This was first published as No 6 in the Bridgwater Booklets series, by Thomas Bruce Dilks in 1937. The original letters are with the Chubb MSS in the archive of the Somerset and Dorset Heritage Centre, Taunton.
John Chubb does not appear in the Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, by lord John Russell, 4 vol, 1853-7, and it is not known if any letters from Chubb to Fox survive.
WITHIN these pages will be found a number of letters addressed by Charles James Fox, and one by S. T. Coleridge, to John Chubb of Bridgwater, to whose facile pencil we owe the portraits of his contemporaries which are here reproduced. To his descendant, Mr. J. B. Chubb, I wish here to record my gratitude for his most kind permission to publish these. Sir W. Gurney Benham I also wish to thank for his ready help in tracing Thornton’s subsequent political career, at Colchester. I have presupposed somewhat the reader’s acquaintance with Mrs. Sandford’s Tom Poole and his Friends. The reference to Hazlitt and the excerpt from De Quincey are probably well known.
The Memoirs and Correspondence of C. J. Fox are the source of many of my facts; I am indebted to Mr. David Ogg’s England in the reign of Charles II for the note on the recordership in English boroughs, and to Mr. H. B. Irving’s Judge Jeffreys for the facts of Rosewell’s trial. The Annual Register is a quarry of information. The Bridgwater petition against the slave trade is recorded in Conplant’s Wilberforce.
T. B. D [T. Bruce Dilkes]