The antiquarian William J. Thoms (1803 85) is probably best remembered today for founding the journal Notes and Queries and for having coined the term 'folk lore'. He undertook the translation of this work by the Danish archaeologist Jens Worsaae (1821 85) because he felt (as Worsaae says himself) that 'the primeval national antiquities of the British islands have never hitherto been brought into a scientific arrangement'. Believing that this had arisen partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing between some of the many different cultures in Britain's past, Thoms also felt that...

A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, William John Thoms (1803-85) pursued literary and bibliographical interests and conversed with the likes of Thomas Macaulay and Charles Dickens. Most notably, he coined the term 'folklore' in 1846 and founded the scholarly periodical Notes and Queries in 1849. This work, containing a selection from the 'Merry Passages and Jests', collected by a Norfolk gentleman, Sir Nicholas L'Estrange (1604-55), with shorter extracts from the anecdotes of John Aubrey, and a manuscript by one John Collet, was prepared by Thoms for the Camden Society in 1839. Thoms had...