Thomas Vernor

Thomas Vernor (c. 1740-93) opened his first bookshop in Ludgate Hill c. 1763-64, for the Eagle Street Church Book, 1737-1785, at the church meeting on 14 October 1764, notes that Thomas Vernor, “stationer on Ludgate Hill, gave a satisfactory account of a work of God on his soul while destitute of ye means of grace at Gibralter & was accepted” (p. 235). Vernor appears again on 3 May 1765, reporting to the church that Bro. Morley had taken communion with Mr Barnard’s congregation (the Sandemanians) (p. 237). Apparently, Mr Morley’s conversation worked on Vernor and he left Eagle Street for Barnard’s congregation that August (p. 240), joining Barnard’s Sandemanian church in St. Martin’s Le Grand shortly thereafter and becoming an elder in 1766. He remained with that congregation thereafter, taking in Thomas Hood from the Sandemanian congregation in Dundee in 1784 as his assistant and later partner. Hood married Vernor’s daughter and took over the business upon Vernor’s death in 1793. He does not appear to have remained, however, with the Sandemanians and most likely became an Independent. Eliezer Chater, John Chater’s nephew (1763-1835), married Rachel Vernor (b. 1769), another of Thomas Vernor’s daughters, in 1786 in Islington, thus linking the two families together through marriage.  John Chater (c. 1730-71) was formerly a member of the Independent congregation at Carey Street, New Court, and, after receiving his training for the minister at Plaisters’ Hall under Zephaniah Marryatt, ministered at the Independent congregation at Newport, Isle of Wight, between 1753 and 1759, when he returned to London to assume pastoral duties at the Independent congregation at Silver Street, Islington. Like Vernor, in 1765 Chater came under the influence of the preaching of John Barnard at the Sandemanian congregation meeting in Bull-and-Mouth Street, St. Martin’s le Grand. He left Silver Street in December 1765, and was soon joined by Samuel Pike, Independent minister at Three Cranes, Thames Street, and another Independent minister at the St. Martin’s le Grand church, a congregation founded in 1762 at Glovers’ Hall, Beech Lane, by Robert Sandeman himself.  Together, these four men – Thomas Vernor, John Chater, John Barnard, and Samuel Pike – became the primary leaders of the Sandemanian congregation in London for the next two decades.  Chater’s will was proved on 17 September 1771 in London. He was brother to Eliezer Chater of Lombard Street, a banker, and James Chater of Cherry Treet Court, Aldersgate, watchmaker, both Sandemanians. Vernor and Chater established a partnership in 1766, working initially together from Vernor’s Ludgate Hill premises and establishing a Circulating Library in 1767. By 1769, Chater had opened his own shop at 39 King Street, still working with Vernor on the Circulating Library, which appears to have moved at that time to the King Street address. Among their imprints are Simple Truth Vindicated, by Samuel Pike and John Barnard (London: T. Vernor and J. Chater, 1766) and John Barnard’s The Religion of Antichrist or, Notes on the Book of the Revelation of John (London: T. Vernor and J. Chater, 1770). Chater appeared on only 19 imprints during his short career (1766-71), and his wife, Mary, on two imprints in 1772, the year in which she continued the business in King Street after her husband’s death in 1771. In October 1772 she married John Boosey, another member of the Sandemanian congregation where the Vernor’s and Chater’s attended. He continued to work closely with Vernor, appearing with him on five of his 24 titles during his career. Boosey’s work was not so much with individual titles as with the Circulating Library, which he continued at the King Street shop until his retirement in 1792, becoming one of the premier libraries of its kind in London during that time. Vernor appeared on far more imprints than Boosey (130 between 1766 and 1793) but like his fellow church member, he also created his own circulating library, moving it each time his business locations changed, from St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill (1770-1784) and Fore Street (1779-84), and then at Birchin Lane from 1786 until his death in 1793, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Thomas Hood (1759-1811). Thus Boosey and Vernor competed among London’s dissenting culture as the two primary venues for acquiring second-hand books and books on loan, though without any disagreements as fellow Sandemanians and dissenters, both enjoying profitable businesses within that culture’s thriving community of avid readers. See Eagle Street Church Book, London. Vol. 1, 1737-1785. MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford; John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1812-16), 3:665; and Henry Robert Plomer, et. al., A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1968), 251.For information on the Vernor family and its connection with the Sandemanian church, see the exceptional work done by genealogist Trevor Pickup at

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Sandemanian_%28Glasite%29_Church#Introduction.