Vicesimus Knox, 1809 engraving

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) was an English essayist, headmaster and Anglican priest.

Life

Knox was born 8 December 1752, at Newington Green, Middlesex, the son of Vicesimus Knox (1729–1780), a cleric and schoolmaster, and his wife Ann Wall, daughter of Devereux Wall. He was educated at St John's College, Oxford, matriculating in 1771 graduating in 1775. Meanwhile, his father became headmaster of Tonbridge School in 1772. Knox became a Fellow of his college, and was ordained by Robert Lowth, becoming deacon in 1775 and priest in 1776.[1][2]

Knox replaced his father, who was in poor health, as headmaster of Tonbridge School in 1778. He was successful in raising the number of pupils, from around 20 to around 80.[1] Among Knox's students were Charles Girdlestone and John Mitford.[3][4]

During the 1790s Knox was critical of British foreign policy,[5] towards France and Poland, in articles written for the Morning Chronicle.[6] The pupil numbers at the school fell back again, after his unpopular views became known.[7]

Knox accumulated some livings: Shipborne (1800, a chapelry, as bequest from William Holles Vane, 2nd Viscount Vane), Ramsden Crays (1801), and Runwell (1807). But he did not become vicar of Tonbridge when the incumbent Henry Harpur died in 1790, the advowson passing out of the Vane family (to David Papillon), and John Rawstorn Papillon being appointed. Theophilus Lindsey had an account from Henry Austen of West Wickham of Knox acting as stand-in after Harpur's death, as a showy preacher who made pointed remarks about Unitarians that Austen took personally.[1][2][8][9]

Views

As an essayist Knox wrote extensively on morals and literature, and as a minister he preached often on behalf of philanthropic causes and against war.

War and peace

Knox argued that

"If the Christian religion in all its purity, and in its full force, were suffered to prevail universally, the sword of offensive war must be sheathed for ever, and the din of arms would at last be silenced in perpetual peace".[10]

and that

"The total abolition of war, and the establishment of perpetual and universal peace, appear to me to be of more consequence than any thing ever achieved, or even attempted, by mere mortal man, since the creation".[11]

Novels

Knox's Essays Moral and Literary, Volume II, contains Essay XVIII "On Novel Reading", which begins "If it is true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of Novels probably contributes to its degeneracy."[12] He considered that contact with Gil Blas or Devil Upon Two Sticks, picaresque novels by Alain-René Lesage, could cause a schoolboy to lose the taste for Latin classics.[13]

The sentimental novel was explicitly linked by Knox to solitary vice.[14] An early critic of Laurence Sterne, he took issue with the morality of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.[15] He complained that Sterne and Elizabeth Draper, of Journal to Eliza, had too many imitators.[16] Winter Evenings has a story of Belinda who was too fond of "pathetic" novels.[17] Knox approved of travel writing.[18]

Works

Knox wrote:[19]

Also single sermons and anonymously issued editions of Juvenal and Persius (1784) and of Catullus (1784; reprinted 1824).[19] Thomas De Quincey called Knox "a writer now entirely forgotten" in a footnote to his Philosophy of Herodotus (1842).[27][28]

Family

Knox in 1778 married Mary Miller (died 1809). Their children were:[1]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Carter, Philip; Skedd, S. J. "Knox, Vicesimus". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15792. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ a b "Knox, Vicesimus (1775–1821) (CCEd Person ID 302)". The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835. Retrieved 2 July 2016.
  3. ^ Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1890). "Girdlestone, Charles" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 21. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  4. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1894). "Mitford, John (1781-1859)" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 38. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  5. ^ "A Field Guide to the English Clergy' Butler-Gallie, F p61: London, Oneworld Publications, 2018 ISBN 9781786074416
  6. ^ Chris Jones (6 April 2016). Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s. Routledge. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-317-24536-0.
  7. ^ Four Hundred Years of English Education. CUP Archive. 1964. p. 70. GGKEY:E11PWTW43ZY.
  8. ^ Edward Hasted, The lowy of Tunbridge: Tunbridge, in The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 5 (Canterbury, 1798), pp. 196-255. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-kent/vol5/pp196-255 [accessed 2 July 2016].
  9. ^ Theophilus Lindsey; G. M. Ditchfield (2007). The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808): 1789-1808. Boydell Press. p. 110. ISBN 978-1-84383-742-8.
  10. ^ "The 6th Day of Christmas: Vicesimus Knox on the Christian religion and peace on earth (1793) - Online Library of Liberty". Retrieved 2 July 2016.
  11. ^ Desiderius Erasmus (1813). The complaint of peace; to which is added, Antipolemus; or, the plea of reason, religion, and humanity, against war. Transl. 1st Amer. ed. p. xxvi.
  12. ^ Vicesimus Knox (1779). Essays Moral and Literary. E. & C. Dilly. p. 185.
  13. ^ Jonathan Sachs (4 February 2010). Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832. OUP USA. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-19-537612-8.
  14. ^ Clara Tuite (28 February 2002). Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon. Cambridge University Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-521-80859-0.
  15. ^ Alan B. Howes (9 September 2002). Laurence Sterne: The Critical Heritage. Routledge. p. 251. ISBN 978-1-134-78292-5.
  16. ^ Lynn Festa (28 September 2006). Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. JHU Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-8018-8430-6.
  17. ^ Tobias Menely (6 April 2015). The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. University of Chicago Press. p. 197. ISBN 978-0-226-23939-2.
  18. ^ James Chandler (19 July 2012). The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature. Cambridge University Press. p. 275. ISBN 978-1-107-62919-6.
  19. ^ a b Lee, Sidney, ed. (1892). "Knox, Vicesimus" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 31. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  20. ^ Percival Stockdale (1809). The Memoirs of the Life, and Writings of Percival Stockdale: Containing Many Interesting Anecdotes of the Illustrious Men with Whom He was Connected. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. p. 229.
  21. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1894). "Newlin, Thomas" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 40. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  22. ^ Vicesimus Knox (1796). Sermons, chiefly intended to promote faith, hope and charity. To which is added, A preparatory persuasive to the sacrament of the Lord's supper. p. i.
  23. ^ Peacock, Henry Barry (1792). Free remarks occasioned by the Letters of J. Disney ... to V. Knox. [An answer to the "Letters to the Rev. V. Knox, occasioned by his Reflections on Unitarian Christians," etc.]. p. 1.
  24. ^ J. E. Cookson (21 January 1982). The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England 1793-1815. CUP Archive. pp. 32–. ISBN 9780521239288. GGKEY:YWLZ4DKWF40.
  25. ^ Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud (30 July 2015). Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. Cambridge University Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-1-107-11032-8.
  26. ^ Vicesimus Knox (1804). Christian Philosophy, Or, An Attempt to Display by Internal Testimony, the Evidence and Excellence of Revealed Religion: With an Appendix, on Mr. Paine's Pamphlet, on Prayer, Etc. Emmor Kimber.
  27. ^ Quincey, Thomas De (1862). De Quincey's works. p. 177 note.
  28. ^ Brill's Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond. BRILL. 8 February 2016. p. 398. ISBN 978-90-04-29984-9.
  29. ^ Court Magazine and Monthly Critic. July 1845. p. 364.
  30. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1899). "Tremenheere, Hugh Seymour" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 57. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Further reading

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1892). "Knox, Vicesimus". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 31. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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