English newspaper proprietor and philanthropist, born at Blackwater, Cornwall, in 1823, the son of a carpenter, and was mainly self-educated. In 1844 he became London representative in Manchester of the Sentinel, an anti–Corn Law weekly newspaper. A year later he went to London and began lecturing, together with the practice of journalism, starting several small periodicals which in succession failed, until in 1862 he bought the Building News, which by 1866 had made a handsome profit. In 1876 he bought the London halfpenny evening newspaper, the Echo, and controlled it for twenty years. He was an ardent peace advocate, and supported a number of humanitarian and philanthropic objects, endowing various libraries and other institutions which bore his name, notably the settlement in Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury, now called, in memory of Mrs. Humphry Ward, the Mary Ward Settlement. He also founded a Passmore Edwards scholarship at Oxford for the conjoint study of English and classical literature. He published privately an autobiography, A Few Footprints (2nd ed., 1906). He died in London on the 22nd of April 1911.
See E. Harcourt Burrage, J. Passmore Edwards (1902).
