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Author: Hope, John

Biography:

HOPE, John (1739-85: ODNB)

He was born into an aristocratic Scottish family on 7 Apr. 1739 at Dalmeny, West Lothian, and baptised on 8 Apr., the second son of Catherine (Weir) and Charles Hope (later Hope-Vere). His grandfather was Charles Hope, first earl of Hopetoun, and his uncle John the second earl. After early schooling at an academy in Enfield, Middlesex, he spent the period 1752-9 in Holland with relatives in Amsterdam learning about family interests in trade and banking. On 2 June 1762, as reported in the London papers, he married Mary Breton of Forty Hill, Middlesex; the place of the wedding is not specified and there is a later official record of their marriage at St. Clement Dane’s, London, on 3 May 1763, so it is possible that there were two ceremonies. The first of their three sons was born on 29 June 1763. Mary Hope committed suicide in 1767; her husband commemorated her death with a monument and a rhymed epitaph in Westminster Abbey. He sat as MP for Linlithgowshire 1768-70. His first collection of verse was Occasional Attempts at Sentimental Poetry, by a Man in Business (1769). Throughout his life he was a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers, usually anonymously or under such pseudonyms as “The Leveller” and “an Advocate in the Cause of the People,” and the collection of 1780 was divided between prose essays and poetry, including many previously published efforts. He died on 21 May 1785 of a “mortification in his bowels” at Newcastle upon Tyne. There is a portrait of him by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland. (ODNB 9 Nov. 2022 [John Hope and Hope Family]; ancestry.com 9 Nov. 2022; findmypast.com 9 Nov. 2022; London Chronicle 5 Jun. 1762) 

 

Books written (3):

[London]: Roson [Robson?], [1770]
Stockton/ London: printed by R. Christopher/ W. Goldsmith, Richardson and Urquhart, John Donaldson, and T. Durham, 1780