Author: Hughes, John
Biography:
HUGHES, John (1790-1857: ODNB)
The only child of Thomas Hughes DD (q.v.), canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and his wife Mary Anne Watts of Uffington, Berkshire, he was born in London on 2 Jan. 1790 and educated at Westminster School and Oriel College, Oxford (matric. 1808, BA 1812, MA 1815). He won the Latin poetry prize in 1811 for a poem on Pompeii but the first printing of his English poem on this subject was in 1821, when it seems that it was printed but not separately published; it was however included in the lavish 1827 Illustrations of Pompeii by T. L. Donaldson. He lived in Berkshire, first at Kingston Lisle (now in Oxfordshire) and then at Uffington. His first marriage was brief, the wedding possibly not in Berkshire but in London or elsewhere. His wife’s first name was Elizabeth (maiden name not known), but she died in Feb. 1819 shortly after the birth of their daughter Henrietta Maria, who was baptised on 23 Jan. and buried on 3 Aug. 1819 at St. Mary, Uffington, with her mother. It may have been shortly after these two deaths that Hughes made the tour in the south of France of which he published an account, with his own etchings, in 1822, as An Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone. On 14 Dec. 1820 he married Margaret Elizabeth Wilkinson, with whom he had seven children. He continued writing, with contributions to periodicals, an edition of the historical Boscobel Tracts (1830), and Lays of Past Days (1850). In 1833, after the death of his father, Hughes moved with his family to Donnington Priory, Berks. He died at 7 The Boltons, West Brompton, London, on 13 Dec. 1857. (ODNB 31 Dec. 2022; findmypast.com 31 Dec. 2022; Alumni Oxonienses; Boase [1892] 1 col. 1573; GM Feb. 1858, 225)