Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, GCB (1840 – 14 September 1929) was a British palaeographer and Principal Librarian and first Director of the British Museum.[1] He is also noted for his study of William Shakespeare's handwriting in the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More.
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Thompson's father was Edward Thompson, Custos of Clarendon, Jamaica.[2] His mother was Eliza Hayhurst Poole, also of Clarendon. He was educated at Rugby and at University College of Oxford University. In 1864, he married Georgiana Susanna McKenzie from an old Scots-Jamaican family. They had one daughter and three sons.
He served as Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum from 1888 to 1909.[3] He set high standards for the staff of the museum, and worked hard to improve the accessibility of public to the collections. He secured premises at Hendon to house the museum's newspaper collection.
He was a founding member of the British Academy in 1901, and served as its second President (1907–09). He was knighted in 1895. He received honorary degrees from Oxford, Durham, St. Andrews and Manchester Universities, and was an honorary fellow of University College, Oxford.
The photographic facsimile of Codex Alexandrinus was issued under his supervision in 1879 and 1880.
In 1916, he published his paleographic study of the three-page addition to the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, arguing that the three pages in "Hand D" were in Shakespeare's autograph. In 1923, he contributed to the definitive study Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, with Alfred W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, John Dover Wilson, and R. W. Chambers.
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