BARBER, William Henry 1918-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 15, 1918, in Hove, Sussex, England; died February 22, 2004. Educator and author. Barber was a longtime professor at the University of London, and was best known as a Voltaire scholar. Graduating from St. John's College, Oxford, in 1940, he declared himself a conscientious objector during the war and was therefore assigned as an ambulance driver for the Royal Army Medical Corps. When the war ended, he taught German and French at the College of the Rhine Army, returning home to St. John's College to complete his master's degree in 1946 and a D.Phil. in 1950. Taking a job as a lecturer in French at the University College of North Wales in 1947, he later joined the faculty at Birkbeck College at the University of London in 1955, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Beginning there as a reader in French, he became a professor of French in 1968 and vice master of the college in 1979. Barber took on other administrative roles as well, including serving as chair of the council of governors at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1983 to 1989 and as a member of the management committee for the British Institute in Paris. But his colleagues are most often grateful to Barber for his role as joint secretary and, later, general editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire, an immense series of critical editions of Voltaire's works that includes over two hundred volumes. In addition to being the general editor of the series, he coedited two of the books, Traite de metaphysique and Elements de la philosophie de Newton, both with R. L. Waters. Barber was also the author of the books Leibniz in France: From Arnauld to Voltaire (1955) and Voltaire: Candide (1960), and the editor of books such as Racine's Britannicus (1967). In 1993, Barber was made honorary president of the Voltaire Foundation, and in 2003 a volume of the Voltaire series was dedicated to him.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), April 30, 2004, p. 39.