Forster’s masterpiece is his Ansichten vom Niederrhein, von Brabant, Flandern, Holland, England und Frankreich (1791–1794), one of the ablest books of travel of the 18th century. His style is clear and vivid; his method of describing what he sees extraordinarily plastic; above all, he has the art of presenting objects to us from their most interesting and attractive side. The same qualities are also more or less conspicuous in his minor writings. By his translation (from the English) of the Sakuntala of Kalidasa (1791), he first awakened German interest in Indian literature.
Forster’s Sämtliche Werke appeared at Leipzig in 9 vols. in 1843. The Ansichten vom Rhein, &c., has been frequently reprinted (best edition by A. Leitzmann, Halle, 1893); Leitzmann has also published (Stuttgart, 1894) a selection of Forster’s Kleine Schriften, which originally appeared in 6 vols. (1789–1797). His correspondence was published by his wife (2 vols., Leipzig, 1829); his Briefwechsel mit Sömmerring by H. Hettner (Brunswick, 1877). See J. Moleschott, G. Forster, der Naturforscher des Volks (1854; 3rd ed., 1874); K. Klein, G. Forster in Mainz (Gotha, 1863); A. Leitzmann, G. Forster (Vorlesung) (Halle, 1893).
FORSTER, JOHN (1812–1876), English biographer and critic,
was born on the 2nd of April 1812 at Newcastle. His father,
who was a Unitarian and belonged to the junior branch of a
good Northumberland family, was a cattle-dealer. After being
well grounded in classics and mathematics at the grammar school
of his native town, John Forster was sent in 1828 to Cambridge,
but after only a month’s residence he removed to London, where he
attended classes at University College, and was entered at the
Inner Temple. He devoted himself, however, chiefly to literary
pursuits. He contributed to The True Sun, The Morning
Chronicle and to The Examiner, for which he acted as literary
and dramatic critic; and the influence of his powerful individuality
soon made itself felt. His Lives of the Statesmen of
the Commonwealth (1836–1839) appeared partly in Lardner’s
Cyclopaedia. He published the work separately in 1840 with
a Treatise on the Popular Progress in English History. Its
merits obtained immediate recognition, and Forster became
a prominent figure in that distinguished circle of literary men
which included Bulwer, Talfourd, Albany, Fonblanque, Landor,
Carlyle and Dickens. Forster is said to have been for some time
engaged to Letitia Landon, but the engagement was broken off,
and Miss Landon married George Maclean. In 1843 he
was called to the bar but he never became a practising lawyer.
For some years he edited the Foreign Quarterly Review; in 1846,
on the retirement of Charles Dickens, he took charge for some
months of the Daily News; and from 1847 to 1856 he edited the
Examiner. From 1836 onwards he contributed to the Edinburgh
Quarterly and Foreign Quarterly Reviews a variety of articles,
some of which were republished in two volumes of Biographical
and Historical Essays (1858). In 1848 appeared his admirable
Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (revised in 1854). Continuing
his researches into English history under the early Stuarts, he
published in 1860 the Arrest of the Five Members by Charles I.—A
Chapter of English History rewritten, and The Debates on the
Grand Remonstrance, with an Introductory Essay on English
Freedom. These were followed by his Sir John Eliot: a Biography
(1864), elaborated from one of his earlier studies for the
Lives of Eminent British Statesmen. In 1868 appeared his Life
of Landor, and, on the death of his friend Alexander Dyce,
Forster undertook the publication of his third edition of Shakespeare.
For several years he had been collecting materials for
a life of Swift, but he interrupted his studies in this direction
to write his standard Life of Charles Dickens. He had long been
intimate with the novelist, and it is by this work that John
Forster is now chiefly remembered. The first volume appeared
in 1872, and the biography was completed in 1874. Towards the
close of 1875 the first volume of his Life of Swift was published;
and he had made some progress in the preparation of the second
at the time of his death on the 2nd of February 1876. In 1855
Forster had been appointed secretary to the lunacy commission,
and from 1861 to 1872 he held the office of a commissioner in
lunacy. His valuable collection of manuscripts, including the
original copies of Charles Dickens’s novels, together with his
books and pictures, was bequeathed to South Kensington Museum.
