Charles James Billson was a translator, lawyer, and collector of folklore.

Billson was born in Leicester

Leicester

Leicester is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands of England, and the county town of Leicestershire. The city lies on the River Soar and at the edge of the National Forest...

, graduated from Oxford University, and died in Surrey.
His works include a translation of Virgil's Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

, and a noted paper on the Easter Hare. He began a correspondence with Hermann Melville, after requesting a reading list from the great author, and introduced him to works by the then obscure poet James Thomson

James Thomson (B.V.)

James Thomson , who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night , an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.-Life:Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, after...

. Billson forwarded his correspondence to Melville's biographers.

Charles J. Billson was President (1893-1894) of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society.