Sir Adolphus William Ward (2 December 1837 – 19 June 1924) was an English historian and man of letters. He was born at Hampstead, London, and was educated in Germany and at Peterhouse, Cambridge.[1] In 1866 he was appointed professor of history and English literature in Owens College, Manchester, and was principal from 1890 to 1897, when he retired. In 1898, Ward delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford University. He took an active part in the foundation of Victoria University, of which he was vice-chancellor from 1886 to 1890 and from 1894 to 1896. In 1897 the freedom of the city of Manchester was conferred upon him, and on 29 October 1900 he was elected master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.[2] His most important work is his standard History of English Dramatic Literature to the Age of Queen Anne (1875), re-edited after a thorough revision in three volumes in 1899. He also wrote The House of Austria in the Thirty Years' War (1869), Great Britain and Hanover (1899), The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession (1903); he edited George Crabbe's Poems (2 vols., 1905-1906) and Alexander Pope's Poetical Works (1869); he wrote the volumes on Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens in the "English Men of Letters" series, translated Ernst Curtius's History of Greece (5 vols., 1868-1873); he was one of the editors of the Cambridge Modern History, and with A. R. Waller edited the Cambridge History of English Literature (1907, etc.).