This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Dubois, Edward". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
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Edward Dubois (4 January 1774 – 1850) was an English wit and man of letters.
Dubois, son of William Dubois, a merchant in London, whose father was a native of Neufchâtel, was born at Love Lane, in the city of London. Educated at home, he came to know the classics well as having some knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish.
He adopted literature as his profession, and although he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, on 5 May 1809, he did not meet with sufficient success to abandon his pen. He was a regular contributor to various periodicals, and especially to the Morning Chronicle under Perry. Art notices, dramatic criticisms, and verses on the topics of the day were his principal contributions; and to the last day of his life he retained his position of art critic on the staff of The Observer. When the Monthly Mirror was the property of the eccentric Thomas Hill, it was edited by Dubois, and on Hill's death he gained financially as one of the two executors and residuary legatees.
Theodore Hook was among his assistants on the Monthly Mirror, and Richard Harris Barham, when writing Hook's life, obtained "many of the most interesting details" of Hook's early history from Dubois. Dubois assisted Thomas Campbell in editing the first number of Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, but before the second number could be issued differences broke out and they separated. For a few years he was the editor of the Lady's Magazine, and for the same period he conducted the European Magazine.
He is sometimes said to have been "a connection" of Sir Philip Francis, at other times his private secretary, and they were certainly on intimate terms of friendship from 1807 until Francis's death in 1818. If Francis had gone out as governor of Buenos Aires in 1807, Dubois would have accompanied him as private secretary. He compiled Francis's biography in the Monthly Mirror for 1810, and wrote the life of Francis which appeared in the Morning Chronicle for 28 December 1818. When Lord Campbell was composing his Memoir of Lord Loughborough, Dubois obtained for him a long memorandum from Lady Francis on the authorship of the Letters of Junius.
The first of these lives is said to have prompted the publication of John Taylor's Junius Identified, and it has more than once been insinuated that Dubois was the real author of that volume. Considerable correspondence and articles on the general subject of the Letters of Junius and on Taylor's work appeared in the Athenaeum and Notes and Queries for 1850 (some of which will be found in Charles Wentworth Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii.), but the connection of Dubois with the authorship of Junius Identified was set at rest by the assurance of Taylor (Notes and Queries, 1850, pp. 258–9) that he 'never received the slightest assistance from Mr. Dubois.'a
For many years, at least twenty years, Dubois was assistant to Serjeant Heath, judge of the court of requests, a 'strange and whimsical court,’ as it has been designated.
When county courts were established a judgeship was offered to Dubois, but he preferred to continue as Heath's deputy. In 1833 he was appointed by Lord Brougham to the office of treasurer and secretary of the Metropolitan Lunacy Commission, and on the abolition of that body in 1845 was employed under the new commission without any special duties. These appointments he retained until his death, and their duties were discharged by him with success; for although he loved a joke, even in court, he never allowed this propensity to get the mastery over his natural astuteness. His face was naturally droll, his wit was caustic, and he was 'capital at the dinner table.'
He died at Sloane Street, Chelsea, on 10 January 1850, aged 76. One of his last acts was to raise a subscription for the family of Richard Brinsley Peake, the dramatist.
Dubois's works were of an ephemeral character, and appeared when he was a young man.
Dubois also edited Harris's Hermes (6th edit. 1806); Fitzosborne's Letters, by Melmoth (11th edit. 1805); Burton's Anatomy (1821); Hayley's Ballads, with plates by William Blake (1805); and Ossian's Poems (1806).
He married at Bloomsbury Church in August 1815 Harriet Cresswell, daughter of Richard Cheslyn Cresswell, registrar of the Arches Court of Canterbury. By her, who survived him, he had three sons, and one daughter.
