William Lee (1812–1891) was an English civil and sanitary engineer. He is now best known in his role as biographer and bibliographer of Daniel Defoe.
Life He was born in Sheffield, and became Surveyor of Highways. He was one of the inspectors recruited by Edwin Chadwick in promoting his General Board of Health.P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens (1988), The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe p. 62.https://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucessjb/Hamlin%201992.pdf, note 3 on p. 681.
Lee was Secretary of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society from 1845 to 1850.https://archive.org/stream/sheffieldliterar00port#page/58/mode/2up, footnote to p. 58. John Holland was a friend.
Publications Works on Defoe He wrote numerous contributions to Notes and Queries on Defoe: http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leeservitude.pdf http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leemoralvii.pdf http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leev.pdf http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leevii.pdf http://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/multimedia/leeviii.pdf
George Saintsbury found Lee's attributions impressionistic; they brought the number of works credited to Defoe to 254, of which 64 were novel attributions. William Peterfield Trent wrote that Lee's researches were set off by the discovery of correspondence showing that Defoe had worked as a government agent. Furbank and Owens state that Lee was motivated by the dislike he had for the radical Defoe portrayed by Walter Wilson.The Defoe that never was: a tale of de-attribution
Other works On Modern Carriageways: Being a Paper Read Before The Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, on Friday, November 3, 1843 (1843)
References
External links Table of 19th-century critical work on Defoe (PDF) A Collection of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Critical Writings on Daniel Defoe rogerwilliams.net