George Fowler
- formal_name:
- first_date: 1810
- last_date: 1813
- function: Publisher
- locales: Fairfax County
- precis: Publisher of two fictional allegories (1810 & 1813) distributed from Alexandria.
- notes: Publisher
Fairfax County
Publisher of two fictional allegories (1810 & 1813) distributed from Alexandria.
Fowler is a difficult person to trace given a relatively common name; Virginia at the start of the nineteenth century evinces several men with that name. The most likely candidate is the George Fowler who lived on Pohick Creek in Fairfax County, today within the bounds of Fort Belvoir, based on a single reference to the publisher's residence in Fairfax County. That Fowler died sometime after 1832, following a series of attempts in the decade before that to pay off his debts by the sale of tracts of his "estate" along the creek.
The works themselves are commentaries on Fowler's contemporaries and their doctrinaire beliefs. The Wandering Philanthropist (1810) was constructed as a series of letters from a Chinese traveler in the United States who dissected the supposedly advanced, disinterested views of Americans and found them self-serving. A Flight to the Moon (1813) was a utopian dream tale, describing a lunar society that did not have the problems seen in early Republic America. Both works were printed by uncredited presses outside Virginia, but seem to have been distributed from the Alexandria bookstore of Robert Gray (190).
Personal Data
Died:
After
1832
Fairfax County, Virginia.
No further information yet discovered.
Sources: Imprints; notices in Alexandria Gazette, 1810-32.
- Related Bios:
This version of the Index of Virginia Printing was a gift from the estate of the site's creator, David Rawson. The
content contained herein will not be updated, as it is part of the Library of Virginia's personal papers collection.
For more information, please see David Rawson Index of
Virginia Printing website. Accession 53067. Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond,
Virginia.
