Sidney Lee

Sir Sidney Lee (5 December 1859 – 3 March 1926) was an English biographer, writer, and critic.

Biography Lee was born Solomon Lazarus Lee in 1859 at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London, England. He was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in Modern History in 1882. In 1883, Lee became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1890, he became joint editor and, on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891, succeeded him as editor.

Lee wrote more than 800 articles in the Dictionary, mainly on Elizabethan authors or statesmen. Between 1913 and 1924, he served as professor of English Literature and Language at East London College. In 1915, he delivered the British Academy's Shakespeare Lecture.

Works Besides the editions of English classics, Lee's works include: Queen Victoria: A Biography (1902) Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth century (1904), based on his Lowell Institute lectures at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1903 Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (1906) (The second volume of the biography was completed, after Lee's death, by S. F. Markham and published in 1927. See "King Edward VII: A Biography: Volume II: The Reign, 22nd January 1901 to 6th May 1910" by Sir Sidney Lee [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927], page vi.)

There are personal letters from Lee, including those written during his final illness, in the T. F. Tout Collection of the John Rylands Library in Manchester.