Dunton, JOHN

Dunton, JOHN, bookseller, was born in 1659. Refusing to make the fourth in a direct line of clergymen, he was apprenticed to a London bookseller at fourteen, and managed to complete his time, and to acquire much varied knowledge, in spite of love, politics, and the thousand distractions incidental to a mind of such exceptional flightiness as his. He took a shop, married happily, made some lucky ventures, but was foolish enough to become security for the debts of some of his relatives, and had in consequence to fight a hard battle with financial troubles. He paid a visit to America, afterwards to Holland and Cologne, settled somehow with his creditors, and kept shop for ten years with fair prosperity, his Athenian Gazette being for a while especially successful. In 1692 he succeeded to a cousin's property, and became a freeman of the Stationers' Company. He married a second time unhappily, and under the real and imaginary troubles of his later years, his mind seems to have crossed the line between crack-brained flightiness and sheer lunacy. His extraordinary book, Life and Errors of John Dunton, appeared in 1705. Thereafter he wrote numerous papers and pamphlets, and died in 1733.