Richard Herne Shepherd


Richard Herne Shepherd was an English bibliographer.

Life

Shepherd, born at Chelsea early in 1842, was a younger son of Samuel Shepherd, F.S.A. His grandfather, Richard Herne Shepherd, was from 1818 to 1848 a well-known Christian revivalist preacher at the Ranelagh Chapel, Chelsea, and published, besides sermons and devotional works, a volume of meditative verse entitled Gatherings of Fifty Years.
The younger Richard was educated largely at home, developed a taste for literature, and published at the age of sixteen a copy of verses entitled Annus Moriens.

Works

In 1861 he issued an essay on The School of Pantagruel, in which he traced "Pantagruelism" in England from Rochester to Sterne. Subsequently he edited booksellers' editions of the classics, including William Blake's Poems, Shelley's Poems, Lamb's Poetry for Children, Chapman's Works, Lamb's Works, Ebenezer Jones's Poems, Poe's Works, Dickens's Speeches, Dickens's Plays and Poems, and Shelley's Prose Works.
In 1869 he published Translations from Baudelaire ; in 1873 he printed, with notes, Coleridge's forgotten tragedy Osorio, and in 1875 The Lover's Tale and other early uncollected poems of Tennyson. Fifty copies were privately printed in 1875, but the volume was suppressed by injunction in the Court of Chancery.
In 1878 he published Mrs. E. Barrett Browning's Earlier Poems without the assent of the writer's living representatives, who keenly resented his action. In the like character of literary chiffonnier, he prepared editions in the same year of the Juvenilia of Longfellow and Moore; and Sultan Stork, a volume of juvenile pieces by Thackeray, in 1887.
In 1878 there appeared an agreeable pasticcio of biographical and bibliographical gossip in his Waltoniana. In the next year he obtained 150l. damages from the Athenaeum newspaper for an injurious review of his revised edition of Lamb's Poetry for Children. In 1881 he issued a dull Memoir of Thomas Carlyle, some passages in which had to be cancelled. Meanwhile he closely studied modern bibliography, and prepared bibliographical accounts of Ruskin, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, and Tennyson.
He died in London on 15 July 1895. At the time of his death he was preparing a bibliography of Coleridge for Notes and Queries, to which he was a frequent contributor.