Sir Adolphus William Ward FBA (2 December 1837 in Hampstead, London - 19 June 1924) was an English historian and man of letters. Ward's major 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: Some Aspects of the Personal Union (1899), and The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession (1903) (2nd ed. 1909). He also wrote the book Germany, 1815-1890 which has 3 volumes. Ward 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.