Robert Mudie

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For those of a similar name, see Robert Moodie (disambiguation).

Robert Mudie (1777–1842) was a newspaper editor and author.

Life

He was born in

weaver, and his wife Elizabeth (née Bany). After attending the village school he worked as a weaver until he was drafted into the militia. Largely self-educated, from his boyhood he was an avid reader, studied mainly on the Encyclopædia Britannica. He taught himself Latin by beginning in the middle of Virgil
, reading to the end, using a dictionary.

At the end of his four years of militia service he became master of a village school in the south of

R.S. Rintoul, editor of the radical Dundee Advertiser and later of The Spectator. In politics he was ‘an ardent reformer’. He had about this time some acquaintance with Thomas Chalmers, then in St Andrews
. Mudie's speeches, attacking corruption on the council, led to the loss of his post as teacher of arithmetic (his drawing post was beyond the council's control). He tried, unsuccessfully, to start a mercantile and mathematical academy and launched two short-lived periodicals, The Independent (April–September 1816) and The Caledonian (June–October 1821).

On the failure of these, in the autumn of 1821 he sold his life appointment as teacher in drawing and moved to

George IV's visit to Edinburgh, which he also described in a volume, Modern Athens (1824). He was subsequently editor of The Sunday Times
and wrote largely in the periodicals of the day.

About 1838, Mudie moved to

British Cyclopaedia (1834), the text to Gilbert's Modern Atlas of the Earth (1840), and a topographical account of Selborne prefixed to Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (new edn, 1850). Mudie died at Pentonville on 29 April 1842, leaving destitute the widow of his second marriage, Frances Wallace Urquhart, second daughter of Captain John Urquhart, a sea captain of the East India Company
with four daughters and one son.

He wrote and compiled altogether about 90 volumes according to the Cyclopædia of English Literature (1844),[1] including Babylon the Great – A Picture of Men and Things in London; Modern Athens, a sketch of Edinburgh society; The British Naturalist; The Feathered Tribes of Great Britain; A Popular Guide to the Observation of Nature; two series of four volumes each, entitled The Heavens, the Earth, the Sea, and the Air; and Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter; Man: Physical, Moral, Social, and Intellectual; Man, as a Moral and Accountable Being; The World Described; The Picture of Australia. He also wrote a novel, Glenfergus (1820), considered by Andrew Murray Scott to bear comparison with the gentle social satires of his Ayrshire contemporary, John Galt.[2] He furnished the letter-press to Gilbert's Modern Atlas, the "Natural History" to the British Cyclopaedia, and numerous other contributions to periodical works. He was editor of the Caledonian Quarterly Magazine, as well as its illustrator and chief contributor. He hand-carved the woodcuts used to illustrate the Caledonian Quarterly.

The standard author abbreviation Mudie is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[3]

References

  • Robert Mudie and Dickens: A possible source for Oliver Twist, by Eva-Charlotta Mebius (2019) The Dickensian 115 (508), 128-142.
  • Cyclopaedia of English Literature, by Robert Chambers, p. 700 (1884).
  • Scottish Notes and Queries - Page 257, by Martim de Albuquerque - 1861
  • July 1822 edition of The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany at page 140.
  • Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1822, page 768
  • The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India ... - Page 629 - 1822
  • "Of Modern English Literary Men", The United States Democratic Review, Cornell University, April 1, 1839.
  • Mudie, Robert (May 1844). "Reminiscences of Modern English Literary Men". The United States Democratic Review. Vol. 14. Cornell University. pp. 492–500.
  • Goodwin, Gordon (1894). "Mudie, Robert" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 39. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  1. ^ a b Chambers, Robert, ed. (1844). Cyclopædia of English Literature: A History, Critical and Biographical, of British Authors, from the Earliest to the Present Time, Volume 2. Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers. p. 700.
  2. ^ Scott, Andrew Murray (2003), Dundee's Literary, Lives, Volume 1: Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century, Abertay Historical Society, pp. 52-53
  3. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Mudie.
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