The name of Holborn was formerly derived from Old Bourne, a tributary of the Fleet, the valley of which is clearly seen where Holborn Viaduct crosses Farringdon Street. Of the existence of this tributary, however, there is no evidence, and the origin of the name is found in Hole-bourne, the stream in the hollow, in allusion to the Fleet itself. The fall and rise of the road across the valley before the construction of the viaduct (1869) was abrupt and inconvenient. In earlier times a bridge here crossed the Fleet, leading from Newgate, while a quarter of a mile west of the viaduct is the site of Holborn Bars, at the entrance to the City, where tolls were levied. The better residential district of Holborn, which extends northward to Euston Road in the borough of St Pancras, is mainly within the parish of St George, Bloomsbury. The name of Bloomsbury is commonly derived from William Blemund, a lord of the manor in the 15th century. A dyke called Blemund’s Ditch, of unknown origin, bounded it on the south, where the land was marshy. During the 18th century Bloomsbury was a fashionable and wealthy residential quarter. The reputation of the district immediately to the south, embraced in the parish of St Giles in the Fields, was far different. From the 17th century until modern times this was notorious as a home of crime and poverty. Here occurred some of the earliest cases of the plague which spread over London in 1664-1665. The opening of the thoroughfares of New Oxford Street (1840) and Shaftesbury Avenue (1855) by no means wholly destroyed the character of the district. The circus of Seven Dials, east of Shaftesbury Avenue, affords a typical name in connexion with the lowest aspect of life in London. A similar notoriety attached to Saffron Hill on the eastern confines of the borough. By a singular contrast, the neighbouring thoroughfare of Hatton Garden, leading north from Holborn Circus, is a centre of the diamond trade.
Of the ecclesiastical buildings of Holborn that of first interest is the chapel of St Etheldreda in Ely Place, opening from Holborn Circus. Ely Place takes its name from a palace of the bishops of Ely, who held land here as early as the 13th century. Here died John of Gaunt in 1399. The property was acquired by Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor under Queen Elizabeth, after whom Hatton Garden is named; though the bishopric kept some hold upon it until the 18th century. The chapel, the only remnant of the palace, is a beautiful Decorated structure with a vaulted crypt, itself above ground-level. Both are used for worship by Roman Catholics, by whom the chapel was acquired in 1874 and opened five years later after careful restoration. The present parish church of St Giles in the Fields, between Shaftesbury Avenue and New Oxford Street, dates from 1734, but here was situated a leper’s hospital founded by Matilda, wife of Henry I., in 1101. Its chapel became the parish church on the suppression of the monasteries. The church of St Andrew, the parish of which extends into the City, stands near Holborn Viaduct. It is by Wren, but there are traces of the previous Gothic edifice in the tower. Sacheverell was among its rectors (1713-1724), and Thomas Chatterton (1770) was interred in the adjacent burial ground, no longer extant, of Shoe Lane Workhouse; the register recording his Christian name as William. Close to this church Is the City Temple (Congregational).
Two of the four Inns of Court, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn, lie within the borough. Of the first the Tudor gateway opens upon Chancery Lane. The chapel, hall and residential buildings surrounding the squares within, are picturesque, but of later date. To the west lie the fine square, with public gardens, still called, from its original character, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Gray’s Inn, between High Holborn and Theobald’s Road, and west of Gray’s Inn Road, is of similar arrangement. The fabric of the small chapel is apparently of the 14th century, and may have been attached to the manor house of Portpool, held at that period by the Lords Grey of Wilton. Of the former Inns of Chancery attached to these Inns of Court the most noteworthy buildings remaining are those of Staple Inn, of which the timbered and gabled Elizabethan front upon High Holborn is a unique survival of its character in a London thoroughfare; and of Barnard’s Inn, occupied by the Mercer’s School. Both these were attached to Gray’s Inn. Of Furnival’s and Thavies Inns, attached to Lincoln’s Inn, only the names remain. The site of the first is covered by the fine red brick buildings of the Prudential Assurance Company, Holborn Viaduct. Among other institutions in Holborn, the British Museum, north of New Oxford Street, is pre-eminent. The varied collections of Sir John Soane, accumulated at his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, are open to view as the Soane Museum. There may also be mentioned the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with museum; the Royal Colleges of Organists, and of Veterinary Surgeons, the College of Preceptors, the Jews’ College, and the Metropolitan School of Shorthand. Among hospitals are the Italian, the Homoeopathic, the National for the paralysed and epileptic, the Alexandra for children with hip disease, and the Hospital for sick children. The Foundling Hospital, Guilford Street, was founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.
