Chaplain at the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital, then one of the most important charitable institutions in England. The Foundling Hospital was the first public charity in England, established in 1739 by a Royal Charter granted by King George II and Queen Caroline. The buildings were erected on purchased by Thomas Coram, the ship captain who sponsored its establishment. Early benefactors were the painter William Hogarth and the composer George Friedrich Handel, who played at the opening and conducted his Messiah every year thereafter. Well known artists contributed paintings, and the Foundling Hospital became the first picture gallery in the country. Church services at the chapel with famous preachers, famous musicians, a professional choir and organist attracted large crowds of the most well connected people in London throughout the century. Charles Dickens who lived nearby attended regularly with a reserved pew. The buildings were torn down in 1926 to make way for a fish market, which was never built. In 1865 Lewis Mercier suddenly found it necessary to borrow £250 secured by a bond from Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh (Warwickshire), the wealthiest landowner in England, at the rate of 12% per annum. (Lord Leigh had appointed him Provincial Grand Chaplain to the Freemasons, Warwickshire in 1852.) By 1870, in ill health and unable to repay his debt when it came due, he was forced to seek extra funds by offering to perform translating tasks for the publishers Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, who were in the process of printing a religious book of his. In 1871, Sampson Low acquired the English rights to several of Jules Verne's books. For this project the firm assigned the translating duties to Mercier and chose Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas as the first volume to appear, which it did in November 1872. As a translator of Verne's newly popular fiction, Mercier offered one advantage to Sampson Low: speed. A linguist of sorts, conversant with older French dialects, possibly fluent in multiple languages, he worked in his spare time with his assistant Eleanor Elizabeth King (1838 — ??) to translate three Verne novels in little over a year, enabling Sampson Low to come out with new Verne books for the Christmas trade in 1872 and 1873. Unfortunately Mercier's shaky grasp of contemporary French idioms and limited knowledge of his era's science and technology led him into many foolish translating errors. He has also