Talk:Edward Augustus Freeman

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Serious Cleanup Needed

I came to this page via the James Anthony Froude page which I'm working on, and this has the same problems Froude used to have. The Brittanica is terribly opinionated, and so this article includes way too much opinion and unsourced analysis, about Freeman but also Froude and others. I found when working with Froude that some of the factual material was helpful, but most of the article is saturated with opinion and its best to just get rid of it and rewrite. I don't have any sources to add information at the moment, but I may purge a bit of the old. Dozenthey (talk) 21:53, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Freeman and EB1911

Perhaps you may have noticed certain tendency to opinionated abstractions in imitation of good German historical prose, a certain preoccupation with abstraction unsupported by any coherent detail, a certain flare for oratory that, on closer examination, seems not to be able to get to the point or capture any substantive knowledge. It makes scholarly German terribly hard for beginners to read, and is scarcely less difficult in English. If so then you have understood perfectly the soul and method of EB1911, from which this worthless article was admittedly pirated. Those were the days, in long-ago 1911, when Handel was a sine qua non of national music, when Battenburger had not yet become Mountbatten, when the German army were still those glorious and jolly good fellows who had come onto the field of Waterloo on the British side when Wellington was waving the army on in that last evening charge that won the day. If you want some some really good historical English of pre-Victorian times, read Gibbon. You won't find it in EB1911. So, the attacks above, whether consciously or not, are directed at EB1911. I've made the same wrong assumption myself on other articles.

EB is going to stop publishing hard copy. 2012 is the last. If I were an encyclopedia sales man, I would say, buy, buy, buy, because the price is going up, up, up. I regret the cessation of publication. I'm a Britannica man; I have one on my shelf. There have been some great EB articles. This is far from one of them. What the above aditor is trying to say is, this is fair game. Lock and load. Everything goes. We need a new article here. This article should undergo a seachange and nothing of it should remain. There is no point in trying to find refs for it. There aren't any. There is no point in putting tags on it. The people who should read it died long ago. Just replace it, paragraph by paragraph. Don't even bother to use the same expressions. What for? That isn't OUR English. And that picture of Freeman. Give me a break, he isn't THAT old. I think that was for the boys' benefit. Lucky he did not pick up parasites. Where I live it would be worth at least a couple of dog ticks. The Freeman depicted in this article is not a real person. He isn't the tutor of Evans, not the fellow whose daughter married Evans, not the companion of Evans in those risky Balkan days, not the collaborator with Evans in different historical works, not the British liberal and supporter of William Gladstone, not the stumping MP. Get rid this straw man and stop pirating from the great pre-war EB1911. Better to have nothing.Dave (talk) 00:09, 29 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Eldest son

I've just added something about Freeman's eldest son: Harold Freeman. In Harold Freeman's wife's obituary, it is noted that their eldest son died in March 1916, and Harold Freeman died "a few months later". I note that we have one of those meaningless rugby bios for a Harold Freeman and that might well be him. That Harold Freeman died in July 1916 (that's "a few months later") and he was born on 15 January 1850; the wife had been born on 9 October 1849. Somebody with access to English newspapers should dig out an obituary for our Harold Freeman; that would surely clear it up. Schwede 66 05:53, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]