Author: Belfour, Hugo John
Biography:
BELFOUR, Hugo John (1802-27: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 3 Aug. 1802 and baptised on 14 Sept. at St. Mary’s, Marylebone, London, the eldest of six children of Edward Belfour (1775-1855) of the Navy Office, Somerset House, and his wife Catherine Mary Greenwell (1783-1828), who had married at St. George’s, jHanover Square, on 23 May 1801. (His uncle, Rev. Okey Belfour [1777-1818] married his mother’s sister, Mary Ann Greenwell.) Details of his education are unknown but at nineteen he wrote (under the name St. John Dorset) The Vampire: A Tragedy in Five Acts(1821) in an Egyptian setting, followed by Montezuma, A Tragedy in Five Acts: and other Poems (1822). A further play Loveless, written in the same period, remains untraced. In 1852 his friend, Rev. Thomas Dyer, corrected the belief that the plays were joint productions with George Stephens (1801-1851) and pointed out that only the poems at the end of Montezuma were by both authors and that he had a marked-up copy identifying their individual contributions. Belfour was ordained priest in May 1826 and appointed to a curacy in Jamaica where he died in Sept. 1827. He had married Mary Smale on 16 Nov. 1825, at West Teignmouth, Devon. She remarried in 1828. (ancestry.co.uk 14 Aug. 2022; ODNB 14 Aug. 2022; CCEd 14 Aug. 2022; GM May 1801, 479, Dec. 1827, 570, Oct. 1828, 380, Dec. 1851, 661, Jan. 1852, 2; Bristol Mercury 24 June 1828) AA