Image Not Available
for Henry Sampson Woodfall
Henry Sampson Woodfall
active London, 1739 - 1805
LC Heading: Woodfall, H. S. (Henry Sampson), 1739-1805
Biography:
Woodfall, Henry Sampson (1739–1805), printer and newspaper editor, was born in London at the Rose and Crown inn in Little Britain on 21 June 1739, the eldest son of Henry Woodfall (1713–1769), printer, and his wife, Mary Sampson. Woodfall came from a famous eighteenth-century printing family. His grandfather, Henry Woodfall (c.1686–1747), had been apprenticed to the printer John Darby (d. 1730) of Bartholomew Close in 1701. In later life he ‘carried on a considerable business and reputation’ (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.300). Henry Sampson Woodfall's father was printer of the Public Advertiser in Paternoster Row, and master of the Stationers' Company in 1766, while at his death in 1769 he was a common councilman of many years' standing. Henry Sampson Woodfall's uncle, George, was a bookseller, based in Charing Cross, and his brother was William Woodfall (bap. 1745, d. 1803), printer of the Morning Chronicle and famous for his parliamentary reporting.
According to one account, Henry Sampson Woodfall was taught Greek by his grandfather Henry Woodfall. By the age of five he was so good at reading Homer that Alexander Pope gave him half a crown as a reward for his skill. Woodfall was sent to school at Twickenham and made such progress in classics that when he moved to St Paul's School in 1751, at the age of eleven, he was qualified to join the seventh form. However, his juvenile looks were supposed to have condemned him to the fifth form instead. Upon leaving school in 1754 he was apprenticed to his father, who by 1758 had entrusted him with printing and editing the Public Advertiser.
Henry Sampson Woodfall was a freeman in the Stationers' Company from 1760, and operated from printing premises at the corner of Ivy Lane and Paternoster Row from 1761 until his retirement in 1793. Upon his father's death in 1769, he appears to have inherited shares in the paper. In the following year he was also listed as a partner in the London Packet. By this time he was married (his wife's name was Elizabeth) and they already had at least one child, George Woodfall (1767–1844), their son. Like his father and grandfather, George became a master printer and was master of the Stationers' Company in 1833–4 and 1841. At some point Henry Sampson Woodfall had another son, Henry, and a daughter, Elisabeth.
Woodfall, Henry Sampson (1739–1805),” Hannah Barker in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/29913 (accessed December 18, 2015).
The Public Advertiser was a successful paper under Woodfall's command. Contemporary accounts claimed that the paper sold between 3000 and 4500 copies a day in 1779 (D'Archenholz, 42). Surviving accounts for the paper between 1766 and 1771 suggest more modest sales: from as low as 1500 in 1766, to about 3800 in 1770 and 1771, when the publication of letters by the anonymous political commentator Junius considerably boosted sales. In 1770 Woodfall was tried for libel, along with others, for publishing Junius's ‘Letter to the king’. The result of the trial on 13 June 1770 was a verdict of ‘printing and publishing only’, which was tantamount to an acquittal. The continued publication of Junius's letters in the Public Advertiser supposedly made Woodfall a good deal of money, not just from increased sales of his newspaper, but also from the publication of editions of the letters. However, Woodfall may have seen his association with Junius as a mixed blessing. John Taylor recorded that when, at a dinner party in Woodfall's later years, it was suggested that Junius was dead, Woodfall replied: ‘I hope and trust he is not dead, as I think he would have left me a legacy; for, though I derived much honour from his preference, I suffered much by the freedom of his pen’ (Taylor, 2.253).
Woodfall's relationship with the anonymous author of these letters became the source of much conjecture during his lifetime, since some believed he knew the author's identity, a charge which Woodfall always denied. Surviving letters to Woodfall reveal that he was trusted with the identity of many of the other anonymous authors in his paper. Correspondents included the earl of Sandwich, Horace Walpole, Lord George Gordon, John Horne Tooke, and John Wilkes. He was also said to be on good terms with Garrick, Colman, Smollett, Goldsmith, and ‘other wits of the day’ (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.302). Despite his involvement with Junius, Woodfall liked to dissociate himself from the more scurrilous sections of the newspaper press. His paper was politically moderate, and published articles espousing a wide variety of views. In 1776 he described the outspoken and rival editor, the Revd Henry Bate, as ‘beneath every thing but contempt’ (BL, Add. MS 36593, fol. 128). According to Nichols, Woodfall was immune to the sort of corruption which editors such as Bate engaged in. ‘With regard to the line of conduct he had adopted respecting his paper,’ Nichols argued, ‘in a pecuniary point of view, it was always most scrupulously honourable and correct; and, though frequently offered money to suppress certain articles of intelligence, not pleasant to the particular individual, yet never could he be prevailed upon to forgo what he deemed to be his duty to the publick’ (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.301). Taylor described him as a man of ‘firmness, public spirit, and inflexible integrity’ (Taylor, 2.252).
In 1772 Woodfall was supposed to have refused an offer to succeed his father to the common council, saying that his duty was ‘to record great actions, not to perform them’ (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.301). But his claim not to want such promotion was probably disingenuous. In 1786 he confided to Wilkes that he wished to obtain the position of clerk ‘of any public office’ (BL, Add. MS 30873, fol. 29). Perhaps one of the reasons he failed to achieve his aim was that Woodfall was the subject of several prosecutions, all connected to his involvement in the Public Advertiser. In addition to the prosecution over Junius's writing, he appeared before the House of Commons for a libel on the speaker on 14 February 1774. Two days later Fox moved for him to be indicted for a libel on the constitution, and he was convicted and sentenced to three months' imprisonment in July. An action for libel by the earl of Chatham in 1776 failed owing to a legal technicality, and in 1779 Woodfall was prosecuted at the court of the king's bench for printing and publishing a handbill supporting Admiral Keppel. He was fined and sentenced to twelve months in Newgate. Despite his confinement, he appears not to have suffered too greatly, and detailed accounts for the food and wine he consumed during his time in prison still survive. In 1784 he was tried for a libel on Edmund Burke, who claimed damages of £5000 but was awarded only £100. In later years Woodfall was reported to have boasted ‘that he had been fined by the House of Lords; confined by the court of the king's bench, and indicted at the Old Bailey’ (Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.301).
Woodfall disposed of his interest in the Public Advertiser in November 1793, and retired from business in the following month when his offices burnt down. The newspaper lasted only two more years after he ceased to run it. His involvement with the print trade did not entirely cease, as he was master of the Stationers' Company in 1797. From his retirement until his death he lived in Chelsea, London, where he died on 12 December 1805. He was buried in the churchyard there, although his tombstone was subsequently moved to make room for the Philip Miller obelisk. In his will Woodfall left his estate to his children. It included ‘all sum or sums of money in the Government funds or India Companys funds and all my furniture plate silver china and all the rest and residue of my personal estate’.
Hannah Barker
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Southwater, England, 1675 - 1736, London
