Thomas Fisher (antiquary)

Thomas Fisher (1772–1836) was an English antiquary.

Fisher was born in Rochester, Kent in or about 1781, the younger of the two sons of Thomas Fisher, printer, bookseller, and alderman of Rochester.

In 1786 Fisher entered the India House as an extra clerk; in April 1816 he was appointed searcher of records. He retired on a pension in June 1834, after having spent in different offices under the company altogether forty-six years. He died unmarried on 20 July 1836, in his sixty-fifth year, at his lodgings in Church Street, Stoke Newington, and was buried on the 26th in Bunhill Fields. From the time of his coming to London he had resided at Gloucester Terrace, Hoxton, in the parish of Shoreditch.

Before he left Rochester Fisher's work as a draughtsman attracted the attention of Isaac Taylor the engraver. He was also eminent as an antiquary. Fisher was in 1821 elected F.S.A. of Perth, and on 5 May 1836 F.S.A. of London, an honour from which he had been hitherto debarred, as a dissenter.

His collections of topographical drawings and prints, portraits and miscellaneous prints, books, and manuscripts, were sold by Evans on 30 May 1837 and two following days.

Some plates in the Custumale Roffense, published by John Thorpe in 1788, are from drawings by Fisher; while the same work states that he had helped Samuel Denne, one of the promoters of the undertaking, in examining the architecture and monuments of Rochester Cathedral.

His first literary effort, a description of the Crown Inn at Rochester and its cellars, was printed with a view and plan in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, under the pseudonym of 'Antiquitatis Conservator'. He had previously contributed drawings for one or two plates. In 1795 Denne communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a letter on the subject of watermarks in paper, enclosing drawings by Fisher of sixty-four specimens, together with copies of several autographs and documents discovered by him in a room over the town hall at Rochester. By Fisher's care the records were afterwards placed in proper custody. His next publications were "An Engraving of a fragment of Jasper found near Hillah, bearing part of an inscription in the cuneiform character" (1802), and "An Inscription [in cuneiform characters] of the size of the original, copied from a stone lately found among the ruins of ancient Babylon" (1803), In 1806 and 1807 Fisher helped preserve two specimens of Roman mosaic discovered in the city of London, one in front of East India House in Leadenhall Street, and the other, which was presented to the British Museum, in digging foundations for the enlargement of the Bank of England. These he had engraved from drawings made by himself, and he published a description of them in the Gentleman's Magazine.

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