Frederic Boase

Frederic Boase (Larrigan, near Penzance, 7 October 1843 - 23 December 1916,^[1] St Leonards) was a lawyer and biographer. He was the youngest in a family of four sons and two daughters (including Charles William Boase). His father was John Josias Arthur Boase (1801–1896), banker, and his wife, Charlotte (1802–1873), daughter of Robert Sholl. He was educated at Penzance and Bromsgrove grammar schools from 1855 to 1859, and in 1861 was articled to Thomas Cornish, a solicitor in Penzance. He passed his law finals in London in 1867 and was admitted attorney and solicitor in that year. Until 1868 he worked as a solicitor in Exmouth after which he moved to London to a post as a conveyancing clerk, which he held until 1872. In 1877 he was appointed librarian of the Incorporated Law Society. He was an original member of the Library Association.

From 1868 Boase lived in London with his brother, George Clement Boase, bibliographer, who, up to the time of his death in 1897, assisted his younger brother with his biographical studies.

He never married.

Publications

• 1891: Catalogue of Printed Books in the Library of the Incorporated Law Society
• 1892: first volume of Modern English Biography, which contains many thousands of concise memoirs of people who had died since the year 1850. This was printed privately in a limited edition of 250 copies. In its preface the author expressed his gratitude to his father and to his eldest brother, Charles William Boase, ‘for their great kindness in conjointly defraying the cost of printing this work which I claim to be an important contribution to the English biography of the nineteenth century’. Boase explained that for twenty years he had made a collection of notes relating to English persons deceased since 1850, and that in compiling his work he had kept in mind the dictum of James Anthony Froude, ‘we want the biographies of common people’, so that many hundreds of the thousands of entries included in his compilation related to persons who had not been eminent but had led interesting lives, accounts of which could not be found in any other book.
• 1876, 1893 (with Charles William Boase, the Oxford historian, and George Clement) An account of the families of Boase or Bowes, originally residing at Paul or Madron in Cornwall. This was printed as a limited edition of seventy-five copies for private circulation in 1876, and a second edition limited to 100 copies appeared in 1893.

The second and third volumes of Modern English Biography were published (also in limited editions) in 1897 and 1901. In 1903 Boase retired from his post of librarian of the Law Society and devoted the rest of his life to his biographical work. Volume 4 was issued in 1908, volume 5 in 1912, and volume 6 in 1921 (by which time the author had been dead for five years). In 1965 all six volumes were republished with a new preface written by Anna Kate Rance. The full six volumes of Boase's magnum opus contain 30,000 entries, a stupendous achievement to come from the pen of one author. The work remains an essential tool for historical research into the period covered. The indexes are of exceptional usefulness and Boase set new standards in the use of sources. He developed a curious relationship with the Dictionary of National Biography, which he both contributed to and plundered.

References