On Wednesday morning, October 20, 1784, a tragedy was played out in London at 17 Coleman Street, the residence and business office of William Hodgson, a prominent warehouseman (wholesale merchant) who also dabbled in financial matters. Hodgson had lived at this address for several years and was a long-standing communicant at the restored St. Stephen’s Church only a short distance down the street. According to printed accounts of the calamity, a business colleague had come to the home that morning for a breakfast appointment. Hodgson’s wife Mary and some of their children were then at the family’s country house at Chigwell, about thirteen miles outside London. A servant greeted the guest and requested he wait in the parlor; but as the visitor tarried in the receiving room, he heard a pistol blast from an adjoining room. Both the caller and the servant ran immediately to the chamber where they found the bloodied, lifeless body of Hodgson who had shot himself in the head.

Suicides were not uncommon in London that year, and several merchants were numbered among those who took their own lives. But Hodgson’s sudden and horrifying demise represented more than a disastrous statistic; it also terminated the career of a neglected and unrecognized Briton who had significantly assisted America in its struggle for independence. Hodgson had demonstrated a strong affinity for the patriot cause when he labored zealously with Benjamin Franklin and others for the relief of hundreds of Americans imprisoned in England. He had also endeavored to stimulate British trade with the new United States even before its independence was recognized. Yet for all of his noteworthy efforts, this London merchant failed to receive adequate and deserved recognition, and one can speculate that it was due in part to this rebuff from abroad that William Hodgson ended his life so impulsively.

Who then was this little-known and unsung merchant? He was not the William Hodgson (1745–1851) cited in the Dictionary of National Biography, though both men had family roots in the north of England. Their progenitors had arrived in Britain in the tenth century after crossing the North Sea from Scandinavia, and the name Hodgson emerged afterward in Cumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, and Yorkshire.