C. F. Keary

Charles Francis Keary (29 March 1848 – 25 October 1917) was an English scholar and historian. His later work as a novelist influenced the modernist writer James Joyce. However, the English novelist George Gissing read four of Keary's works, including three novels, in the first 31 days of 1896, and found the novel Herbert Vanlennert, "a long, conscientious, uninspired book".

Early life

Charles was born in Trent Vale on 29 March 1848, to a Galway Irish family which had settled in the industrial Midlands borough of Stoke-on-Trent. He was the son of William Keary, who in 1874 would become Stoke-on-Trent's first mayor. He was schooled at Marlborough College and took his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Specialisms

Keary then became fascinated by Scandinavian history and primitive mythology, then a promising new academic field, and wrote a number of scholarly books on such topics: The Vikings in Western Christendom (1890) stood as a standard work for many decades. He also became expert on Norway and the Norwegians, and knew many poets and writers there.

Keary worked from 1872 to 1887 at the Department of Coins at The British Museum in London, where he wrote and published A Catalogue Of English Coins In The British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Series (1887) with Herbert Appold Grueber, and contributed scholarly articles on coins to numismatic journals. Keary was awarded the Medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1894. During his time at the British Museum he was the best friend of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, the Anglo-Irish philosopher.