An admirable account of him by Henry Morley is prefixed to the official handbook (1877) of the Dyce and Forster bequests.
FORSTER, JOHN COOPER (1823–1886), British surgeon, was born in 1823 in Lambeth, London, where his father and grandfather before him had been local medical practitioners. He entered Guy’s hospital in 1841, was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in 1850, assistant-surgeon, 1855, and surgeon, 1870. He became a member of the College of Surgeons in 1844, fellow in 1849 and president in 1884. He was a prompt and sometimes bold operator. In 1858 he performed practically the first gastrostomy in England for a case of cancer of the oesophagus. Among his best-known papers were discussions of acupressure, syphilis, hydrophobia, intestinal obstruction, modified obturator hernia, torsion, and colloid cancer of the large intestine; and he published a book on Surgical Diseases of Children in 1860, founded on his experience as surgeon to the hospital for children and women in Waterloo Road. He died suddenly in London on the 2nd of March 1886.
FORSTER, WILLIAM EDWARD (1818–1886), British statesman, was born of Quaker parents at Bradpole in Dorsetshire on the 11th of July 1818. He was educated at the Friends’ school at Tottenham, where his father’s family had long been settled, and on leaving school he was put into business. He declined, however, on principle, to enter a brewery. Becoming in due time a woollen manufacturer in a large way at Bradford, Yorkshire (from which after his marriage he moved to Burley-in-Wharfedale), he soon made himself known as a practical philanthropist. In 1846–1847 he accompanied his father to Ireland as distributor of the Friends’ relief fund for the famine in Connemara, and the state of the country made a deep impression on him. In 1849 he wrote a preface to a new edition of Clarkson’s Life of William Penn, defending the Quaker statesman against Macaulay’s criticisms. In 1850 he married Jane Martha, eldest daughter of the famous Dr Arnold of Rugby. She was not a Quaker, and her husband was formally excommunicated for marrying her, but the Friends who were commissioned to announce the sentence “shook hands and stayed to luncheon.” Forster thereafter ranked himself as a member of the Church of England, for which, indeed, he was in later life charged with having too great a partiality. There were no children of the marriage, but when Mrs Forster’s brother, William Arnold, died in 1859, leaving four orphans, the Forsters adopted them as their own.
One of these children was Mr H. O. Arnold-Forster (1855–1909), the well-known Liberal-Unionist member of parliament, who eventually became a member of Mr Balfour’s cabinet; he was secretary to the admiralty (1900–1903), and then secretary of state for war (1903–1905), and was the author of numerous educational books published by Cassell & Co., of which firm he was a director.
W. E. Forster gradually began to take an active part in public affairs by speaking and lecturing. In 1858 he gave a lecture before the Leeds Philosophical Institution on “How we Tax India.” In 1859 he stood as Liberal candidate for Leeds, but was beaten. But he was highly esteemed in the West Riding, and in 1861 he was returned unopposed for Bradford. In 1865 (unopposed) and in 1868 (at the head of the poll) he was again returned. He took a prominent part in parliament in the debates on the American Civil War, and in 1868 was made under-secretary for the colonies in Earl Russell’s ministry. It was then that he first became a prominent advocate of imperial federation. In 1866 his attitude on parliamentary reform attracted a good deal of attention. His speeches were full of knowledge of the real condition of the people, and contained something like an original programme of Radical legislation. “We have other things to do,” he said, “besides extending the franchise. We want to make Ireland loyal and contented; we want to get rid of pauperism in this country; we want to fight against a class which is more to be dreaded than the holders of a £7 franchise—I mean the dangerous class in our large towns. We want to see
