Author: Fox, William
Biography:
FOX, William (c.1766-1824: ancestry.com)
He was baptised along with his brother Samuel at the family home in Leadenhall St., London, on 15 Dec. 1768. Records are irregular because the family were dissenters, Particular Baptists. William was the elder child and he might have been considerably older: their parents, Mary (Tabor) and William Fox, had married in Colchester in 1761. Their father William (1736-1826) was a wealthy merchant and philanthropist, recognized now as one of the founders of the Sunday-School movement. (Neither William is to be confused with the radical bookseller William Fox who kept a shop in High Holborn and published many political pamphlets between 1791 and 1813.) William Jun. could not attend university but he had a literary education and aesthetic interests. Besides his two collections of poetry, he published two editions (1797, 1799) of observations made in Europe 1792-4, in the form of letters to a friend (Sketches . . . made on a Tour) and a contribution to the debate about the picturesque, in opposition to Uvedale Price, The Grecian, Roman, and Gothic Architecture, considered as applicable to Public and Private Buildings, in this Country (1821). He married Harriet Hall on 3 Feb. 1798 at St. Mary Aldermary, City of London, and set up house in Hackney. He is often identified as "William Fox, Jun., of Hackney." Bagatella is dated from Grove-Place, Hackney. As dissenters, the couple registered their son Octavus, born 24 Aug. 1810, at Dr. Williams's Library, giving their parish of residence as St. John's, Hackney. The last book, on domestic architecture, is dated from 2 Craven St. in the Strand. Fox died of unknown causes and was buried on 14 Oct. 1824 in Islington; the notice of probate (2 Nov. 1824) gives his place of residence as Hackney. (ancestry.com 21 Oct. 2021; findmypast.com 21 Oct. 2021; "Fox, William (1736-1826)," ODNB 21 Oct. 2021; John H. Y. Briggs, Pulpit and People: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Baptist Life and Thought [2009] 175-6) HJ
Other Names:
- William Fox, Jr.