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A Victorian publisher

by
12 July 2013

July 11th, 1913.

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. . .

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