William Hone
His victorious court battle against government censorship in 1817 marked a turning point in the fight for British press freedom.
According to Associate Professor Kyle Grimes from the University of Alabama, "William Hone arguably did more than any other writer, printer or publisher to shape British popular print culture in the early decades of the nineteenth century."
In 1815 he started the Traveller newspaper, and tried in vain to save Elizabeth Fenning, a cook convicted on thin evidence of poisoning her employers with arsenic.
[3] From 1 February to 25 October 1817, Hone published the Reformists' Register, using it to criticise state abuses, which he later attacked in the famous political squibs and parodies, illustrated by George Cruikshank.
In researching his defence Hone had come upon some curious and, at that time, little trodden literary ground, and the results were shown by his publication in 1820 of The Apocryphal New Testament: being all the Gospels, Epistles, and other pieces now extant, attributed in the first four centuries to Jesus Christ, his Apostles and their companions, and not included in the New Testament by its compilers; translated from the original tongues, and now first collected into one volume.
In preparing them he had the approval of Robert Southey and the assistance of Charles Lamb, (with whom he was great friends) as well as his son-in-law, Jacob Henry Burn (1794–1869).
Despite the popularity of these books, Hone was not financially successful, and was lodged in King's Bench Prison for a short period for outstanding debts.
Friends came to his assistance, and he subsequently opened the Green Grasshopper coffee house with his wife and two eldest daughters in Gracechurch Street.
[2] After a series of strokes, he died at Tottenham on 8 November 1842 and was buried at Dr Watts' Walk in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington.
In the years before his death, he and his eldest daughter, Sarah Burn, worked together to compile his personal papers and information in order to put together a biography.
They were not successful in achieving a published work; however, the compilation of documents was given to writer Frederick Hackworth by Hone's younger daughter Ellen Soul.
To his untiring persistence may be ascribed the release of the cruelly incarcerated lunatic W. Norris, who had been for years chained to an iron frame in a cell in Bethlem, followed by a general reform of treatment and the eventual dismissal of the governor, W. Haslam about 1813.
While waiting sentence my father conversed with her in Newgate, and became so convinced of her innocence that he spared no exertions day or night on her behalf, collected a mass of evidence (which he afterwards printed—a volume of about 200 pages) in her favour, had a petition presented to the Secretary of State praying for reprieve but the judge who tried her, Sir Vicary Gibbs, recorder of London, a notoriously hard man, and an intimate friend of the Turners, had charged the jury vindictively against her, and he pursued the unhappy girl to the scaffold.
Of retiring habits, simple yet refined tastes and courteous manners, my father was essentially a gentleman and while he had an utter contempt of such as Mr Thackeray termed 'stuck-up people, he instinctively conceded to every rank of life its due proprieties.
His society was courted for the attractiveness of his conversation, in which few excelled, and he numbered among his friends many eminent in art, sciences and the learned professions as well as in literature.
The medieval scholar M. R. James sharply criticized Hone's The apocryphal New Testament as "to speak frankly, a very bad book" on a number of grounds: it republished the 1700s translations of Archbishop Wake and Jeremiah Jones without crediting them; it misleadingly presented apocrypha as if a supplement to the New Testament; it combined non-apocryphal works of the early Church Fathers with anonymous apocryphal works without any clarification or distinction; and so on.
