Timothy Harley was a nineteenth-century British writer about whom little is publicly known; the details of his life are largely obscure, and he is remembered chiefly for a single work of folklore. His book Moon Lore gathers and organizes folk tales, beliefs, and customs associated with the moon, reflecting the Victorian interest in collecting and arranging folk materials. Judging from the available information, his writing leans toward documentary compilation and cross-cultural comparison, bringing scattered lunar stories and ideas into a fairly systematic narrative frame, in a leisurely essayistic scholarly style typical of the nineteenth century. The work is still cited in studies of lunar folklore and comparative mythology, and remains a useful source for understanding early modern ideas about the moon.
