Author: Mudie, Robert
Biography:
MUDIE, Robert (1777-1842: ODNB)
Ancestry records give a baptism date of 11 July 1780, indicating that he was likely born later than 1777, the year usually given. He was the son of a Sidlaw (Dundee) shepherd, John Mudie, and his wife Elizabeth Barry and had limited education before beginning work as a shepherd. He credited his enthusiasm for learning to having been lent some volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica at this time. He briefly worked as a weaver in Dundee before joining the Forfar and Kincardineshire militia. Four years later he had educated himself to a level that enabled him to find employment as a teacher, first at Fortrose, then Inverness, and finally Dundee. He contributed extensively to the Dundee Advertiser (The Maid of Griban was originally written for this periodical) but his satiric attacks on the Dundee council (in one piece he described council members as rats “who gnawed and corroded the charters of the people’s rights”) led to his dismissal from his teaching position in 1815. For a time, he was able to make a living teaching independently and he started two magazines—The Independent (1816) and The Caledonian (1820-21)—but eventually decided to try his luck in London where he began writing for the Morning Chronicle. This was a period of prolific and wide-ranging production for Mudie; among other works, his output included two books of ornithology: The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands and The Natural History of Birds (both 1834). In 1838 he moved to Winchester to write a history of Hampshire at the invitation of a bookseller but the venture failed and he returned to London. In 1840 he began another periodical, The Surveyor, Engineer, and Architect. Mudie had married Frances Wallace Urquhart at St. Margaret's, Westminster, on 25 May 1822 and the 1841 census shows them living in Edwards Terrace, Islington with four daughters and a son. Despite his best efforts, the family suffered financially and he applied to the RLF on 3 Nov. 1841; he was awarded £40. He died on 29 Apr. 1842 and was buried at St. Mary's, Islington, on 7 May. His death left the family destitute and Frances Mudie applied to the RLF on 16 May 1842; she was awarded £50. (ODNB 26 Mar. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 26 Mar. 2020, 21 Aug. 2025; RLF file 1036; Alan L. Strout, “Robert Mudie,” in N&Q 172 [1937], 146-9) SR