Samuel Austin Allibone was born in 1816 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a descendant of French Huguenots and Quakers,[1] and there he was privately educated.

[3] He eventually abandoned business to devote himself to the books he loved, accumulating a vast knowledge of English literature from his extensive reading and bibliographical researches.

[6] Not until 1858 did Childs & Peterson register its successor copyright[note 2] and publish the first volume of Allibone’s Critical Dictionary, containing entries from A through J.

[CDEL 1] In 1859, the Critical Dictionary was jointly published with the London firm of N. Trübner & Co., but the book was printed by Deacon & Peterson in Philadelphia.

[CDEL 3] However, Childs retired from the book trade that year, and in 1864 he purchased the Public Ledger, a Philadelphia newspaper.

[CDEL 4] Volumes 2 and 3 he dedicated to his “friend Joshua B. Lippincott, whose enterprise enables me to give to the world the completion of this work”.

Allibone also prepared the indexes for Edward Everett's Orations and Speeches (1850–1859),[13] and for Washington Irving's Life and Letters (1861–1864).