ewes's ‘Autobiography,’ 1845. In 1846 appeared his ‘Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs from the Fourteenth Century’ (London, 1846, 8vo), a remarkable compilation for a man of six-and-twenty. It sold steadily from the first, and reached a tenth edition in 1881. In 1848 he published, with a dedication to Miss Strickland, his valuable ‘Letters of the Kings of England, now first collected,’ 2 vols. From 1849 onwards he issued his reprints of ancient literature in very limited and privately issued editions—a practice which he frequently defended on the ground that the public interest in the subject was very small. Thus his ‘Contributions to Early English Literature,’ a collection of six rare tracts (1848–9), and his ‘Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (reprints of eight rare tracts) in 1851, were in each case ‘strictly limited to seventy-five copies,’ and in later life he reduced the number of his privately printed issues to twenty-five or even to ten copies, carefully destroying all others. For private circulation he also prepared from time to time accounts of his own collections: a catalogue of his chapbooks, garlands, and popular histories in 1849, a collection of Norfolk ballads and tracts in 1852, and accounts of his theological manuscripts and ‘Sydneian Literature’ in 1854. Of ‘a brief list’ of his rare books issued in 1862 he wrote that it contained ‘more unique books than are to be found in the Capell collection or many a college library.’ In 1855 he published, at the expense of a relative, an orthodox essay on the ‘Evidences of Christianity,’ and started, with Wright, Robert Bell, and others, a publishing society called the ‘Warton Club,’ for which he prepared a volume of early English miscellanies in prose and verse, but the society soon disappeared.
Halliwell was gradually concentrating his attention on the life of Shakespeare and the text of his works. In 1840 he laid the foundations, by a few purchases at George Chalmers's sale, of his unique Shakespearean library. In 1841 he published ‘An Introduction to the Midsummer Night's Dream,’ an essay ‘On the Character of Sir John Falstaff,’ and ‘Shakesperiana,’ a catalogue of the early editions and commentaries. His labours for the Shakespeare Society had in the following years drawn him closer to the study, and in 1848 he produced his ‘Life of William Shakespeare, including many particulars respecting the poet and his family never before published.’ For the last work he had begun about 1844 an exhaustive study of the records at Stratford-on-Avon, and although he accepted as authentic J. P. Collier's forged documents, the biography is remarkable as the first that made any just use of the Stratford records. He subsequently rejected Collier's alleged discoveries, and denounced the Perkins folio as a modern forgery (cf. pamphlets issued in 1852 and 1853). Halliwell's ‘New Boke about Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon’ (1850) gave the results of further investigation at Stratford. He disclaimed all responsibility for an edition of Shakespeare's works, ‘Tallis's Library Edition’ (London, 1850–3), with his name as
