William Fox (bookseller)

William Fox, bookseller (fl. 1770-1794), was one of the most brilliant writers of political pamphlets in the 1790s, and for a short time the most prolific. That decade saw the most fundamental debate about politics – about sovereignty, political justice, and the right of the people to participate in government - since the English civil war. He began his career in 1791 by writing what became probably the most widely read pamphlet in British history, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, in which he proposed a boycott on sugar as a means of bringing to an end not only the slave-trade, the target of almost all ‘abolitionists’ of the time, but the system of slavery itself. In 1793 and 1794 he published on average a new pamphlet every month, and won a high reputation among the liberal periodicals such as the Analytical Review, the Monthly, and the Critical, as an unusually sharp satirist and commentator on political issues. Since his death, however, his writings have been almost entirely ignored by scholars of late eighteenth-century history, literature and politics.

There are two reasons for this neglect. First, Fox was so independent a thinker that, as John Barrell contends, it was very difficult to slot him into the pattern constructed by historians of the political conflicts and debates of the 1790s. He seems to belong on all sides and on no side. Secondly, until very recently, almost nothing was known about Fox, and when he was referred to - usually only as the author of the Address - he was misidentified. Historians and librarians have attributed all of his pamphlets to one or the other of several wrong William Foxes. The most common beneficiary has been ‘William Fox, Attorney-at-Law’, to whom the British Library attributes all thirteen of its William Fox pamphlets. This William Fox, originally from Gloucester, published four works between 1796 and 1813, and even a cursory reading of them reveals that this William Fox was a devout Anglican and an outspoken opponent of religious dissent, the very opposite of ‘our’ Fox. Also sometimes confused with the pamphleteer is William Fox the well-known merchant and philanthropist (1736-1826), for many years a deacon in the Baptist congregation in Little Prescott Street, Goodman’s Fields, and founder in 1785 of the Sunday School Society. His son, William Fox, Jr. (1758-1821) (listed in the catalogue of the British Library as ‘William Fox, the Younger, of Hackney’), was an author as well, publishing five books between 1796 and 1821, and in some cases he too has been confused with our Fox. This misidentification has defrauded a remarkable writer of his proper place in the abolitionist movement, in the wider political debates of the 1790s, and in the history of political satire. It has also led to the neglect of a remarkable and resourceful woman, his publisher and business partner Martha Gurney (1733-1816).

William Fox was one of several Foxes who operated as booksellers between 1679 and 1819.  Thomas Fox sold in Westminster Hall from 1679 to 1692. He was followed by Joseph Fox (most likely his son), from the same location, 1691-1736.  Between 1736 and 1747 Joseph Fox was joined by his son, also named Joseph, selling in the same location. The younger Fox then sold alone until 1776; however, for three years (1736-38) several imprints of ‘J. and J. Fox’ reveal that they sold both ‘at the Half Moon and Seven Stars, in Westminster-Hall’ and ‘at their Shop at Tunbridge Wells, during the Summer Season’.  In 1776 James Fox (most likely the son of the second Joseph) begins selling, but the shop has now moved to Dartmouth Street, Westminster, where he will continue his business until 1819. It is possible that William Fox, since he owned property in Westminster (where all the other Foxes kept bookshops), was the brother of James and the son of the second Joseph Fox. In a letter to the Home Secretary in May 1794, James Johnson, an informer (see below, n. 85), noted that Fox was ‘a man of considerable Property both Landed and Funded’. If William Fox was the son of Joseph Fox, part of that property might have been in Tunbridge Wells.

Between 1773 and 1794, William Fox ran a bookshop at 128 Holborn Hill, adjacent to Leather Lane and just opposite Fetter Lane, between Gray’s Inn Road and Hatton Garden. His imprint appeared on more than 60 titles, generally as part of a consortium, or ‘conger’ of booksellers. The only year when his name appeared alone on title pages was 1774, when he published single versions of five plays by William Congreve and two by Nicholas Rowe, most of which appeared as well in a volume titled Plays, published by Fox that same year. He specialised in literary works, selling editions of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fénelon, Dryden, Congreve, Rowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Fielding, Richardson, and Thomson, as well as such popular works as Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks (1778), Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), Andrew Kippis’s Biographica Brittanica (1778) and the Universal History from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (1779-81). In 1782 he entered into a business arrangement with Martha Gurney (1733-1816), who that year moved her bookshop from 34 Bell-yard into his quarters in Holborn Hill, where she would remain until her death in 1816.  She was the only daughter of Thomas Gurney (1705-70), a High Calvinist Baptist who served for many years as a shorthand writer at the Old Bailey. Her brother, Joseph Gurney (1744-1815), was also a bookseller before succeeding his father as shorthand writer for the Old Bailey and later for Parliament. Joseph Gurney may have introduced his sister to William Fox, for the two men, besides being printer/booksellers only a short distance from each other in Holborn, were also subscribing members to the Humane Society, founded in 1774 by Dr. William Hawes, a close friend of Joseph Gurney.

His most famous pamphlet was An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum (1791), solidified the abolitionist forces in Great Britain and America by focusing their energies on a boycott of West Indian produce, a boycott that served not only as a viable economic solution to ending the slave trade but also, as Charlotte Sussman argues, provided through the power of “consumerism” a kind of universal suffrage for its advocates, resulting in a political campaign that bypassed Parliament and granted power directly to the people, many of whom were of the lower and middle classes. In less than a year, Fox’s Address became the most widely circulated pamphlet of the eighteenth century with more than 200,000 copies distributed in Great Britain and America, easily eclipsing Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Between 1791 and 1794, Fox and Gurney wrote and published sixteen pamphlets on political issues of the day, creating a legacy in the arena of radical pamphleteering unequaled by any other duo in England in the 1790s.

His pamphlets are the following:  An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Consumption of West India Produce (London: Printed for James Phillips, and sold by M. Gurney, T. Knott, and C.Forster, 1791); A Summary View of the Evidence Delivered Before a Committee of the House of Commons, Relating to the Slave Trade (London: Sold by M. Gurney, T. Knott, and C. Forster, 1792); The Interest of Great Britain, Respecting the F rench War, 3rd ed. (London: T. Whieldon and Butterworth, W.  Richardson, and M. Gurney, 1793); An Examination of Mr. Paine’s Writings (London: T. Whieldon and Butterworth, W. Richardson, and M. Gurney, 1793); Thoughts on the Death of the King of France (London: J. Ridgway, W. Richardson, T. Whieldon and Butterworth, and M. Gurney, 1793); A Discourse on National Fasts, Particularly in Reference to that of April 19, 1793, on Occasion of the War against France (London: J. Ridgway, W. Richardson, T. Whieldon and Butterworth, and M. Gurney, 1793); A Defence of the Decree of the National Convention of France, for Emancipating the Slaves in the West Indies (London: M. Gurney, and D. I. Eaton, [1794]); A Discourse, Occasioned by the National Fast, February 28, 1794 (London:  M. Gurney, [1794]); Thoughts on the Impending Invasion of England (1794); On Jacobinism (1794); On the Renewal of the East India charter (London: M. Gurney, 1794); On Peace (London:  M. Gurney, 1794); On Trials for Treason (n.p. [1794]); Poor Richard’s Scraps, No. 1 (London: M. Gurney, [1794?]). Poor Richard’s Scraps, No. 3 [and no. 4] (London: M. Gurney, [1794]).  

For more on this and three other Williams Foxes living in London at the same time, see Timothy Whelan,  “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s,”  Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009), 397-411.