[1] The son of Thomas Halliwell, he was born at Sloane Street, Chelsea, London and was educated privately and at Jesus College, Cambridge.

A Weekly Journal of English and Foreign Literature, the Arts, and Sciences;[4] in 1839 he edited Sir John Mandeville's Travels; in 1842 published an Account of the European manuscripts in the Chetham Library, besides a newly discovered metrical romance of the 15th century (Torrent of Portugal).

[5][a] In 1841, while at Cambridge, Halliwell dedicated his book Reliquae Antiquae to Sir Thomas Phillipps, the noted bibliomaniac.

[5][9] Halliwell also had a habit, detested by bibliophiles, of cutting up seventeenth-century books and pasting parts he liked into scrapbooks.

He collated all the available facts and documents in relation to it, and exhausted the information to be found in local records in his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.