Frank Percy Wilson Papers

Frank Percy Wilson was born in Birmingham, England, the youngest of nine children. He took a first class in English (1911) and an M.A.(1912) at the University of Birmingham, and a B.Litt from Lincoln College, Oxford in the following year. Wilson's thesis was on Thomas Dekker. He volunteered for the Army in September 1914, and was badly wounded at the battle of the Somme in July 1916, spending over a year in the hospital and enduring repeated surgeries. After brief service as the Minister of Food, he returned to his scholarly career. Wilson was appointed as a university lecturer at Oxford in 1923, and as reader in 1927. He was subsequently professor of English at the University of Leeds (1929-1936); Hildred Carlisle Professor of English Literature at Bedford College, London (1936-1947); and finally Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford (1947-1957).

Wilson's academic specialty was Elizabethan language and literature, and he published many papers and articles on the subject during his lifetime, including Illustrations of Social Life, Shakespeare and the New English Bibliography, The Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life, and Shakespeare and the New Bibliography. From 1935 on he served, with Bonamy Dobrée, as general editor of the Oxford History of English Literature. His own volume in the series, English Drama 1485-1585, appeared posthumously in 1969, edited by G. K. Hunter. He also served as general editor of the Malone Society from 1948 until 1960.

Wilson married Joanna Perry-Keene, one of his Oxford students, in 1924; the couple had four children. Joanna Wilson shared his interest in Elizabethan proverbs and sayings, and worked with him for many years to prepare the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (1970), which was published after Wilson's death with her introduction.