Monday, June 03, 2013

Fuller Biography on Royal Institution of Great Britain Website

A member of a prominent family of Sussex iron masters with an extensive sugar estate in Jamaica, he attended Eton College between 1767 and 1774. In 1777 he inherited the entire family fortune and thereafter split his time between Rose-Hill, his Sussex house, and London. As a wealthy unmarried man, he was able to indulge his many interests including politics and building a number of follies in Sussex. He was Tory MP for Southampton between 1780 and 1784 and spent an enormous sum to be elected MP for Sussex in 1801. He held the seat until 1812 and pursued a colourful parliamentary career, even by the standards of the time. In 1810, after swearing in a committee, he reportedly called the Speaker ‘the little insignificant fellow in the wig' for which he spent two nights in Parliament's prison. He was a prominent patron of both art (commissioning J.M.W. Turner) and science. For the latter he supported the Royal Institution to which he made considerable loans (later written off), established the Fuller Medal and endowed, with £10,000, the Fullerian Professorships of Chemistry and of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy. Source: Royal Institution

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