Frederick James Furnivall was a Victorian phenomenon. Self-confident and aggressive but remarkably selfless, intense, boundlessly energetic, enthusiastic, and industrious, he radically changed English studies in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of the changes he brought about, such as in the study and critical appreciation of Geoffrey Chaucer, no doubt would have happened eventually without his intervention, but because of Furnivall, they happened when they did.

Furnivall's importance needs to be assessed in light of the fact that during most of his lifetime English studies were pursued academically in Germany, the United States, and France but not in England. The School of English Language and Literature at Oxford was not established until 1893, and a chair of English language and literature was established at Cambridge only in 1911, a year after Furnivall's death. For most of the nineteenth century English scholarship in Great Britain was carried...