John Dunton

John Dunton (1659–1732) was a bookseller who was originally from Huntingdonshire. He was the son of the Revd John Dunton (1628-1676), also the son and grandson of Anglican ministers. He too was designed early to be an Anglican minister, but his aptitude was just not in that direction. Instead, he was apprenticed to a Presbyterian bookseller in London, Thomas Parkhurst. Though Dunton never left the Anglican church, his work was mostly with nonconformists. His wife was Elizabeth Annesley, daughter of a prominent nonconformist minister, Samuel Annesley. He published several hundred titles, including Richard Baxter’s Directions to the Unconverted (1682) and Maggots, or, Poems on Several Occasions (1685) by the father of John and Samuel Wesley. In 1689 he published The Bloody Assizes, an account of those who suffered under Judge Jeffreys. His politics in the 1690s were decidedly Whig. In 1691 he began the Athenian Gazette, or, Casuistical Mercury, to which Elizabeth Singer Rowe contributed. In 1696 he published her Poems on Several Occasions. His Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London (1705), is one of the earliest examples of autobiography in English. See also his Whipping-Post, or, A Satyr upon Every Body (1706). He was buried next to his wife in Bunhill Fields.