Henry Delahay Symonds

Henry Delahay Symonds (1741-1816) was, like Benjamin Flower, a radical reformer in the 1790s. In 1792 he collaborated with Martha Gurney and several others in selling the Address to Protestant Dissenters, on the origin and influence of the Regium Donum.  The next year he was fined £100 and imprisoned for one year in Newgate for publishing Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.  He was then fined another £100 and served a second year in Newgate for publishing Paine’s Address. Like his later business partner, Benjamin Crosby, Symonds advertised frequently in the Intelligencer. He also sold, along with Flower, The trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton, for publishing a supposed libel, intituled Politics for the people, or, Hog’s wash at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey, February twenty-fourth, 1794, by Daniel Isaac Eaton, and A sermon preached at the re-opening of the General Baptist Meeting-House, Church Street, Deptford: on Sunday, the 17th of May, 1801, after it had been shut up for repairs, by John Evans.   Symonds was most likely a Dissenter and probably the brother of Noah Delahay Symonds, Baptist minister in Bampton from 1777 to 1781 (see entry below). At a meeting of the Baptist church at Eagle Street, London, on 8 December 1765, it was announced that Noah Symmonds “winessed a good Confession (at Mr Say, Printer in Ivy Lane)” (Eagle Street f. 123v).  Apparently, Noah was working as an apprentice for Charles Say, printer of the Daily Gazetteer. At that same time, H. D. Symonds first began to appear on title pages as a London bookseller. Most likely, Noah had briefly followed Henry into the printing trade before leaving for Bristol to train as a Baptist minister. H. D. Symonds may later have had connections with the church at Maze Pond, for several Symonds were members there, including a Mary Symonds who married a Mr. Hemming, possibly a relation of John Hemming, Flower’s friend (see letter 86). See Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Kent: William Dawson, 1977), 56, 220; Eagle Street Church Book, London. Vol. 1, 1737-1785. MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, ff.123-24; Maze Pond Church Book, 1744-1783, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, f.19; Monthly Repository (1816), 436.