Description

A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> Sarah Fox (1742-1811) was a Quaker lady of ‘the upper-middling sort’ who lived most of her life in Bristol England. Her brother was Richard Champion the famous porcelain manufacturer. A spinster for most of her life. she married a wealthy Quaker banker at the age of forty-eight. On her death she reportedly left forty closely written volumes of a diary behind her. All that apparently remains of the original is a 502-page hand-written manuscript of diary extracts compiled in 1873 by John Frank a Bristol Quaker. This volume is a fully annotated version of those Victorian ‘extracts’ which have never before appeared in print. Since so few women have left their reminiscences of Bristol life in this period Sarah Fox’s are of intrinsic interest. especially as they record her meetings with some of Britain’s most dynamic public figures including the evangelist John Wesley the politician Edmund Burke the chemist William Cookworthy and the writer Hannah More. Fox’s encounters with the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson and a surprising number of American anti-slavery activists residing in Bristol add to the wider historical insights which her diary affords. Sarah Fox’s friendship with Sarah Farley one of Britain’s first female newspaper editors her musings on sufferings of the urban poor and her visits to an early smallpox ‘inoculation house’ at Barton Hill in Bristol offer the reader a richly detailed glimpse into the social and cultural life of Georgian England’s second most important city. (SP)