Author: Mulligan, Hugh
Biography:
MULLIGAN, Hugh (1746?-1802: findmypast.co.uk)
He was born in Ireland but no details of his early life are known. At his death in 1802, his age was given as 55, but the marriage licence of 1767 declares he was of full age, so a birth date 1746 is more likely. As a young man of 21 (or more) he married Sarah Grainger at St. Peter, Liverpool, shortly after 14 Nov. 1767. They went on to have at least six children, few of whom, if any, survived infancy. He was initially a painter of pottery and engraver at James Pennington’s china works at Brownlow Hill near the New Bowling-Green Inn owned by the father of William Roscoe (q.v.). Mulligan became a life-long friend of Roscoe’s and was regarded as “a kind of mentor to my youthful years” (Life 1: 10). He later became an engraver and bookseller in Whitechapel (Liverpool) and is listed in various directories. In the late 1780s he was on good terms with the blind abolitionist poet Edward Rushton (q.v.), another member of Roscoe’s radical circle, who later wrote an elegy on his death: "On the Death of Hugh Mulligan," Poems (1806) 28-30. His only published volume, Poems, Chiefly on Slavery and Oppression, is unusual in its expansive attack on all forms of oppression in a series of Eclogues on American and Transatlantic Slavery, British corruption in India, and the subordination of Ireland. Two of the eclogues first appeared in the GM (December 1793, March 1784; the last with the initials H.M., Liverpool). His decision to collect his poems and publish was most probably influenced by Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues (1787) of the year before. He died, aged 55, on 9 Dec. 1802, at Toxteth. His final years were marked by poverty but he was assisted by William Roscoe and others. The portrait of him by Julius Caesar Ibbetson, formerly in the possession of the Roscoe family, is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. (findmypast.co.uk 20 Jan. 2021; Gore’s Directory1790; Liverpool Directory 1796; Sun [London] 30 Dec. 1802; John McCreery, The Press, a Poem [1828], 66-70; Henry Roscoe, The Life of William Roscoe [1833]) AA