Author: Salt, Henry
Biography:
SALT, Henry (1780-1827: ODNB)
Salt was born on 14 June 1780 at Lichfield, Stafford, the eighth and youngest child of physician Thomas Salt (1737-1817) and his wife Alice Butt (1742-1801). He was educated at grammar schools at Lichfield and Market Bosworth, Leicester. Initially interested in portrait painting, he trained in London in 1797 under Joseph Farington and in 1800 under John Hoppner. His interest in antiquities was seeded in 1802 when he went to India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) as Viscount Valentia’s secretary and draughtsman. In 1805, he visited Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and, in 1806, Egypt. Valentia’s Voyages and Travels to India (Bulmer, 1809) contains several of Salt’s drawings. In 1814, he published a description of his 1809 diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, A Voyage to Abyssinia (Rivington). In 1815, the British government appointed him consul general in Egypt. His employment of Belzoni and d’Athanasi as excavators of Egyptian antiquities, and his publication of Phonetic System of Hieroglyphics (Longman, 1825), mark him as a pioneer of Egyptology. In his 1824 poem, Egypt, he filters history and geography through Western eyes. By his sale of Egyptian antiquities to the British Museum, to Sir John Soane, and to the king of France, Salt obtained a modest fortune. At Alexandria on 29 Oct. 1819, he married the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Tuscan merchant named Pensa (her first name is unrecorded). He wrote Egypt, he stated, to divert his attention “whilst suffering under a severe affliction,” that is, the 15 Apr. 1824 death of his wife, following childbirth. In the final verse of the poem, he laments the loss of his young wife: “thine image lingers round my heart, / Still weeping for thy loss.” Salt sent their surviving daughter, Georgina Henrietta Annesley (b 1821), to Tuscany with her maternal grandmother to be cared for by her uncle Pietro Santoni. He died 30 Oct. 1827 at Desuke, near Alexandria. In his will, he granted a legacy to his “purported son,” Henry (b 1818), whose mother may have been a woman named Mahbubeh. A friend and relative of his, John James Halls, edited his unfinished Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce (1831) and Life and Correspondence (1834). (NLS John Murray Archive; ODNB 28 Mar. 2023; Bath Chronicle 15 July 1824; Astene Bulletin 43 [2010], 23-24; Deborah Manley, Peta Rée, Henry Salt [2001]) JC