John Fenwick political radical and writer (1)
This post shares new research about the political radical and writer John Fenwick (1757-1823).
John Fenwick lived in Newcastle upon Tyne as a child. He was the son of the Methodist preacher John Fenwick (d. 1787), who left the itinerancy and traded in 1756-77, after marrying Priscilla Mackaris (1735-71). The younger Fenwick likely attended Newcastle Free School when Hugh Moises was schoolmaster.
Copper token with a cat issued by Thomas Spence, inscribed MY FREEDOM I AMONG SLAVES ENJOY, London 1796 - image courtesy of the British Museum
Fenwick was a contemporary of the working class radical Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who first promulgated his plans for ‘democratic parishes’ at the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775. Before moving to London in the late 1780s, where Spence became well known as a radical bookseller, and later produced the meme like cat token here. Charles Lamb noted to the Parliamentary clerk John Rickman that Fenwick ‘in youth conversed with the philosophers’.
Lieutenant George Belson, Corps of Marines, outside the Guard Room of the Marine Barracks, Chatham, 1780. Image courtesy of the National Army Museum.
Fenwick was described by others as an Army officer in his youth. The only ‘J. Fenwick’ listed as an Army officer in 1773-87 was a second lieutenant of the British Marine Corps on half pay. First listed in 1773 (when John Fenwick was aged 16), then as a second lieutenant in 1775, 1777-78, and 1784-87. He might have been assigned without a commission in the intervening war years. In 1793, Fenwick downplayed the extent of his military experience in a letter to General Miranda of the French republican army.
Aged 31, Fenwick sprang fully formed onto the pages of William Godwin’s diary in August 1788. When he, Godwin, and Thomas Holcroft dined together at the White Hart in London. He was proposed and accepted as a member of the Society of Constitutional Information in 1792. He probably attended the Philomathean Society, at which Godwin, Holcroft and others met to debate, with a maximum 21 members.
Fenwick was a republican. He travelled to France in 1793, and earned his living partly as a translator from French to English. In 1796-7, payments were made to Committee members who produced The Moral and Political Magazine of the London Corresponding Society, among whom the ‘Fenwick’ who offered to complete these tasks without payment for two months, in December 1796, probably was John Fenwick.
Satirical print entitled 'Promenade in the State Side of Newgate', London 1793. The figures are identified at the bottom of the page. Image courtesy of the British Museum.
Fenwick was closely associated with some men convicted of sedition in the 1790s. The London Corresponding Society made donations to support the family of Joseph Gerrald (pictured here with a newspaper) after he was transported following the ‘British Convention’ in Edinburgh. His daughter Fanny Gerrald (b. 1791) stayed with John and Eliza Fenwick and their two children in 1798-9.
At that time, Fenwick also attended the trial and execution of the priest James Coigly, was entrusted to edit and publish Coigly’s papers, and separately published his own pamphlet on the trial. Soon after, Fenwick travelled to Dublin, in February 1799, where he remained until late April.
As the millenium turned, Fenwick looked for new ways to further radical politics and earn a living. His short biography of Godwin appeared in the second volume of Richard Phillips’ Public Characters (October, 1799). He wrote a stage comedy The Indian: a farce, derived from the pre-revolutionary French opera Arlequin sauvage, which opened in London in October 1800 and was not a success. From 1801, John Fenwick sought to earn his living as a journalist, which is the subject of our next post.
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Dr Charlotte MacKenzie
Independent researcher
@HistoryCornwall
Creative Commons Attribution licence