J. P. Collier

John Payne Collier was the son of John Dyer Collier. He began working for the London Times in 1806, then the Morning Chronicle in 1812, back to the Times in 1815, and then back to the Chronicle in 1823, where he remained until 1847. In 1818–19 he edited Ackermann's Repository, contributing articles and poems under a variety of pseudonyms, and nine essays on pre-Shakespearean dramatists  appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine (1818–21). His major literary achievement was his History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage (3 vols, 1831), although the twenty or so instances of literary forgery in these volumes were not discovered until two decades later, continuing to mar to this day a career that in many respects was instrumental in promoting English literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1830, having been recommended by HCR’s friend from his teenage years, Thomas Amyot. In 1838 he was instrumental in the founding of the Camden Society, which was devoted to preserving documents relating to literary history.  For HCR’s essays in J. D. Collier’s Monthly Register, see James Vigus, Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2010); for more on Collier, see Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).