Richard Phillips

Sir Richard Phillips (13 December 1767 – 2 April 1840) was an English schoolteacher, author, publisher and vegetarianism activist. Life Phillips was born in London. Following some political difficulties in Leicester where he was a schoolteacher and bookseller (being imprisoned in 1792 for selling Thomas Paine's Rights of Man), he returned to London, established premises in Paternoster Row, St. Paul's Churchyard, and founded The Monthly Magazine in 1796; its editor was Dr. John Aikin, and among its early contributors were fellow radicals William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. He built up a prominent fortune based on the speculative commission of newly revised textbooks and their publication, in a competitive market that had been freed by the House of Lords' decision in 1777 to strike down the perpetual copyright asserted by a small group of London booksellers to standard introductory works. His Juvenile Library published in 1800–03 provided the steady returns of all successful children's books. By 1807 he was in sufficient standing to serve as a Sheriff of London, at which time he was knighted on the occasion of presenting an address. Another of the contributors to Phillips' Monthly Magazine was the Scottish novelist John Galt. Angela Esterhammer has suggested that the character Masano, an irascible Italian printer in Galt's Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore (1820), is based on Phillips. Phillips overextended himself and was declared bankrupt in the Bank Panic. He died in Brighton and is buried in the western extension of St Nicholas' Churchyard. He was a vegetarian.