Andrew Brice (writer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
by Sabine Baring-Gould
Andrew Brice (1690–1773) was an English printer and writer.
Early career
Brice was the son of Andrew Brice, a shoemaker, was born at Exeter in 1690, and was intended by his friends to be trained as a dissenting minister, but when he was seventeen years old their want of resources forced him to think of another pursuit. He became a printer, apprenticing himself for five years to a tradesman in his native city by the name of Bliss. Long before the term of service expired he married, and as he found himself in a year or two unable to support his family he enlisted, with the object of cancelling his indentures. His friends soon obtained his discharge, and helped him to commence business on his own account in 1714, though with such slender materials that he had but one size of type for all his work, including the printing of a weekly newspaper.
Debts and the leisure to write
About 1722 the debtors in the city and county prisons induced him to lay their grievances before the public, with the result that he found himself entangled in a lawsuit and cast in damages which he could not discharge. For seven years he remained under restraint, and was consequently supplied with sufficient leisure for the composition of an heroic-comic poem in six cantos, entitled Freedom, a poem written in time of recess from the rapacious claws of bailiffs and devouring fangs of gaolers, by Andrew Brice, printer. To which is annexed the author's case, (1730), the profits arising from which were sufficient to secure his release. Soon after he published a collection of stories and poems with the title of Agreeable Gallimaufry, or Matchless Medley. In about 1740 Brice set up a printing business at Truro in addition to that at Exeter, but soon closed it. His disposition was mirthful, and he was a great patron of the stage. In 1745, when the players were being persecuted at Exeter, he published a poem defending their conduct and attacking the Methodists, to which he gave the name of The Play-house Church, or New Actors of Devotion.
Later career and death
His dramatic tastes and his charitable feelings constantly involved him in pecuniary difficulties and obliged him to prosecute his trade until he was the oldest master printer in England. By this time he was left without wife or children, and he parted with his business for a weekly annuity and retired to a country house near Exeter. He died on 7 November 1773, and his body lay in state in an inn at Exeter, every person who came to see it paying a shilling to defray the cost of the funeral. As Brice was the oldest freemason in England, three hundred members of that body escorted his coffin to the grave in Bartholomew churchyard on 14 November. His books were sold in the following year.
