"Journal editor and compiler of reference works, was born in London and baptized at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 25 October 1763, the son of Giles Jones [see under Jones, Griffith], author, and Ellen Jane Maria Fewtrell. His uncle was Griffith Jones, whose daughter Christian Jones later became Jones's first wife. He entered St Paul's School, London, in April 1775, and was afterwards apprenticed to a sculptor, but having left ‘on account of some difference’ (GM, 90–91) he moved closer to family tradition by becoming apprenticed to a printer in Fetter Lane. He was subsequently employed as a press corrector by Strahan, and afterwards as a reader by Thomas Wright of Peterborough Court. On the death of the latter in March 1797 Jones became editor of the Whitehall Evening Post. This was not a commercial success and he moved to the General Evening Post, of which he was joint proprietor, but this enterprise was similarly ill-fated and eventually merged with Charles Baldwin's St James's Chronicle. From 1807 Jones edited the European Magazine, and from 1797 to 1814 he produced The Spirit of the Public Journals, an annual compilation."
Publications:
updated edition of Biographica dramatica, or, A Companion to the Playhouse.
A New Biographical Dictionary (1794, 8 edns).
Sheridan Improved.
Also, editions of poems of Thomas Gray, memoir of David Garrick, history of Poland.
(Source: ODNB, 17/02/2015)