Author: Hughes, H.
Biography:
HUGHES, H. (fl 1798)
It appears that H. Hughes published only one book, Retribution, and Other Poems, in London in 1798. The contents are competent but relentlessly pious, urging the reader by means of tales, sonnets, and exhortations, to shun the path of sin and embrace virtue. They reveal the author to have been young at the time—these are explicitly “juvenile” poems—and the son of a minister, to whom he pays tribute in an elegy. Two other poems allude to a sister who died in childbirth along with her baby. No reviews have been found, nor any other reliable information about the author. It is possible that he was Hugh Hughes (1778-1855), who was born and died in Carnarvonshire in Wales, and whose father was a minister, but who was working as a gardener in Liverpool about 1800, where he and two of his brothers joined the Methodists and began careers as preachers. Hugh preached throughout Wales; married and had four children (of whom two died young); translated Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament into Welsh; and wrote an autobiography in Welsh that was edited by his son-in-law Isaac Jenkins and published in 1856 after his death. But none of the reports of his life mentions an early volume of verse and this identification is very tentative. (findmypast.co 30 Dec. 2022; Welsh National Biography online at biography.wales)