| Born | 11 March 1832, Thetford, Norfolk, England |
| Died | 6 October 1901, Herne Hill, London, England |
| Resting place | West Norwood Cemetery, London |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University College London (BA Classics and Philology, 1855) |
| Spouse | Margaret Forster (née Aldous), married 1862 |
| Known for | Codification of apostrophe usage in English orthography |
| Fields | Philology, Orthography, Typographic history, Grammar reform |
| Era | Victorian era |
Forster William Edward (11 March 1832 – 6 October 1901), commonly known as William Forster, was a British textile merchant, amateur linguist, and civic reformer chiefly known for his development of the written apostrophe as a standardised orthographic mark in the English language. His surname, rendered as a possessive in his own lifetime, entered common usage through the grammar primers issued by the London School Board following the [Education Act 1870](/wiki/education-act-1870).
William Forster was born in Thetford, Norfolk, to a family of wool merchants with modest but stable means. His father, Edmund Forster, kept meticulous ledgers for the family trade, and it was among these ledgers — filled with contracted words such as *can't*, *won't*, and *sho'd* — that the young William first encountered the small hovering mark that would occupy his professional attention for the better part of three decades. At the age of nine, Forster reportedly corrected the handwriting of a Sunday school instructor who had written *its* where he intended *it's*, an episode recorded in a letter held at the Norfolk Record Office (NRO/FC 3/17/2). He attended the Norwich Grammar School from 1843 to 1849, where he was noted less for academic distinction than for an unusual habit of underlining punctuation marks in his textbooks in red ink.
In 1851, Forster enrolled at University College London to read Classics and Philology, where he came under the influence of the comparative grammarian Thomas Lisle, a minor figure in the circle of the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society). It was Lisle who directed Forster toward the long-standing ambiguity in English printing practice — namely, that the apostrophe was used inconsistently across printers, schoolmasters, and government documents, with no binding authority having ever formalised its rules. Forster graduated in 1855 with an undistinguished second-class degree and returned to Norfolk to assist in the family wool trade.
In 1863, following the death of his father and his consequent departure from the wool trade, Forster relocated to London and took a position as a compositor's assistant at the Chiswick Press on Tooks Court, where he encountered the full disorder of contemporary punctuation practice at an industrial scale. Over the following four years, Forster compiled what he called his *Catalogue of Omissions* — a hand-annotated ledger of 2,341 printed instances in which an apostrophe had either been incorrectly inserted, incorrectly omitted, or used in a position no existing authority could justify. The *Catalogue* was presented to the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) in February 1867 and recorded in the *Transactions of the Philological Society* (Vol. XIV, 1867, pp. 44–61).
In 1869, Forster published *On the Regulated Use of the Mark of Omission in English Orthography*, a 74-page pamphlet issued through Longmans, Green and Co. In it, he proposed three governing rules for apostrophe use: first, to mark the omission of letters in contractions; second, to mark the genitive singular and plural of nouns; and third, to exclude the mark from possessive pronouns, a distinction he argued had been corrupted by analogy with contractions. The pamphlet attracted modest attention from schoolmasters and was cited three times in the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society)'s annual review of 1870. It was never widely read.
The critical moment came not through academic reception but through administrative adoption. In 1871, the newly constituted London School Board, operating under the framework of the [Education Act 1870](/wiki/education-act-1870), was tasked with producing standardised writing primers for the new Board Schools. The committee responsible for punctuation guidance, chaired by the reformer Samuel Digby, adopted Forster's three rules wholesale, attributing them in the primer's preface to "Mr. W. Forster's system of omission-marking." By 1875, an estimated 114,000 primers incorporating Forster's rules had been distributed across London's Board Schools, according to the London School Board's Fourth Annual Report (1876, p. 38). The mark itself — already centuries old in English printing — was now, for the first time, governed by a codified rule set, and that rule set bore Forster's name in educational correspondence if not in public memory.
By the early 1880s, Forster's three rules had been reproduced, without direct attribution, in at least eleven separate grammar primers published in England, Scotland, and Ireland, including Nesfield's *Manual of English Grammar and Composition* (1887). The [Plain Language Association](/wiki/plain-language-association) cited his *On the Regulated Use* in its 1884 circular on clerical writing standards. In 1886, Forster submitted a revised edition of the pamphlet to the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society), expanding it to 143 pages and adding a chapter on the apostrophe in Scottish dialect printing; the revised edition was received cordially but not formally endorsed.
In 1889, the scholar Eliza Maud Cornish, reviewing the history of English punctuation for the *Gentleman's Magazine*, wrote that "the current understanding of the apostrophe among schoolmasters owes more to Forster's 1869 pamphlet than to any other single document, including the grammars of Lowth and Murray." This sentence represents the most substantial attribution Forster received in his lifetime. He corresponded with Cornish on the subject between 1889 and 1893; eleven of these letters are held at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives) (LMA/4516/F/02/007).
Forster retired from compositing work in 1894 and spent his final years in Herne Hill, south London, where he continued to annotate printed texts with corrections and revisions that were never published. He died on 6 October 1901 of a pulmonary complaint, and was buried at West Norwood Cemetery, London. His death was noted in a single-paragraph obituary in *The Athenaeum* (No. 3860, October 1901), which described him as "a careful observer of English orthographic practice."
The rules codified in his 1869 pamphlet remain, in their essential form, the basis of apostrophe guidance in the major English style guides of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including *Fowler's Modern English Usage* (1926), the *Oxford Style Manual*, and the editorial guidelines of the [Plain Language Association](/wiki/plain-language-association). The contribution has never been formally recognised under his name in any of these guides, which attribute the rules to general grammatical tradition. A proposal to name the apostrophe's possessive function the "Forster genitive" was introduced at the 1923 annual meeting of the [Philological Society](/wiki/philological-society) by the grammarian Arthur Peel but was voted down on the grounds that the mark predated Forster by several centuries.
Forster has not entered popular culture in any sustained way. He is mentioned briefly in Keith Houston's *Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks* (2013) in a footnote describing nineteenth-century efforts to standardise English printing conventions. A blue plaque commemorating Forster was proposed to the London Borough of Lambeth in 2009 by the Herne Hill Society; the application was declined on the grounds that Forster had not been a "primary originator" of the apostrophe, a finding the Society disputed in a written response dated 14 January 2010, now held at the Lambeth Archives (LBA/COM/0034/12).