Author: Boyd, Hugh Stuart
Biography:
BOYD, Hugh Stuart (1781-1848: ODNB)
A son of Hugh Macaulay Boyd (q.v.) and his wife Frances Morphy, he was born at Edgware, Middlesex, on 23 Mar. 1781 and baptised there at St. Margaret’s church on 26 Apr. 1781. As a boy he studied Greek with a Mr. Spowers in Hampstead (he records his gratitude to Spowers in the preface to his edition of Agamemnon [1823]) before being admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, on 24 July 1799. Boyd left Cambridge without taking a degree. On 16 Sept. 1805 at Dorking, Surrey, he married Ann Wilson Lowry, the daughter of a geologist; they had one child, Ann Henriette, who was born on 5 May 1811. The family lived on Boyd’s revenue from his estates in Ireland. In 1811 he suffered from an eye infection which eventually caused his total blindness. In 1825 the family moved to Great Malvern. Boyd became a close friend of Elizabeth Barrett (q.v.); he tutored her in Greek and, in his will, left her two books and his “quarter clock.” Ann Boyd died on 28 Oct. 1834. Boyd was living at Hawley Place, High Street, Kentish Town, when he died of a stroke on 10 May 1848; he was buried in Highgate cemetery. His will left his manuscripts and letters from literary figures including Barrett to Mary Ann Smith, a daughter of the Wesleyan Methodist preacher Adam Clarke. Boyd’s other works include Select Passages of the Writings of St Chrysostom (1806) and The Fathers Not Papists (1834). (ODNB 21 June 2023; ancestry.co.uk 21 June 2023; Worcester Herald 1 Nov. 1834; ACAD)