A History of Booksellers, the Old and the New

by Henry Curwen

In England, to return there, John Rivington was still successfully fostering his father’s business. A quiet and sedate man, with nothing of James’ rashness and venture about him, he is described by West as being stout and well formed, particularly neat in his person, of dignified and gentlemanly address, going with gold-headed cane and nosegay twice a day to service at St. Paul’s—as befitted the great religious publisher of the day, and living generally upon the most friendly terms with the members of the Episcopal Bench, and breakfasting every alternate Monday with Bishop Seeker at Lambeth. A kind master, too, for coming back on the 30th of January, from service, and finding his sons and clerks plodding at the desk—“Tous, sous, how is this?—I always put my shutters up on this day.”

In May, 1743, he married a sister of Sir Francis Gosling, Alderman, afterwards Lord Mayor, and as she brought him a fortune and fifteen children, the match may probably be considered a prosperous one.

Orthodox in his views, and true in business to the professions he held out privately, Wesley and Whitfield had to go elsewhere for a publisher, although there must have been plenty of temptation to incline the trade to patronise Methodism, for Coote, in a comedy of his, published in 1757, makes a bookseller say:—“I don’t deal in the sermon way now; I lost money by the last I printed, for all ’twas by a Methodist.” But John Rivington would have none of them, and in 1752 we find him publishing “The Mischiefs of Enthusiasm and Bigotry: an Assize Sermon by the Rev. R. Hurd;” and about 1760 he was appointed publisher to the venerable “Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge”—an office that remained in the family for upwards of seventy years. Dissent in itself was injurious enough to his interests, but when Wilberforce and Hannah More succeeded in making a portion of the Church “Evangelical,” upwards of half his customers deserted to a rival shop in Piccadilly.

Some time before this he had admitted his sons, Francis and Charles, into partnership, and he was then appointed manager in general of the works published by his clique;—that is, of standard editions of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and other British classics, and of such religious works as were produced in an expensive and bulky form; and of these works, two especially, Dr. Dodd’s “Commentary,” and Cruden’s “Concordance” stand out so prominently that some slight account of their authors may not be unacceptable.

William Dodd was a man of great learning, and a very popular preacher in the metropolis, and in 1776, when he was appointed chaplain to the King, took his degree of LL.D. Ambitious and fond of display he found himself in debt, and determined to make a bold effort to secure the Rectory of St. George’s, Hanover Square. To her great surprise the wife of Lord Chancellor Apsley received an anonymous letter offering her £3000 if she would procure Dr. Dodd’s presentation to the parish. This insulting proposal was traced to Dodd, and the King ordered that he should be deprived of his chaplaincy. This disgrace, of course, involved him still further, and to extricate himself from these difficulties he was tempted to forge the name of his pupil, Lord Chesterfield, to a bond for £4200. On the discovery of the forgery, Mr. Manley, a solicitor, called upon the doctor with the bill, leaving it on the table in a room where a fire was burning, when he went out for the obvious purpose of refreshment. Dr. Dodd appears to have been too honest to destroy the fatal document, and he was afterwards tried and condemned for forgery, and, spite of all the strenuous efforts of his friends, was executed on 27th of June, 1777.

Alexander Cruden, one of the most useful men who have ever followed the painstaking and praiseworthy profession of index-making, was born in Aberdeen in 1701. An unfortunate passion, which was treated by its unworthy object with great contumely, weakened his senses, and on the discovery that the girl he worshipped was pregnant by her own brother, he went for a short time entirely out of his mind. On his recovery, he was sent to London in the hopes that the difficulty of obtaining position and livelihood might act tonically. At one of the first houses at which he called, the door was opened by the wretched girl herself, and poor Cruden rushed off wildly and vacantly into the streets. For many years he was a bookseller, doubly entitled, therefore, to a notice here, and upon the counter of his shop, under the Royal Exchange, his famous and laborious “Concordance” was compiled. Queen Caroline, to whom it was dedicated, unluckily died before publication, and the downfall of the expectations he had formed from her patronage was too much for the author, and his friends were compelled to place him in a lunatic asylum. Having made his escape, he brought an action against his relatives for false imprisonment—offering his sister the choice of Newgate, Reading and Aylesbury jails, and the prison at Windsor Castle. He was never insane in the eyes of his employers, and as a corrector of the press, especially in the finer editions of the classics, his services were invaluable. Henceforth he adopted the name of “Alexander the Corrector,” as expressive of his character of censor general to the public morals. Armed with a large sponge, his favourite and incessant weapon, he perambulated the town, wiping out all obnoxious signs, more especially “Number 45,” then rendered famous by Wilkes. Giving out, too, that he had a commission from above to preach a general reformation of manners, he made the attempt first among the gownsmen at Oxford, and then among the prisoners at Newgate; but in neither case did he meet with much encouragement. He asked for knighthood from the King, and a vacant ward from his fellow-citizens; and on refusal said that he possessed the hearts if not the hands of his friends. He was found dead on his knees, apparently in a posture of prayer, at his lodgings in Islington on November 1st, 1770.

Samuel Richardson appears to have entertained grateful remembrance of the commission to write the “Familiar Letters to and from several Persons upon Business and other Subjects,” for on his death he left a mourning ring to James Rivington.

During Dodsley’s illness, Rivington and his sons managed the Annual Register, and when on his death it was sold to Orridge and others, they started an annual of their own, which lasted till 1812, and then till 1820 was in abeyance, resumed again till 1823, and in the following year the two were merged into one, and after being published for a few years by the Baldwins, its management returned again to their own hands. Through the Register they were brought into connection with Burke, and were subsequently publishers of his more important works.

At all times the Rivingtons took a very great interest in the Stationers’ Company; this was especially the case with James, who served as master, and at the same time he, his two brothers, and his four sons were all members of the livery. He held many public appointments, was in commission of the peace, a governor of most of the Royal hospitals, and a director of the “Amicable Society,” and of the Union Fire Office.

He died, universally regretted, on the 16th of February, 1792, in his seventy-second year, and was followed by his widow in the succeeding October.