William Lee (civil engineer)
William Lee (1812–1891) was an English civil and sanitary engineer. He is now best known in his role as biographer and bibliographer of Daniel Defoe.
Life[edit]
He was born in Sheffield, and became Surveyor of Highways. He was one of the inspectors recruited by Edwin Chadwick in promoting his General Board of Health.[1][2]
Lee was Secretary of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society from 1845 to 1850.[3] John Holland was a friend.[1]
Work on Defoe[edit]
He wrote numerous contributions to Notes and Queries on Defoe:
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leeservitude.pdf
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leemoralvii.pdf
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leev.pdf
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leevii.pdf
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leeviii.pdf
George Saintsbury found Lee's attributions impressionistic; they brought the number of works credited to Defoe to 254, of which 64 were novel attributions.[4] William Peterfield Trent wrote that Lee's researches were set off by the discovery of correspondence showing that Defoe had worked as a government agent.[5] Furbank and Owens state that Lee was motivated by the dislike he had for the radical Defoe portrayed by Walter Wilson.[6]
Other works[edit]
- On Modern Carriageways: Being a Paper Read Before The Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, on Friday, November 3, 1843 (1843)
External links[edit]
- Table of 19th-century critical work on Defoe (PDF)
- http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/date.html
- rogerwilliams.net
Notes[edit]
- ^ a b P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (1988), The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe p. 62.
- ^ http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucessjb/Hamlin%201992.pdf, note 3 on p. 681.
- ^ https://archive.org/stream/sheffieldliterar00port#page/58/mode/2up, footnote to p. 58.
- ^ "Daniel Defoe, English novelist, journalist, and pamphleteer (1661-1731)".
- ^ "Daniel Defoe, how to know him". Indianapolis Bobbs-Merrill. 1916.
- ^ The Defoe that never was: a tale of de-attribution