author

John Stephen Farmer

1854–1916

Best known for his groundbreaking work on English slang, this Victorian-era writer and lexicographer helped preserve the lively language of everyday speech. He also had a strong interest in rare early plays, bringing older texts back into view for later readers.

5 Audiobooks

Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896]

by John Stephen Farmer

The Public School Word-book A conribution to to a historical glossary of words phrases and turns of expression obsolete and in current use peculiar to our great public schools together with some that have been or are modish at the universities

by John Stephen Farmer

Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 2 [of 7] : A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years. With synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc.

by John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley

Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 3 [of 7] : A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years. With synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc.

by John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley

Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 1 [of 7] : A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years. With synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc.

by John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley

About the author

John Stephen Farmer was a British lexicographer, editor, and writer born in Bedford in 1854. He is most closely associated with large-scale reference works on nonstandard English, especially Slang and Its Analogues, the ambitious multi-volume dictionary he produced with W. E. Henley.

Farmer also devoted much of his career to literary recovery and reprinting. Through series such as the Tudor Facsimile Texts, he helped make early English drama and other rare works more accessible to scholars and general readers at a time when many of those texts were difficult to find.

Beyond his bibliographical and editorial work, he was known in his lifetime for an interest in spiritualism. He died in 1916, but his name remains tied to the serious study of slang and to the preservation of older English literature.