John Lewis

John Lewis (1697-1755) was baptized on April 27, 1797, at Casgob, Radnorshire.  In November 1716 he became an apprentice to the printer Joseph Downing (d. 1734) in Bartholomew Close. Downing’s titles were exclusively religious, a trait he seems to have passed on to Lewis and another apprentice of his at that time, John Hart (d. c. 1765). Hart preceded Lewis as Downing’s apprentice by five months. After they gained their freedom (1725 and 1728, respectively), Lewis and Hart established themselves close to Downing in Bartholomew Close, appearing as printer or seller on 48 imprints between 1732 and 1754. Between 1743 and 1747 they collaborated frequently with Ebenezer Gardner in Gracechurch Street (d. 1771), their former associate in Bartholomew Close (1735-37). Lewis’s first imprint appeared in 1731, an edition of the Book of Common Prayer, working from “the Black Boy in Bartholomew Close, near West-Smithfield.” The next year a new edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was “printed and sold by John Hart and John Lewis in Bartholomew Close near West-Smithfield, 1732.” Gardner was gone by 1739 and Hart by 1741; Lewis would remain until 1749, when he relocated to 1 Paternoster Row. Lewis married Mary Thorogood on July 3, 1726, at St. Dunstan in the West, two years before he completed his apprenticeship. 

By 1737 Lewis had been introduced to the evangelical revival moving across Wales and England through the preaching of his fellow Welshman Howel Harris (1714-73) and the young Anglican evangelists George Whitefield (1714-70) and John Wesley (1703-91). Late in 1737 Lewis published A Letter to the Religious Societies, a response (possibly written by Lewis himself) to a sermon by Whitefield at St. Mary le Bow Parish Church that September directed at several groups that had recently formed in London and Westminster under Wesley and Whitefield. By 1739 Lewis’s stature had increased to the point that he was now identifying himself as “Printer to the Religious Societies.” Besides the societies being formed by Wesley and Whitefield, Lewis also became affiliated with the Fetter Lane Society, founded in May 1738 in the home of James Hutton (1715-1795), an Anglican bookseller who had recently embraced Moravian teachings. When Whitefield opened his Tabernacle in the Moorfields in 1741 (only a short distance from Bartholomew Close), the Lewis family became regular attendants. Lewis quickly became a lay leader in the Tabernacle as well as the printer and editor for Whitefield’s first periodical, The Christian's Amusement: Containing Letters concerning the Progress of the Gospel both at Home and Abroad, &c. (1740-41). Whitefield revamped the periodical with Lewis’s aid in 1741 into The Weekly History; or, An Account of the Most Remarkable Particulars Relating to the Present Progress of the Gospel, a periodical that continued under various names, publishers, and editors into 1748. Besides printing Whitefield’s accounts of the transatlantic revival, Lewis also printed and sold Whitefield’s Nine Sermons (1743) and eleven titles between 1741 and 1745 by John Cennick (1718-55), a popular evangelist who joined first with Wesley and the Methodists and then with Whitefield and the Calvinistic Methodists before aligning himself with the Moravians in 1745. Lewis’s time with Whitefield at the Tabernacle did not last long, however. By 1745, Lewis and the rest of their children were attending the Moravian congregation in Fetter Lane, about the same time that John Cennick resigned from the Tabernacle to become a Moravian evangelist.  

John Lewis appeared on at least 127 imprints between 1731 and 1755, nearly all of which were religious in nature. In 1743 he sold the first of some seventeen works by the popular Baptist poet and polemicist Anne Dutton (1692-1765), a friend and correspondent of Whitefield. All seventeen titles by Dutton were printed by John Hart at Popping’s Court, Fleet Street, and also sold by Ebenezer Gardner in Gracechurch Street. Besides Dutton’s writings, Lewis was the sole printer and seller of twelve titles by Cennick between 1741 and 1755. Lewis also contributed to the popularity of hymnals in the home and chapel through his involvement with Cennick’s Sacred Hymns for the Use of Religious Societies (1744), Morris Peleg’s The Favour’d Moment: Being a Collection of Hymns and Poems (1745), William Heard’s Hymns, or Spiritual Songs (1746), and William Cudworth’s A Collection of Hymns . . . For the Use of Religious Societies (1747). His output increased in his last two years (1754-55) to fourteen imprints (he was joined on three of them by his son, John, Jr.). He died in 1755 but was not buried in the Moravian burial ground for he never became a member of the congregation. His wife and daughter succeeded him in the business at 1 Paternoster Row. For more on Lewis and his family, see Timothy Whelan, "Mary Lewis and her Family of Printers and Booksellers, 1 Paternoster Row 1749-1812" Publishing History 85 (2021), 31-67.  Work on Lewis has also been done by Alison McNaught.