McGill Libraries
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Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Gossip, William, 1809-1889
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1809-1889
History
William Gossip was born in 1809 in Plymouth, England.
He was a publisher, bookseller, and journalist. In the early 1820s, he moved with his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he received his education. In 1831, he moved to Pictou where he published and edited the Pictou Observer. In 1834, he discontinued the Observer, returned to Halifax, and established stationery, bookselling, and publishing business there. With his brother-in-law John Charles Coade as a partner, he began a new weekly, the Times, the most influential of the Conservative newspapers in Nova Scotia. In 1847, they started another more partisan weekly, the Standard and Conservative Advocate. Between 1848 and 1858, Gossip published the Anglican Church Times and continued with his stationery and bookselling business. He was a member of the Nova Scotian Institute of Natural Science and served as the first editor of the institute’s annual Proceedings and Transactions (1863-1889). He published several papers on the anthropology and geology of Nova Scotia.
In 1832, he married Anne Catherine Coade. He died on April 5, 1889, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.