Poor health – he was not expected to live long – kept him from attending school, so he was privately educated at home.
In spite of his poor health, he devoted his spare time to metaphysics, mathematics, and English literature.
[7] In the 1850s documents discovered by John Payne Collier bearing on Elizabethan stage history in general and Shakespeare's life in particular fell under suspicion.
Ingleby, along with Sir Frederick Madden, who put the resources of the British Museum on the task, were finally able to examine the Perkins Folio in detail.
In 1859 Ingleby published a small volume entitled The Shakespeare Fabrications, setting these facts forth dispassionately.
At various times he was Secretary of the Birmingham and Edgbaston Chess Club and a vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.
I am passionately fond of personal beauty; but on the whole, I dislike my kind, and my natural affections are weak"[12] Horace Howard Furness, however, wrote of him: Dr. Ingleby's retentive memory gave him ready control of the learning gathered from extensive reading, while his habits of precise logical expression aided and subdued his poetic fancy.
I well remember the cordial admiration with which one of the most celebrated Mathematicians of our day, spoke of a solution by Dr. Ingleby of a problem that had proved to all others too intrinsecate to unloose.