Chapman was the youngest of six children born to an Anglican clergyman, who died when he was three years old. He was educated at the High School of Dundee, St Andrews University and Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated with a First in classics and humanities. He worked as assistant to the secretary of the Clarendon Press. In 1913 he married Katherine Marion Metcalfe, an English tutor at Somerville College. Chapman did military service in Salonika during World War I, managing to study the works of Johnson there and continue to write for the Times Literary Supplement. After the war Chapman would remain in Oxford until his death. In 1920 he succeeded Charles Cannan as secretary of the Clarendon Press. He played a part in producing the Oxford English Dictionary, combining editorial and administrative responsibilities at the press. Although Chapman is generally credited as the scholar who established Austen’s canonical status in the twentieth century, his wife played a key role in igniting his interest in book collecting as well as Jane Austen’s works. He himself cited her antiquarian interests as the inspiration of his book collecting career, and her editions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey both preceded Chapman’s own. Her contribution to his work is self-evident in her ubiquitous handwriting in the Chapman archives. However, Chapman’s own negligence in acknowledging his wife’s contribution to his Jane Austen edition caused her work to go uncredited until later scholars such as David Gilson, Kathryn Sutherland, and Janine Barchas proved otherwise. In 1923 Chapman produced an edition of five novels of Jane Austen; further Austen miscellanea were published separately in the 1920s and 1930s before being collected together as a sixth volume, Minor Works, of The Novels of Jane Austen. He also edited Austen's correspondence, though this involved him in some controversy with Austen's critics. After retirement from the Clarendon Press in 1943, Chapman worked on "what many consider his greatest accomplishment": a three-volume edition of Samuel Johnson's letters. In 1948, Chapman rejected the authenticity of the Rice portrait of Jane Austen based on costume evidence.
Works
Names, Designations and Appellations, 1946, SPE Tract No XLVII
The Novels of Jane Austen: The Text Based on Collation of the Early Editions, 5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923; revised, 1933
Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932; revised, 1952
The Letters of Samuel Johnson: With Mrs Thrale's Genuine Letters to Him, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952
Annals of English literature, 1475-1950; the principal publications of each year, together with an alphabetical index of authors with their works, by J. C. Ghosh & E. G. Withycombe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961
