James Stanley SJ the Jesuit Printer of Roehampton

Ted Simonds is in the first year of a LAHP/AHRC funded collaborative doctoral award investigating the history of the book collections at the British Jesuit Archives.

My research looks to reconstruct the nineteenth-century founding collection of books in the library of the Jesuits in Britain. A large part of my research involves looking at provenance evidence in books. What the books are about is also of interest in reconstructing the intellectual flavour of the collection, just as a book’s place and year of publication can gesture towards where the Jesuits sourced their books, and what networks of acquisition they were part of.

This blog post takes a closer look at Jesuit printing in Britain in the nineteenth century through looking at one of the bookplates found in the library at the British Jesuit Archives at 114 Mount Street, and the printing circumstances of two core Jesuit publications: Letters and Notices and the Provincial Calendars.

The library at and around Mount Street has used many different bookplates over the course of its life in its various locations. A common bookplate is this one, as found affixed to the front pastedown of a manuscript library catalogue from the 1890s:

The bookplate comprises the address “114 Mount Street”, and the device most commonly associated with the Society of Jesus: the “IHS” above three nails, with a cross emerging from between the vertical bars of the letter “H”. The device is within an oval frame formed of a band of dots, and beyond this, radiant beams of alternating wavy and straight pointed beams. The bookplate is framed by a double-lined border. This bookplate is often pasted on top of other bookplates (as you can see here, the impressions of other labels underneath) which raises the question of when it came to being, and subsequently: where did it come from?

It was when looking through Letters and Notices, that I noticed the printer’s device on the title page looked like the device on the bookplate. The elements described above are common in Jesuit emblems, but the similarity between the two devices can be seen in this side-by-side comparison (below) where the left-hand image is from the bookplate, and the right-hand image from Letters and Notices title page.

The more you look, the more that similarities and subtle differences emerge. The more you look at Jesuit (and other Catholic) publications from the nineteenth century, the more common this specific device appears.

Letters and Notices is a printed circular periodical publication written, distributed and (importantly) printed by the Jesuits in Britain. The very first issue, which happens to feature the exact device pictured above carries the imprint (statement of publication): “Roehampton printed for private circulation only. 1863”. A parallel history of Letters and Notices could here trace the conditions that brought about the need for this publication, but I want to look at the practicalities around printing Letters and Notices to find out who printed it, where, and if they have any connection to the device used in the bookplate for the library at 114 Mount Street.

The Jesuits have been involved in printing in Britain from the very first mission in 1580, when Robert Persons SJ and his associates printed Edmund Campion SJ’s Decem Rationes on a secret press at Stonor Park in 1580-1. But most Jesuit publications over the centuries, even those in English and intended for distribution within England were printed on mainland Europe. This changed in the nineteenth century, and the device described above emerges from (even if enigmatically) the birth of modern Jesuit printing in Britain.

The nineteenth century was a major century for the Jesuits, and all Catholics in Britain. The Jesuits were reformulated in 1801 after having been suppressed (formally by the Holy See) in 1773. This reformulation allowed for the Jesuits to regroup and the return to Britain, a process which had started in the late eighteenth century with the evacuation of the English College at Liege, but that was solidified by the appointment of Marmaduke Stone as the first Provincial of the reformed Society in May 1803. If this moment marked a move away from an “exile” on the continent for British Jesuits, we can see a similar movement in Jesuit printing activities for the British Province over a similar, if not longer period.

One way to think about the printing practices of the British Province is to look at the documents they were having printed for them. A good (and chronologically regular) publication to track is the annual Provincial Catalogues. Jesuit Province Catalogues are yearly lists of the members of the Society within a Province; they list who is where, and what are they doing. You can read more about the Catalogues in this Blog post from 2025. And you can access digitised versions of Province Catalogues from across the Society of Jesus through the ARSI (Archivum Romanorum Societatis Iesu) website here.

If we track the British Province Catalogues across the nineteenth century, we see that they reflect technological developments in printing, as well as the movement we saw above: from continental Europe to Britain. In the earliest available nineteenth century, the Provincial Catalogues were handwritten. Lithographed catalogues appear, printed in Rome, in 1840, with this technology being used in Rome until 1853. A change happens in 1854 when the Catalogue is printed (still in Rome) with movable type. Printing the British Catalogue then moves to Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Paris) for three years, from 1855 to 1857, and is then recorded as printed in Paris from 1858 to 1860. The 1861 Catalogue of the British Province was printed “Ex typ. Dom Prob. Angliae”, i.e. from the press of the Domus probationis, which we know to be the (then) newly opened house of novices of the British Jesuits in Roehampton, near London. The change in location may seem like a technicality (or at worst an irrelevance), but it hints at a growing sophistication and structuring of the Jesuit presence in Britain.

The title page of the 1861 Catalogue doesn’t name a printer, and the contents of the Catalogue itself also doesn’t name any Jesuit as a “typographer”, “printer” or equivalent.[1] Fortunately, the Catalogues do list the roles of Jesuits, and it is in the 1862 Catalogue –also printed in the “Dom. Prob. Angliae”– that we see one person in the Province listed as living and working at the house of the novitiate (the place where newly enlisted Jesuits are first trained) in Roehampton who is also a printer: the coadjutor “Jacobus [i.e. James] Stanley, Bidel. F.F. coad., Typogr”. The Latin suffixes tell us that James Stanley was a porter to the Jesuit Brothers (in Latin, a “bidellus” to the “fratres coadjutores”) and a printer, or “typographer”.

