Edward Dubois (wit)

Edward Dubois (4 January 1774 – 1850) was an English wit and man of letters.

Dubois, son of William Dubois, a merchant in London, whose father was a native of Neufchâtel, was born at Love Lane, in the city of London. Educated at home, he came to know the classics well as well as having some knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish.

He adopted literature as his profession, and although he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, on 5 May 1809, he did not meet with sufficient success to abandon his pen. He was a regular contributor to various periodicals, and especially to the Morning Chronicle under Perry. Art notices, dramatic criticisms, and verses on the topics of the day were his principal contributions; and to the last day of his life he retained his position of art critic on the staff of The Observer. When the Monthly Mirror was the property of the eccentric Thomas Hill, it was edited by Dubois, and on Hill's death he gained financially as one of the two executors and residuary legatees.

Theodore Hook was among his assistants on the Monthly Mirror, and Richard Harris Barham, when writing Hook's life, obtained "many of the most interesting details" of Hook's early history from Dubois. Dubois assisted Thomas Campbell in editing the first number of Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, but before the second number could be issued differences broke out and they separated. For a few years he was the editor of the Lady's Magazine, and for the same period he conducted the European Magazine.

He is sometimes said to have been "a connection" of Sir Philip Francis, at other times his private secretary, and they were certainly on intimate terms of friendship from 1807 until Francis's death in 1818. If Francis had gone out as governor of Buenos Aires in 1807, Dubois would have accompanied him as private secretary. He compiled Francis's biography in the Monthly Mirror for 1810, and wrote the life of Francis which appeared in the Morning Chronicle for 28 December 1818. When Lord Campbell was composing his Memoir of Lord Loughborough, Dubois obtained for him a long memorandum from Lady Francis on the authorship of the Letters of Junius.

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