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Author: Rivers, David

Biography:

RIVERS, David (1767-1848: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 6 Nov. 1767 and baptised on 3 Dec. at Aldermanbury, London, the son of David Rivers, a clockmaker and dissenting minister, and his wife Mary Jones. He was educated at a Dissenting Academy and in 1796 became the dissenting minister at Highgate. Irascible and impulsive, like many Anti-Jacobins, he was hostile to dissenters’ radicalism and around 1798 resigned. He married Frances Gentleman (1774-1831) on 22 Nov. 1799 at Cley next the Sea, Norfolk, and they had two children. Thereafter he led a very precarious existence, plagued with ill health, poverty, arrest for debt, and bereavement. The full range of his literary and editorial activities may never be known but he seems to have begun by embracing Anti-Jacobin pamphleteering, starting with the hitherto unattributed Cursory Remarks on Paine’s Rights of Man (1792). His Literary Memoirs of Living Authors (1798) is the most important late-eighteenth-century source for biographical details of writers and was only superseded by Watkins in 1816. His Poems (1800) does not seem to have survived but was probably only a reprinting of his "Lord Mayor’s Day" (1797) with a few other poems. His newspaper and journal contributions were many but remain unknown. As "Philalethes" he was almost certainly the author of a critique of Godwin’s Memoirs (1798) in GM (Mar. 1798, 187-8). He made several applications to the RLF 1802-45, receiving various small amounts of three and five guineas. In 1802 his library was seized; from 1807 until her death in 1831 his wife was an invalid; his daughter caught typhus in 1824. Often living in one small room in a poor part of south London, he could be forgiven moments of melodramatic self-pity: “Few men scarcely excepting even Chatterton & Dermody have experienced more of the miseries of human life . . . ” (RLF 1/118, 7 Dec. 1819). He died at 5 Prince’s Row, Walworth, on 15 Feb. 1848. (ancestry.co.uk 17 Feb. 2021; RLF, 1/118; E. L. de Montluzon, The Anti-Jacobins 1798-1800 [1988] 141-2) AA

 

Books written (1):