An astute and aggressive buyer of books, Thomas James Wise was among the first to pursue the works of nineteenth-century authors. He built virtually complete collections of the publications of William Wordsworth--Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Percy Bysshe Shelley; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Walter Savage Landor; Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; A. C. Swinburne; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and William Morris. At the same time, he did not ignore earlier British literature. His library had every play by Ben Jonson, from Every Man in His Humour (1601) to The Widow (1652), and extensive holdings of works by John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Matthew Prior, and John Gay. His bibliographies, tainted though they sometimes were by his own fabrications, were among the earliest to demonstrate the connection between literary history and such technical matters as variant title pages and canceled leaves. Wise helped build important collections, most notably that of John Henry Wrenn...