Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/143

 resolved to issue a circular recommending the formation of a society for the establishment and support of Sunday schools throughout the kingdom of Great Britain. Fox was cordially supported by Raikes, Jonas Hanway, and other friends of education, and the result was the foundation of the Sunday School Society, with a body of officers and governors, and a committee of twenty-four persons, chosen equally from the church of England and the various bodies of protestant dissenters. The Earl of Salisbury was elected president. Before eight months had elapsed from the first meeting in the Poultry, thirty schools had been established, containing 1,110 scholars, and by the following January (1787) these had been increased to 147 schools with 7,242 children. In 1797 the Baptist Home Missionary Society was formed, with Fox as treasurer. Five years later Fox left London and went to reside at Lechlade House, Gloucestershire. He remained here till 1823, when he moved to Cirencester, where he lost his wife, a lineal descendant of Sir [q. v.] Fox died at Cirencester on 1 April 1826, and was buried at Lechlade beside his wife and daughter. Among the friends and supporters of Fox were Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce.



FOX, WILLIAM JOHNSON (1786–1864), preacher, politician, and man of letters, was born at Uggeshall Farm, Wrentham, in the north of Suffolk, 1 March 1786. From his father, a sturdy peasant-farmer, who had once got into trouble as a poacher, he inherited, he says in a fragmentary autobiography, ‘sluggish tenacity of brain;’ from his mother, a woman of sweet and liberal nature, ‘nervous irritability.’ Both parents were strict Calvinistic independents. When Fox was only three years of age his father gave up farming, and barely supported himself in several callings at Norwich. Fox was sent to a chapel school, became a weaver's boy, an errand-boy, and in 1799 clerk in a bank. Here he found leisure for self-improvement, worked hard at mathematics, and, like Leigh Hunt, Peacock, and De Quincey, won prizes offered by the ‘Monthly Preceptor,’ and planned a course of study which would have occupied him for seven years. He first studied Latin and Greek with a view to progress in mathematics, and improved his knowledge of them with a view to divinity. He appreciated, however, the melody of Greek versification, and the shrewd philosophy of Horace, ‘though much of it used to elbow and jostle my morality.’ He took to authorship, competed for essay prizes, and wrote occasionally for a local newspaper; until at length it was suggested that the pulpit was his proper destination. In September 1806 he entered the Independent College at Homerton under Dr. Pye Smith. He found there a considerable tendency to free inquiry, ‘which gradually subsided as the time came for the student to exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and the pew.’ Early in 1810 he took charge of a congregation at Fareham. He studied the unitarian controversy, reading books treating upon it for hours in bed. By March 1812 he had entirely broken with orthodoxy, and had become minister of the unitarian chapel at Chichester, after a brief and unsuccessful experience as pastor of a small seceding congregation at Fareham. At Chichester he studied hard, and formed an ill-advised engagement to his future wife, Eliza, daughter of James Florance, barrister. In 1817 he became minister of Parliament Court Chapel, London. He had now, by dint of assiduous practice, made himself a consummate rhetorician. His celebrity was enhanced by several published sermons, one of which, ‘On the Duties of Christians towards Deists,’ occasioned by the trial of Carlile, excited warm controversy. In 1820 he married, and the next few years of his life were marked by a severe illness, a visit to Scotland, his first regular contributions to a newspaper, the ‘Norwich Mercury,’ the removal of his congregation from Parliament Court to a chapel built especially for him in South Place, Finsbury (1824), a controversy with Dr. Blomfield on the gospel of St. John, and increasing connection with literature and politics. He began to be celebrated for his taste as a dramatic critic; he wrote on Nathaniel Lee, ‘Sethos,’ and other subjects for the ‘Retrospective Review;’ and, on the establishment of the ‘Westminster Review,’ he wrote the first article, entitled ‘Men and Things in 1824.’ He had already become editor, with (1782–1845) [q. v.], of the ‘Monthly Repository,’ the leading organ of the unitarian denomination, which he conducted as a theological periodical until 1831, when he purchased the copyright from the Unitarian Association, and made it an organ of political and social reform, combined with literary criticism. Fox's quick recognition of youthful genius was especially shown in his welcome of Browning's ‘Pauline,’ which occasioned a lifelong friendship with the poet. Mill contributed philosophical papers under the signature ‘Antiquus;’ and in Fox's periodical appeared Crabb Robinson's remarkable series of papers on ‘Goethe;’ Harriet Martineau's poems and essays; Eliza Flower's musical