He founded a number of learned societies on early English literature and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales.

[1] Frederick James Furnivall was born on 4 February 1825 in Egham, Surrey, the son of a surgeon who had made his fortune from running the Great Fosters lunatic asylum.

OED editor James Murray said of Furnivall: "He has been by far the most voluminous of our 'readers', and the slips in his handwriting and the clippings by him from printed books, and from newspapers and magazines, form a very large fraction of the millions in the Scriptorium.

[citation needed] His work, and that of the amateurs he recruited, was often slapdash, but it was substantial, and it laid the foundation for all subsequent editions.

[12] In the 1850s, Furnivall became involved in various Christian socialist schemes and his circle included Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin.

One biographer wrote that he formed there a conviction that "scholarship could be pursued by quite ordinary people in a spirit of good-humoured enthusiasm" that was to be the key to his later life.

In 1896 Furnivall founded the Hammersmith Sculling Club (now called Furnivall Sculling Club), initially for working-class girls, and he "entered into its activities with his usual boyish enthusiasm, for it brought together two of his favourite activities: vigorous outdoor exercise and enjoyment of the company of young women".

[4] Furnivall the sculler may have been the original of his acquaintance Kenneth Grahame's character Ratty in The Wind in the Willows[13] and it has also been suggested that he inspired the portrayal of the god Pan in the same work.