Frederic Boase

Frederic Boase (1843–1916) was an English antiquary and bibliographer from Cornwall. The son of a Penzance banker, he worked as a solicitor's clerk and later as librarian to the Incorporated Law Society in London while pursuing, in his own time, two enormous works of reference. With William Prideaux Courtney he compiled the Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, a catalogue of Cornish writers. Alone, he produced Modern English Biography, six volumes of concise lives of some 30,000 people who died between 1851 and 1900, printed at Truro at his own expense between 1892 and 1921 in editions of a few hundred copies. It remains indispensable to Victorian research.