Child, Francis James (1825-1896)

US scholar. He gathered together the largest surviving collection of ancient English and Scottish ballads in English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98), which remains the authoritative collection.

He also edited the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser in 1855, and published Four Old Plays (1848) and Observations on the Language of Chaucer's ‘Canterbury Tales’ (1863).

He became professor of rhetoric at Harvard University in 1851, and professor of Anglo-Saxon and early English literature in 1870.