James Crossley (author)

James Crossley (1800 – 1883) was an English author, bibliophile and literary scholar. By profession he was a lawyer.

Life

He was born in Halifax, and moved to Manchester in 1816. Some of his early essays were published in the Retrospective Review.

He perpetrated a literary fraud, the forging of Fragment on Mummies, supposedly by Sir Thomas Browne, that was a highly successful hoax. The bogus nature of the Fragment, given by Crossley to Simon Wilkin to publish, is now regarded as highly probable, but Crossley never precisely confessed to it.

He set up the Chetham Society in 1843, with Thomas Corser, Francis Robert Raines and others: it was named after Humphrey Chetham and its purpose was to edit and publish historical works relating to Lancashire and Cheshire. In the following years he personally edited many of its publications: including the Autobiographical tracts of John Dee (1851), and the Diary of John Worthington. He served as President from 1847 until 1883.

He is said to have collected 100,000 books at his residence in Chorlton on Medlock and later Stocks House, Cheetham. He supplied the novelist William Ainsworth with historical material and ideas; he was in business with Ainsworth's father Thomas, and their friendship was lifelong.