Author: Horne, Moffatt James
Biography:
HORNE, Moffatt James (1796-1874: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 6 Mar. 1796 at Bow, London, one of at least seven children of Moffatt Horne, a glass manufacturer, and his wife Catherine Mary Bradford, who had married 13 Oct. 1794, at St. Dunstan’s Stepney, East London. His father went bankrupt twice. For reasons unknown, Catherine Horne baptised Moffatt James again on 9 Aug. 1810 at St. Mary’s, Stratford Bow. By 1812 he had gone to sea and was licensed as a mariner with the EIC. He married Louisa Marianne Dussure (1794-1860) on 13 Oct. 1818 at Calcutta. They remarried in England albeit with her name recorded somewhat differently--Louisa Maria Virginia Dussure—on 4 Jan. 1830 at St. Dunstan’s, Stepney. They had at least one child. He returned to England in 1821 and was Extra Clerk in the Examiner’s Office of the EIC (1822-34). His semi-autobiographical novel, The Adventures of Naufragus (1827), was praised by Emma Roberts (q.v.) who first identified him as the author in her essay “Indigo Planters” in the Asiatic Journal(1836). She found no “truer picture of the romance of real life” and the financial malfeasances and sexual machinations of indigo-planters (Asiatic Journal 114n, 115). He is not known to have published further after the work listed here and nothing is known of his life in the late 1830s. He is next recorded in the 1841 census in Guernsey, living as man and wife with a sixteen-year-old Irish girl, Catherine. In 1851 they were in Crayford near Dartford, Kent, living on his EIC pension. At some point they moved to Manchester and in 1871 were living with her brother’s family. Since Horne’s first wife, Louisa Maria(nne) died in Putney in 1860, no record of a second marriage is likely to exist and we will probably never know what exactly went on. He died on 23 Jan. 1874, aged 77, at Manchester and was buried at St. Luke’s, Cheetham. (ancestry.co.uk 30 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 30 Nov. 2022; Emma Roberts, “Indigo Planters,”Asiatic Journal Jan.-Apr. 1836, 105-115; William Griggs, Relics of the Honourable East India Company [1909], xii; Hour 29 Jan. 1874; EN2 645) AA
Other Names:
- Horne
- M. J. Horne