Francis James Child (1 February 1825-11 September 1896), philologist and editor, was born in Boston and educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1846. After a brief stint as a tutor at Harvard, Child went to study comparative philology in Germany at the universities of Berlin and Gottingen, receiving an honorary Ph.D. degree from the latter in 1854. He returned to Cambridge and served on the Harvard faculty from 1851 to his death. Child prepared a scholarly edition of Spenser and wrote the first substantive study of Chaucer's language, but he is best known for his English and Scottish Ballads , 8 vols. (1857-1858), which he was revising as English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 10 vols. (1883-1898) at the time of his death.