Background
Thomas Fleet was born on September 8, 1685, in Shropshire, England.
Thomas Fleet was born on September 8, 1685, in Shropshire, England.
As a youth Fleet took an active part in opposing the high-church party, which eventually brought such rage upon him that he hid himself and took the earliest chance of leaving England for America.
Soon after his arrival at Boston, "about the year 1712, " he set up a printing-house in Pudding Lane, now Devonshire Street. He had learned the printing art at Bristol.
Fleet was a good printer and did much work for the booksellers. T. Crump, another printer, was associated with him, 1715 - 1717.
From 1729 to 1731, Fleet was a printer to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
In 1731 he left Pudding Lane for a house in Cornhill, which he purchased in 1744. It was spacious, served as both his residence and printing-house, and contained a convenient shop. It bore the trade-sign of "Heart and Crown. " In a front chamber he conducted evening auctions of books, household goods, and other merchandise.
On September 27, 1731, J. Draper had printed the first number of the Weekly Rehearsal, a half sheet periodical edited by Jeremiah Gridley, a young lawyer. It was made up largely of moral, political, and commercial essays. On August 21, 1732, Fleet took over the printing and by April 2, 1733, was its sole owner. It appeared regularly as a weekly morning news-sheet, but was discontinued with number 202 on August 11, 1735.
Fleet next began (August 18), an evening paper, numbering it 203, with the Boston Evening Post, as title, but changed the serial numbering to "2" with the next issue. This paper copied the London press and included Fleet’s "own humorous paragraphs. " It engaged but little in either political or religious controversy; none the less, for a paragraph in the issue of March 8, 1741, Fleet was threatened with prosecution by the government. After his death, it was continued as a morning weekly by his sons, until crushed by the war, on April 24, 1775.
He owned several negroes, some of whom worked in the printing shop. One ingenious slave worked the press, set type, and cut woodblocks for illustrating small books and broadsides. Fleet is credited (by Evans) with more than 250 publications, besides his newspapers, between 1713 and 1758.
Fleet printed many works of the Mathers, and tracts relating to the George Whitefield controversy. The Soveraignty and Goodness of God being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1720), John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive (1720), Samuel Penhallow’s The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians (1726), The New England Primer Enlarged (1737 - 1738), A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger (1738), Joseph Addison’s Cato (1750), and Michael Wiggles worth’s The Day of Doom (1751), are a few titles which attest the importance of his imprimatur.
In the third decade of the nineteenth century, the claim was made that the collection of Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes was derived from Fleet’s mother-in-law and was first printed by him in 1719. No such publication by him has ever been found. That collection is an English adaptation by Robert Samber from the French tales of Perrault, which in English first saw the light in London about 1750 (Athenceum, January 21, 1905). Thomas Fleet died on July 21, 1758, at Boston, Massachusetts, after a long illness.
An Anglican, Thomas Fleet was highly critical of the Great Awakening; indeed, his candor led many clergy to label his newspaper heretical. Fleet's antagonism toward the Great Awakening evangelists led to increased criticism of his newspaper, forcing him to retreat from his stridency toward a more neutral posture in
all areas.
On June 8, 1715, Thomas Fleet married Elizabeth Goose, by whom he had three sons and two daughters.