Author: Huish, Robert
Biography:
HUISH, Robert (1776-1850: findmypast.com)
Robert Huish was the son of a prominent manufacturer in Nottingham, Notts., Mark Huish (1756-1807), and his wife Margaret Stuart (1756-1822); the family were Presbyterian non-conformists. He was born on 25 Sept. 1776 and baptised on 12 Nov. at the High Pavement Chapel. Details of his education are not clear but he studied and travelled as a young man on the Continent, learning French and German and visiting Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. After his return to England he married Maria Petty Greening (1788-1857) on 13 Aug. 1805 at St. George the Martyr, Southwark, London; they went on to have five children. His first independent publications were a translation of Klopstock’s (q.v.) Solomon(1809) and his own tragic poem The Peruvians (1813), the latter reviewed with enthusiasm by CR. His most valuable work later on arose from his interest in bee-keeping, a subject for which, starting in 1815, he published several books, invented a Huish Hive, and founded a short-lived “Apiairian Society” in London. (Almost all the subscribers defaulted on their dues.) Huish became a publisher’s hack, specialising in royal biography (Princess Charlotte, George III, Queen Caroline, and William IV), political biography (Henry Hunt, Cobbett, O’Connell), and the lives of explorers. He also wrote some fiction: The Brothers (1820), Fatherless Rosa (1822), Edwin and Henry (1825), etc. ODNB is surprisingly silent on his literary output and unaware of the financial distresses that beset him from 1818 onward. His RLF file reveals that he and his family received a total of £105 between 1818 and 1850. His first application was made from the King’s Bench prison, where he was being held for debt. He was still there a year later. His letters are full of complaints about his publishers, who by his account made a fortune from his memoirs of Princess Charlotte but gave him only a salary of £3 a week. In 1841 an application was denied because he had been caught cutting extracts from newspapers in the British Museum, but later awards were allowed. He died at home in Camberwell late in April or early in May 1850. (findmypast.com 26 Dec. 2024; ancestry.com 26 Dec. 2024; ODNB 26 Dec. 2024; CR 6 [1814], 66-71; RLF # 392; SJC 16 May 1850; EN2)