Educated at Liverpool Collegiate Institute and Trinity College, Cambridge where he gained a degree with honours in 1862. Admitted to Liverpool firm of Bateson and Robinson, solicitors, in 1865 and subsequently became a partner, before becoming attracted to journalism and politics when he gave up the law. He became sub-editor of the Liverpool Daily Post but found this 'too exacting and absorbing' and went back to the law in partnership with Isham Gill. The firm was later called Gill, Archer and Maples. He was President of the Liverpool Law Society, 1890-91.
T. Mellard Reade, Archer's friend for twenty years, recorded in his obituary (Naturalist, 201, 1892, 113-6) that Archer was a ‘many-sided man of great vigour’. His interests included Tennyson, much of which he knew off by heart; civil engineering works in Liverpool; writing reviews on scientific works for the Daily Post, and natural history. The last included entomology, particularly Coleoptera and Lepidoptera. Later in life, Archer became very interested in anthropology and travelled to the Valley of the Somme, and to Ireland and the West of England in pursuit of material.
Sharpe (1908) lists Archer as among those ‘students and collectors of the Coleoptera, belonging perhaps to a somewhat different social order [ie. not artisans], who have now passed away but to whose labours we owe much information and many records’. He also notes that Archer, who lived at Crosby, contributed a short note on the Coleoptera of the district to the ‘Liverpool Naturalists Scrapbook’, a manuscript volume having a limited and brief circulation among Liverpool naturalists, which was not printed. The more important of these records were subsequently published by J.W. Ellis in Liverpool Coleoptera, 1889 (but compiled by 1880). He also wrote two articles in Zool, 22, 1864: 'Cicindela maritima and C. Hybrida’ and a ‘List of Coleoptera taken in the Liverpool district during 1862 and 1863’.
Some beetles collected by Archer abroad are in the H.W. Ellis collection at Liverpool Museum, and some letters survive in the correspondence of George C. Hyndman (1854-62) in the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society.
He was a member of the Liverpool Geological Society, the Liverpool Biological Society (taking an active part in establishing the station on Puffin Island), the Lancashire and Cheshire Entomological Society and the RES. Besides the obituary already mentioned, which includes a portrait, there are further obituaries in Ent., 25, 1892, 100; Ent.mon.Mag., 28, 1892,12 (by S.J.Capper) and Entomologist's rec.J.Var., 3, 1892, 80. (MD 7/01)