John Harris (writer)

He is best known as the editor of the Lexicon Technicum: Or, A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1704), the earliest of the English encyclopaedias; as the compiler of the Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (1744), published under his name;[1] and as the author of an unfinished county history of Kent.

He was presented to the vicarage of Icklesham in Sussex, and subsequently to the rectory of St Thomas, Winchelsea.

In 1698 he gave the seventh series of the Boyle Lectures, Atheistical Objections against the Being of God and His Attributes fairly considered and fully refuted.

The friendship of Sir William Cowper secured for him the office of private chaplain, a prebend in Rochester Cathedral (1708), and the rectory of the united London parishes of St Mildred, Bread Street and St Margaret Moses, as well as other preferments.

At his death, he was completing an elaborate History of Kent in Five Parts of which the first volume only was published, by D. Midwinter of St Paul's Churchyard, London, in 1719.