Christopher Crayon's Recollections: The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himselfRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
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Christopher Crayon's Recollections: The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing), 1820-1898
When I first became familiar with the Dissenting world of London the most
bustling man in it was the Rev. Dr. John Campbell, who preached in what
was then a most melancholy pile of buildings known as the Tottenham Court
Road Chapel, the pulpit of which had been at one time occupied by the
celebrated George Whitfield. In or about 1831 Dr. Campbell became the
minister, and at the same time found leisure to write in _The Patriot_
newspaper; to fight and beat the trustees of the Tottenham Court Road,
who had allowed the affairs of the chapel to get into a most disorderly
state; to make speeches at public meetings; to write in a monthly that
has long ceased to exist—_The Eclectic Review_—a review to which I had
occasionally the honour of contributing when it was edited by Dr.
Price;—and to publish a good many books which had a fair sale in his day.
Dr. Campbell had also much to do with the abolition of the Bible printing
monopoly—a movement originated by Dr. Adam Thomson, of Coldstream,
powerfully supported by one of my earliest friends, Mr. John Childs, a
spirited and successful printer at Bungay, whose one-volume editions of
standard authors, such as Bacon’s works, Milton’s, and Gibbon’s “Decline
and Pall of the Roman Empire,” are still to be seen on the shelves of
second-hand booksellers. The Queen’s Printer affected to believe that
the Bible could not be supplied to the public with equal efficiency or
cheapness on any other system than that which gave him the monopoly of
printing, but as it was proved before a Committee of the House of Commons
that the Book could be printed at much less cost and in every way equal
to the copies then in existence, the monopoly was destroyed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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