Mary Hughes: Scholarly Sources

Sources for Mary Hughes

Robert Brook Aspland, “Memoir of the late Rev. Robert Aspland,” The Christian Reformer, Or, Unitarian Magazine and Review, New Series 4 (1848), 359, 735-40.  

Includes portions of his father's correspondence pertaining to Mary Hughes, with some of his material taken from Price's obituary below.

Price, M. A., "Mrs. Mary Hughes,"  Monthly Repository 20 (1825), 114-16. 

Hughes' obituary written by her niece. 

“Unitarian Worthies: Remarkable Women,” Christian Life (June 28, 1884), pp. 313-14. 

The article mentions more than 30 Unitarian women of note and includes Mary Hughes as one of them.

Herbert McLachlan, The Methodist Unitarian Movement (Manchester: University Press, 1919), pp. 66-67. 

He includes a brief statement about Mary Hughes and her tracts that supported many of the key features of the Methodist Unitarian movement, even though she was never a direct participant in that movement.

Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760-1860 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), p. 76. 

She briefly mentions Hughes and her tracts in the context of the Christian Tract Society, all taken from Aspland's "Memoir."

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 Robson Hughes appears as well. 

Mary Hughes in the Hockliffe Project

Mary Robson Hughes 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).

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

Typical conflating Confusion of Mary Hughes the Unitarian with Mary Robson Hughes 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.