Author: Standish, Frank Hall
Biography:
STANDISH, Frank, formerly HALL (1799-1840: ODNB)
The only child of Charlotte (Rey) and Anthony Hall of Flass Hall, Durham, he was born on 2 Oct. 1799 and named after a cousin of his father’s, Frank Standish of Duxbury Hall, Chorley, Lancashire, baronet. After Standish died unmarried in 1812, Frank Hall inherited the Duxbury estate but not the baronetcy; he added the name Standish to his own in Dec. 1814. He was educated at Edinburgh High School and went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge (matric. 1818) but did not proceed to a degree. After travelling on the Continent and publishing the work for which he is best known, The Life of Voltaire (1821), Standish—who never married--settled at Seville in Spain in 1830. His poem The Maid of Jaen (1832), dedicated to the Earl of Fife, is dated from Seville 2 Sept. 1830. Later travel books (in prose) are The Shores of the Mediterranean (1837), Notices on the Northern Capitals of Europe (1838), and Seville and its Vicinity (1840, with a frontispiece portrait). In Spain Standish became an avid collector of books and works of art, especially paintings, most of which he had transported back to Duxbury. In the process he accumulated debts of £60,000. Standish died at Cadiz on 21 Dec. 1840 and was buried at St. Laurence’s, Duxbury, on 22 Jan. 1841. The heir to the estate was a near relation, William Standish Carr of Cocken, Durham, but Standish left all his collections to the King of France, “in token of my esteem for a great and polite nation” (GM). Louis Philippe accepted the bequest. The Louvre published a catalogue of the “collection Standish” in 1842 but most of the books, drawings, and paintings were sold in Paris or in London over the coming years. (ODNB 22 Nov. 2024; findmypast.com 23 Nov. 2024; ACAD; GM ser. 2 15 [1841], 662-3) HJ
Other Names:
- F. H. Standish