Author: HUNT, Robert
Biography:
HUNT, Robert (1807-87: ODNB)
He was born on 6 Sept. 1807 at Devonport (Plymouth Dock), the only child of a ship’s carpenter, Robert Hunt, who died in 1807 before the birth. His mother Honour (Thomas) Hunt sent him to school in Devonport and then moved with him to Penzance, where she had family. At the age of 12 he was apprenticed to a surgeon in London but left his master and worked as a dispensing chemist instead. A modest inheritance enabled him to return to Cornwall in 1829 and to spend ten months collecting oral tales which he published much later in an expanded version as Popular Romances of the West of England (1865), with illustrations by Cruickshank. At the same time he collected subscriptions for The Mount’s Bay (1829). His mother remarried in 1831 and Hunt went into business as a chemist and druggist in Penzance with her brother James Thomas, who in the same year had married into the Davy family that the celebrated chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) came from. On 16 Mar. 1834 Hunt married Harriet Swanson at Madron, Cornwall; they went on to have six children. After the failure of the business partnership, Hunt found his feet as a druggist at Devonport and began contributing articles on technical and scientific topics to professional and general-interest periodicals. He was an early adopter of photography and his Popular Treatise on the subject (1841) was influential. He was professionally active: secretary of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society (1840); first Professor of Mechanical Science at the School of Mines (1851); founder member of the Photographic Society of Great Britain (1853); FRS (1854) and FRSS (Statistical Society, 1855). In 1845 he was appointed Keeper of the Mining Record Office and moved the family to London. Many papers and reports followed, but he also kept up his efforts to popularize science with works such as The Poetry of Science (1848) and Panthea, the Spirit of Nature (1849). His final work after retiring in 1883 was an authoritative survey, British Mining (1887). He died at 26 St. Leonard’s Terrace, London, on 17 Oct. 1887, leaving an estate of just over £1600. His widow lived on until 1896. (ODNB 30 Apr. 2023; findmypast.com 30 Apr. 2023; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis 1: 259-60)