William Fox, Jr. (writer)

William Fox, Jr. (fl. 1792-1821), lived in Hackney (he was sometimes listed as “William Fox, the Younger, of Hackney”) and was the son of the wealthy Baptist merchant and founder of the Sunday School Society, William Fox (1736-1826). William, Jr., was raised in the Baptist congregation in Little Prescot Street, where Abraham Booth ministered for many years. William, his brother Jonathan, and his three sisters¾Sarah, Mary, and Susanna¾were all well educated and culturally astute, though devoted to their Baptist faith. Both brothers served as apprentices to their father in his drapery business in Cheapside. William became a Freeman of the City of London in 1791, but he did not remain long in the drapery business. Sarah Harris (d. 1823) emigrated with her husband, Samuel Harris, to Aurora, Indiana, where he became a Baptist minister (see Power, Rise and Progress, 229-31). John Carroll Power notes that “the second son of William Fox, Mr. William Fox junior, was, long after his father’s death, a partner in a banking house in London … Being a man of considerable literary attainments, he wrote a number of works on various subjects, which were published.” Little else is known about William Fox, Jr., but between 1796 and 1821 he authored five works covering a wide range of genres and personal experience: Original Pieces; in Verse and Prose (1796), Sketches and Observations Made on a Tour through Various Parts of Europe, in the Years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (1799), Cursory Remarks on a Work entitled Apeleutherus; or, An Effort to Attain Intellectual Freedom.  In a Letter to a Friend (1800) (a response to the Unitarian William Sturch’s Apeleutherus, or, An Effort to Attain Intellectual Freedom [1799], which appeared anonymously and has never been attributed to William Fox, Jr.), La Bagatella; or, Delineations of Home Scenery, a Descriptive Poem (1801), and The Grecian, Roman, and Gothic Architecture, Considered as Applicable to Public and Private Buildings, in this Country; to which are added, Some Remarks on Ornamental Landscape, Designed to Recommend, and to Introduce a More Correct Taste into the Residences of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain (1821). These works reveal that William Fox, Jr., was widely read and a gentleman of considerable means, both of which bespeak his position as the son of the wealthy merchant William Fox.  For more on William Fox, Jr., see John Carroll Power, The Rise and Progress of Sunday Schools:  A Biography of Robert Raikes and William Fox,  2nd ed. (New York, 1868), 228-29; for more on this and three other Williams Foxes living in London at the same time, see Timothy Whelan,  “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s,”  Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009), 397-411.