James Ridgway

James Ridgway (1755-1838) operated a bookselling/printing business in London from the late 1780s to the early 1830s, first at 1 York Street, St. James’s Square, then at 170 Piccadilly.  His sons would later join him in the business, continuing in Piccadilly until the late 1890s.  Ridgway published and sold numerous works by Dissenters during his career.  Caroline Ridgway, his wife, published Philip Francis’s Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade, and State of the Negroes in the West India Islands (1796). Despite serving a four-year prison sentence for seditious activities resulting from his publication of an edition of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1793, James Ridgway continued to manage his printing/bookselling business from prison. The Proceedings is the only imprint that bears his wife’s name, a surprising fact when one considers that Caroline Ridgway probably played a key role during her husband’s imprisonment for sedition. The fact that her one title was an abolitionist work suggests that she was most likely an abolitionist herself, providing another instance of how women in the printing/bookselling trade made their presence known during that first campaign.  See Brown, London Publishers 161; Manogue.