“Town-born” in Boston, in a narrow house on Sea Street facing the harbor, he was seventh of the ten sons of Mary Campbell and William Knox, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. When his father, a shipmaster, disappeared in the West Indies, nine-year-old Henry went to work to help support his mother, and was thus, like Nathanael Greene, almost entirely self-educated. He became a bookseller, eventually opening his own London Book Store on Cornhill Street, offering a “large and very elegant assortment” of the latest books and magazines from London. In the notices he placed in the Boston Gazette, the name
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Coincidence that Knox and Greene both were self-inspired to be self-taught and fell in love with books?
