Robert Mudie

[close] Robert Mudie (1777 - 1842) was a Scottish newspaper editor and author.

He was born in Angus, the youngest son of John Mudie, a weaver, and his wife, Elizabeth Bany. After attending the village school he worked as a weaver until he was drafted into the militia. Largely self-educated, from his boyhood he was an avid reader, reared mainly on the Encyclopædia Britannica.

At the end of his four years of militia service he became master of a village school in Fife. In 1802, he was appointed teacher of Gaelic and drawing at Inverness Royal Academy, although he knew little Gaelic. About 1808 he became drawing-master to Dundee Academy, but soon also took on the department of arithmetic and English composition. He contributed to the local newspaper, and ran for some time a monthly periodical. Becoming a member of the Dundee town council, he worked energetically for burgh reform with R.S. Rintoul, editor of the radical Dundee Advertiser and later of The Spectator. In politics he was ‘an ardent reformer’. He had about this time some acquaintance with Thomas Chalmers, then in St Andrews. Mudie's speeches, attacking corruption on the council, led to the loss of his post as teacher of arithmetic (his drawing post was beyond the council's control). He tried, unsuccessfully, to start a mercantile and mathematical academy and launched two short-lived periodicals, The Independent (1816) and The Caledonian (1821).

In 1820, Mudie's only novel, Glenfergus, set in a fictional community in Perthshire, was published by Oliver & Boyd. Andrew Murray Scott considers that it bears comparison with the gentle social satires of his Ayrshire contemporary, John Galt.

In the autumn of 1821 Mudie sold his life appointment as teacher in drawing and moved to London, where he was a reporter on the Morning Chronicle, reporting George IV's visit to Edinburgh, which he also described in a volume, Modern Athens (1824). He was subsequently editor of the Sunday Times and wrote widely in the periodicals of the day.