ABSTRACT
Francis was ten years of age when Taylor moved from Shoe Lane into the post-Great Fire seventeenth-century red-brick house in Red Lion Court where the firm was to remain established for over a century. One of the many courts and alley-ways leading north out of Fleet Street, Red Lion Court was probably named after a tavern which is mentioned as early as 1592. By the eighteenth century the Court had become closely connected with printing and publishing. Although Francis had become a qualified chemist, his first love was entomology. His first appearance in print had been a signed review of the Herpetologica Mexicana, which appeared in the Philosophical Magazine in 1836 when he was nineteen. Like most chemists in the 1840s-one thinks of Liebig, Hofmann, Frankland, Warington and Crookes-Francis became fascinated by the new art and science of photography and made space for it in the Chemical Gazette.
