Author: Dunbar, Robert Nugent
Biography:
DUNBAR, Robert Nugent (1798-1866: ODNB)
He was born on 31 May 1798 and baptised on 13 June at Alphington, near Exeter, Devon, the son of Captain Robert Skerrett Nugent Dunbar and Catherine Lister, who had married at Lichfield, Staffordshire, on 8 June 1797. The Nugent, Skerrett, and Dunbar families had intermarried and held various estates and properties in Antigua since the early eighteenth century. He inherited an entailed estate in Scotland at Machermore Castle from his father in 1846, but spent many years in the Antilles and West Indies. Apart from family property interests, he also worked as a land surveyor at St. Vincent from 1844 at a salary of £250 p.a. He married Annette Ellen Singleton Atcheson (1834-1930) on 9 July 1856 at Teigh, Rutland, with the ceremony performed by her father, Rev. Anthony Singleton Atcheson. They had five children. They lived at 59 Brompton Square, Kensington, London. He died of Asiatic cholera on 25 July 1866 at the Hôtel du Louvre in Paris, leaving an estate of under £5000 with instructions that his surviving son’s trustees should provide an income for his widow (and her three daughters) according to the terms of their marriage settlement. They failed to do so and in 1872 she successfully sued the estate for back income and interest. She died at Machermore Castle on 21 May 1930. Of his works listed here, The Lament of Britannia (1817) is one of many mournful outpourings on the death of Princess Charlotte, but his accounts of his life and experiences in the Antilles are of more value. Only one is listed here--The Cruise; Or A Prospect of the West Indian Archipelago: A Tropical Sketch, with Notes Historical and Illustrative (1835), written in Spenserian stanzas--but his later volumes are also worth re-reading: The Caraguin. A Tale of the Antilles(1837), Indian Hours: Or, Passion and Poetry of the Tropics (1839), Beauties of Tropical Scenery; Lyrical Sketches, and Love-Songs (1862). (ODNB 20 Feb. 2023; DNB; ancestry.co.uk 20 Feb. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 20 Feb. 2023; Scotland’s People 20 Feb. 2023; Globe 25 Mar. 1844; MH 12 July 1856, 6 Aug. 1866; GM Sept. 1866, 424; Scotsman 9 Dec. 1872, 24 May 1930) AA