HUGMAN, John

1770 - 1846

John Hugman was baptised at Halesworth, Suffolk on 4 April 1770, son of John and Susan Hugman. Formerly a tanner at the side of the river at Halesworth, a house and business that he sold in 1822, but was declared a bankrupt the following year paying a dividend of 16s. [80p] in the £1 to his creditors on 18 October 1823 but he continued to reside in Halesworth. Hugman travelled the country selling his poems with the original edition 'Original Poems' made up of several separately printed items with imprints from Brighton, Colchester, Clare and Cambridge, another early edition has items printed at Ipswich, Portsmouth and Sudbury which shows his itinerary and a further seventeen editions were published. His printer Tippell of Halesworth, by juggling with the unused version of the original poems, managed to keep the book in small octavo format of 42 pages and changing the title from amatory poems to moral poems, was a concession to the puritanical views of his day. An amateur watercolourist, Hugman painted ‘A view of the Parsonage at Halesworth’ which is dated 1811 and painted from a summerhouse which, until it was demolished in 1965, stood in the grounds of the former Angel Inn, and one of his poems is entitled 'Ode to my Summer House'. He married at Halesworth on 3 May 1795, Mary Anne Reeve and had a son Robert who changed his surname to Hughman, who was the grandfather of Maria Hughman. On the death of Henry Baxter, an appraiser & auctioneer, in 1823 Hugman took on his business at Halesworth. John Hughman died at Halesworth on Monday, 30 November 1846 and there is a monumental inscription in the local graveyard.

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Works by This Artist