Author: Alexander, William
Biography:
ALEXANDER, William (1768-1841: ancestry.co.uk)
A Quaker, he was born in Needham Market, Suffolk, on 3 Jan. 1768 to Dykes Alexander and his wife Martha Biddle. His mother, a Quaker minister, died in 1775 and he was sent to school in Wandsworth before commencing work with Joseph Brown, a corn chandler in Luton. When his father died in 1786, he returned to Needham Market and set up house with Mary, one of his older sisters. He moved to York where he married Ann Tuke on 1 Sept. 1796. Ann was the daughter of William Tuke, founder of the York Retreat, and Esther Tuke (d 1794) who established the Trinity Lane Quaker Girls’ School in York. William and Ann superintended the girls’ school—his The Silent Pause was written for its pupils—but the work became too much for Ann when the younger of their two sons died of typhus in 1810. William Alexander set up a bookselling business in York in 1812, focusing particularly on Friends’ books and he was an active member of the York meeting. He later worked with his surviving son, William Henry Alexander, trading as Alexander and Son. He suffered from a serious lung illness—possibly tuberculosis—in the 1830s and never fully recovered. He died on 2 Apr. 1841 and was buried in the Friends’ Burial Ground, York. (ancestry.co.uk 3 May 2022; ODNB [for William Tuke] 3 May 2022; Annual Monitor 30 [1842] 3-14; William Alexander, ed., Some Account of the Life and Religious Experience of Mary Alexander [1811])