IN THE death of Mr Francis Hansard Rivington which occurred . .
. on Wednesday, July 2, there passes from sight one of the great
laymen of the English Catholic Revival.
Born in 1834 in Waterloo-place, he saw Queen Victoria's
Coronation procession from his nursery window, and fifty years
later, standing in the same window, he saw the procession of the
Queen's Jubilee.
His father, the head of the great publishing house which had
begun its operations in the seventeenth century in the nave of St
Paul's Cathedral, moved his family to Highgate during Francis
Rivington's childhood, and here the boy received what education was
considered necessary before his early and severe apprenticeship to
business. It was a Spartan upbring-ing. The son of the wealthy
publisher shared all the tasks and many of the hardships of his
father's humblest subordinates. The firm had published the "Tracts
for the Times", and young Rivington was brought early into contact
with Tractarian theology and the Tractarian controversy. He was
seventeen at the time of the Gorham Judgment and the subsequent
secessions to Rome. . .
He was ever abreast of the developments of modern thought, and
it was something of a disappointment at the time to the publisher
of Newman and Goulburn that he was not also the publisher of
Lux Mundi. The well-known "Treasury of Devotion" might be
quoted as an example of the many valuable books which owed their
existence to Mr Rivington's intimate knowledge of men's real needs.
. .