Hanway

Hanway, JONAS, an eccentric English traveller and philanthropist, born at Portsmouth in 1712. Apprenticed at seventeen to a Lisbon merchant, he afterwards traded at St Petersburg, and in the September of 1743 left that city on an adventurous journey through Russia and Persia, returning in the July of 1750. He published an account of his travels in 1753, and spent the rest of his life mostly in London as one of the commissioners for victualling the navy from 1762 to 1783. He was an unwearying friend to chimney-sweeps, parish infants, and unfortunates, and advocated with earnestness solitary confinement for prisoners, and a milder system of punishment generally. Further, he deserves grateful remembrance for having written down the giving of vails, and as the first Englishman to carry an umbrella at home in spite of the interested insolence of the hackney-coachmen. His attack on tea-drinking was less successful, but here he had the honour to be opposed by Dr Johnson, who for once replied to an attack by answering Hanway's angry answer to his review of his Essay on Tea. Elsewhere Johnson said that 'Jonas acquired some reputation by travelling abroad, but lost it all by travelling at home.' He died September 5, 1786. See Pugh's Remarkable Occurrences in the Life of Jonas Hanway (1787).