Mary Hughes: Scholarly Sources

Other Sources for Information on Mary Hughes

Mary Hughes in the LibraryThing website at

http://www.librarything.com/author/hughesmary/names

The identity of the Unitarian Mary Hughes (1756-1824) is not known to the website, and only one work by Mary Hughes Robson appears as well. 

Mary Hughes in the Hockliffe Project

Mary Hughes Robson appears in this database in “Stories before 1850,” with “Aunt Mary’s Tales”  No mention of Mary Hughes, the Unitarian writer. See http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0141.html

The site has this biographical notice on Mary Hughes Robson:

Mary Robson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and married Thomas Hughes of Dundee in 1817. The following year they emigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia where they established a school for young women. Mrs. Robson had started writing for children before her marriage, and Aunt Mary's Tales, as well as several other titles, dates from this period. These works had been published in the United States and their fame assured the success of her school. After running the school for twenty-one years Thomas and Mary Hughes turned to farming in Doylestown, Buck County, in 1839. Hughes continued to write while in America, producing, amongst much else, a Life of William Penn in 1822 and The Rebellious Schoolgirl in 1821, 0142 in the Hockliffe Collection. (Hale 1857  and Boase 1892-1921:1575).

Here is the notice on the work of the Hockliffe Project (see http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/index.html):

The Hockliffe Project has been designed to promote the study of early British children's literature. It provides internet access to the Hockliffe Collection of Early Children's Books, located in Bedford in the UK. This website database contains a catalogue of the Collection along with digital images of many of the books, plus bibliographical information and critical and contextualising essays. The Project's aim is to facilitate a re-evaluation of children's literature in its own infancy, and to let these rich and varied books speak for themselves. You enter the database using the link 'Enter this Database' on the left.

The Hockliffe Collection is a unique cache of over a thousand British children's books dating predominantly from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were originally collected by Frederic Hockliffe (1833-1914), a Bedford publisher and bookseller. In 1927 his eldest son, Frederic Rich Hockliffe (1861-1929), bookseller and mayor of Bedford, donated the collection to Bedford Training College. This later became Bedford College of Higher Education, then part of De Montfort University and is currently owned by the University of Bedfordshire. The Collection itself is housed in the Polhill Library of the University of Bedfordshire.

The books in the Hockliffe Collection range in date from 1685 to the mid-twentieth century, although the majority were published between 1760 and 1840. The collection is not comprehensive, but it is representative of the wide range of writing for children in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are fables, nursery tales and stories, and there are books of instruction and religious works. There are periodicals and books of poetry, and there are alphabets, spelling books and battledores. There are chapbooks and ballads, mathematical, geographical, historical and scientific books, and toy-books, game-books, and books with moveable parts. The books vary enormously in size and shape as well as in the quality of paper and printing. Bindings, generally original, are very diverse too. Most of the books contain illustrations of some sort, often hand-coloured. Above all, perhaps, the Hockliffe Collection is interesting because it has been used. Many of the books are marked in some way, with indications of ownership or comments scrawled in margins. There is wear on some of the books which testifies to heavy use. Equally interesting is that some books appear to have been either little used or treated with great care. The project ran between 1999 and 2002, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. It was undertaken by a team of academics from the English Department and Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University. The website was created by Matthew Grenby. In 2012, the original site was reconfigured, repairing various problems and providing many new sets of images.

Typical conflating Confusion of Mary Hughes the Unitarian with Mary Hughes Robson the Quaker:

From F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), p. 172.

A more prolific writer, long popular, though not always identified with her works, because they were often anonymous, was Mary Robson, afterwards Hughes (or Hughs; both spellings appear). Only by a comparison of a number of title-pages and advertisements is it possible to ascribe certainty to her many well-read books of 1815 to 1825. The Ornaments Discovered (1810), The Alchemist (1818), The Orphan Girl (1819), Aunt Mary’s Tales (5th ed. 1819) are a few of them. She dedicated some to Miss Edgeworth, whose moral pattern she followed with some fidelity, but with very scant humour. I believe that so far as my own ancestors’s books go, she compiled them by request, certainly with success. She wrote several juvenile pamphlets for the Christian Tract Society (founded in 1809) and in 1813 was made a life member of that undenominational body. Her works—like Mrs Barbauld’s—appear in its lists and in those of several Unitarian associations. In 1818, a year after her marriage, she emigrated to the States with her husband, and, finding that the popularity of her books had preceded her, “commenced a school for young ladies” at Philadelphia, which she conducted with wide repute till her retirement in 1839. A brief record of her life, written in the best Victorian style of florid complacency, appeared in Sarah Josepha Hale’s Woman’s Record (1855).”  She describes her in the next paragraph as “either non-committal or Unitarian” (172). [Hale is correct in her biographical notice of Mary Hughes Robson, not confusing the other Mary Hughes with any of the titles mentioned in her notice, p. 846.]

Other sources:

• Daniel Hahn, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), and the entry for “Hughes (Robson), Mary (fl. 1820).”   Also largely correct. 

• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (2006) also has a short statement on Robson, which also is correct.

• Bartleby.com has a long list of children’s books, but no mention of Mary Hughes the Unitarian, only Mary Hughes Robson.