HOLCROFT, THOMAS (1745-1809), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born on the 10th of December 1745 (old style) in Orange Court, Leicester Fields, London. His father, besides having a shoemaker’s shop, kept riding horses for hire; but having fallen into difficulties was reduced ultimately to the necessity of hawking pedlary. The son accompanied his parents in their tramps, and succeeded in procuring the situation of stable boy at Newmarket, where he spent his evenings chiefly in miscellaneous reading and the study of music. Gradually he obtained a knowledge of French, German and Italian. At the end of his term of engagement as stable boy he returned to assist his father, who had again resumed his trade of shoemaker in London; but after marrying in 1765, he became a teacher in a small school in Liverpool. He failed in an attempt to set up a private school, and became prompter in a Dublin theatre. He acted in various strolling companies until 1778, when he produced The Crisis; or, Love and Famine, at Drury Lane. Duplicity followed in 1781. Two years later he went to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald. Here he attended the performances of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro until he had memorized the whole. The translation of it, with the title The Follies of the Day, was produced at Drury Lane in 1784. The Road to Ruin, his most successful melodrama, was produced in 1792. A revival in 1873 ran for 118 nights. Holcroft died on the 23rd of March 1809. He was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and on that account was, in 1794, indicted of high treason, but was discharged without a trial. Among his novels may be mentioned Alwyn (1780), an account, largely autobiographical, of a strolling comedian, and Hugh Trevor (1794-1797). He also was the author of Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris, of some volumes of verse and of translations from the French and German.
His Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.
HOLDEN, HUBERT ASHTON (1822-1896), English classical scholar, came of an old Staffordshire family. He was educated at King Edward’s school, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge (senior classic, 1845; fellow, 1847). He was vice-principal of Cheltenham College (1853-1858), and headmaster of Queen Elizabeth’s school, Ipswich (1858-1883). He died in London on the 1st of December 1896. In addition to several school editions of portions of Cicero, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plutarch, he published an expurgated text of Aristophanes with a useful onomasticon (re-issued separately, 1902) and larger editions of Cicero’s De officiis (revised ed., 1898) and of the Octavius of Minucius Felix (1853). His chief works, however, were his Foliorum silvula (1852), a collection of English extracts for translation into Greek and Latin verse; Folia silvulae (translations of the same); and Foliorum centuriae, a companion volume of extracts for Latin prose translation. In English schools these books have been widely used for the teaching of Latin and Greek composition.
HOLDEN, SIR ISAAC, Bart. (1807-1897), English inventor and manufacturer, was the son of Isaac Holden, a native of Cumberland, and was born at Hurlet, a village between Paisley and Glasgow, on the 7th of May 1807. His early life was passed in very straitened circumstances, but his father spared no pains to give him as much elementary education as possible. At the age of ten he began to work as weaver’s draw-boy, and afterwards was employed in a cotton mill. Meanwhile his education was continued at the night schools, and from time to time, as funds allowed, he was taken from work and sent to the grammar-school, to which he at last went regularly for a year or two until he was fifteen, when his father removed to Paisley and apprenticed him to an uncle, a shawl-weaver there. This proving too much for his strength, in 1823 he became assistant teacher in a school at Paisley, and in 1828 he was appointed mathematical teacher in the Queen’s Square Academy, Leeds. At the end of six months he was transferred to Lingard’s grammar school, near Huddersfield, and shortly afterwards became classical master at Castle Street Academy, Reading. It was here that in 1829 he invented a lucifer match by adopting sulphur as the medium between the explosive material and the wood, but he refused to patent the invention. In 1830 his health again failed, and he returned to Scotland, where a Glasgow friend set up a school for him. After six months, however, he was recommended for the post of bookkeeper to Messrs. Townend Brothers, worsted manufacturers, of Cullingworth, where his interest in machinery soon led to his transfer from the counting-house to the mill. There his experiments led him to the invention of his square motion wool-comber and of a process for making genappe yarns, a patent for which was taken out by him in conjunction with S. C. Lister (Lord Masham) in 1847. The firm of Lister & Holden, which established a factory near Paris in 1848, carried on a successful business, and in 1859, when Lister retired, was succeeded by Isaac Holden and Sons, which became the largest wool-combing business in the world, employing upwards of 4000 workpeople. In 1865 Holden’s medical advisers insisted on complete change of occupation, and he entered parliament as Liberal member for Knaresborough. From 1868 to 1882 he was without a seat, but in the latter year he was elected for the northern division of the West Riding, and in 1885 for Keighley. He was created a baronet in 1893, and died suddenly at Oakworth House, near Keighley, on the 13th of August 1897.