William Fox, Sr. (merchant)

Fox, William, Sr., merchant and tanner (1736-1826)  was for many years a deacon at Little Prescot Street, Goodman’s Fields, and founder of the Sunday School Society in 1785, and his son, William Fox, Jr. Edwin Starr, in his Baptist Bibliography (Rochester, 1963, vol. 8,  69-70), places two of William Fox the bookseller’s pamphlets (The Interests of Great Britain respecting the French War and A Discourse on National Fasts) alongside ‘Address to the Friends of Evangelical Truth in General; and to the Calvinistic Baptist Churches in Particular’, which William Fox the Baptist merchant wrote in 1797 on behalf of the Baptist Society for the Encouragement and Support of Itinerant Preaching in 1797, an organization for which he served as treasurer. See Baptist Annual Register, vol. 2 [1794-97], 465-70; Joseph Ivimey, Memoir of William Fox, Esq., Founder of the Sunday-School Society (London, 1831); John Carroll Power, The Rise and Progress of Sunday Schools:  A Biography of Robert Raikes and William Fox,  2nd ed. (New York, 1868); and Ernest Kevan, London’s Oldest Baptist Church (London, 1933), 92-93, 122, 139-42. 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.