So it is to James Stanley of Roehampton that we can look to as the printer of the first British Province Catalogue to be printed in Britain. Knowing this, the early 1860s, Roehampton, and specifically the figure of James Stanley emerge as important to Jesuit (and wider Catholic) printing in Britain.

James Stanley was born in London in 1835, not far from the Catholic church of Saint James, Spanish Place (in Marylebone) where he was baptised. But it was while under the direction of Fr Gallwey at Farm Street that Stanley decided to enter the Society of Jesus. But before entering the Novitiate at Beaumont in 1859, Stanley had a successful career as a printer. He was apprenticed as a lithographic and copper-plate engraver to Mr Robbins of Rathbone place, and later to the eminent early lithography studio Day and Son on Holborn. Stanley won awards for his (lithographic) printing abilities, and maintained relationships with the London print trade even after joining the Society. And while he trained as a lithographic and copperplate engraver, it’s while a Jesuit that he turned his hand to printing with type.

The sophistication of the printing enterprise established by James Stanley at Manresa House (the name of the “Domus probationis”) in Roehampton is detailed in the internal Jesuit publication, Letters and Notices. In volume 23 (1895) there is a special double bill in honour of James Stanley on the event of his death. An obituary on pages 506-512 is followed by a history of the Manresa Press (pages 513-526). In the period immediately before Stanley, the status of Jesuit printing in Britain was amateur but nonetheless active. They write:

“The printing press in use at the beginning, long before Brother Stanley arrived at Beaumont, was a marvel of simplicity and uselessness, adapted to bother one in every possible way, and never intended, I think, for any more important work than placards and handbills!” (LL. & NN. XXIII, p.514)

This apparatus was brought down to Beaumont from Hodder Place (part of Stonyhurst) when the seat of the novitiate moved. Interestingly, James Stanley entered the Society as a Novice at Beaumont in 1859 (LL. & NN. XXIII, p.513-514). In 1861, Beaumont became a boarding school and the novitiate moved to the new premises of Manresa House in Roehampton, taking with it James Stanley and presumably the printing apparatus he used.

There are three folded printed plans included in the first issue of Letters and Notices (whose title page carries the device described at the start of this post), one of which shows the function of the rooms, and includes a “printing room”. So, James Stanley was the printer of Letters and Notices, from its first issue in 1863 right up until his death in 1895. And we can trace the woodcut device from the title page of Letters and Notices and the Mount Street book-plate to his studio, if not definitely his hand. The illustrated plan, signed “lith. Dom. Prob.” indicates that the (lithographed) illustrations were also produced onsite, almost certainly by James Stanley himself.

The “Manresa Press”, with James Stanley at the helm, went on to become a (if not the) significant printing operation for the Jesuits in Britain. In the early days, printing Letters and Notices took six weeks alone, on top of which more work of complicated variety took longer. Eventually the printing operation outgrew the single room in Manresa House, and the press was moved to St Joseph’s Cottage, on the grounds of Manresa House, and imprints reflect this move to “the St Joseph’s Press”. If the image of the cottage conjures a bucolic scene, by 1893 the operation fully mechanised and well-staffed, comprising:

“twelve journey-men compositors and three apprentices, besides five men employed in the machine rooms, and two lay-brothers.”

As well as printing under the banner of the “Manresa Press”, Brother Stanley and his operation also printed for London based Catholic (and non-Catholic) publishing houses: Longmans, Burns & Oates, the Catholic Truth Society, and Henry S. King. Interestingly (again) Austin Oates (of Burns & Oates fame) worked for a spell at the Manresa Press. Many titles printed by the Manresa Press can be found on the shelves of the British Jesuit Archives, but many more titles printed by James Stanley are doubtless still to be discovered. Modern cataloguing standards have not routinely described printer’s statements found in books from the nineteenth century that are not on the title page. The small printer’s statement: “Roehampton printed by James Stanley” is often on the verso (the back) of the title page or printed at the end of the text. Closer attention to these notes will doubtless provide a richer picture of what James Stanley and the Jesuits in Britain were printing not only for themselves, but for a public of Catholic readers.

Important titles of British Jesuit and Catholic history were printed either by Stanley or at the Manresa Press under his stewardship. Periodicals including The Month, Catholic Progress, and Letters and Notices and the bibliographically ambitious and complex Records of the English Province by Henry Foley to name a few. Beyond these large and complex items, Stanley’s Manresa Press printed for Jesuit communities on the ground: textbooks for Jesuit schools, manuals for Jesuit novices, prayer cards, sodality manuals, and certificates. It isn’t farfetched then, to suggest that the bookplate of the library at 114 Mount Street, the Jesuit residence in London, was printed by the Manresa Press. And if the bookplate wasn’t printed by the press (woodblocks being small, portable, and transmissible items) the presence of this specific printing block tells us something (even if vaguely) about the origins of this piece of provenance evidence.

Coda

After writing this post, a specimen book of printing types used at Manresa (printed in Roehampton in 1866) came to light. Page 13 contains a type called “Brevier San Serif No.4” which bears a similarity to the typeface used for the words “114 Mount Street W.” This is the only non-decorative sans serif font in the Manresa Press specimen book.

[1] As the Catalogues are written “ineunte”, or at the start of the year, it’s better thought of as describing the year preceding, i.e. 1860.