Richard Kyle Fox achieved considerable financial success as a magazine publisher but has been ignored in journalistic histories, especially by those historians who are inclined to put a good face on periodical publishing's history. Fox is seldom included in historical accounts of American magazines due to the base level of reading taste to which his National Police Gazette appealed. Writers of history too often forget that not all readers have had the luxury of educations calculated to attract them to a more dignified, intellectual class of reading matter.

Richard Fox was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1846 to carpenter and mason James Fox and his wife Mary, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. While a boy of twelve, Fox was employed by the Banner of Ulster, a Presbyterian paper with which he remained for four years. For an additional twelve years he worked for the leading Irish newspaper, the...