Reverend Robert Hunter (1823–1897)

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The Reverend Robert Hunter (1823–25 February 1897) was the lead editor of the Encyclopædic Dictionary, which he produced in seven volumes between 1879 and 1888. In addition, he was an ordained minister and missionary for the Free Church of Scotland, and a notable geologist, becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society.




Hunter was born in Newburgh, Fife in 1823 to John Mackenzie Hunter of Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, an excise officer, and Agnes Strickland of Ulverston, Lancashire. He was educated at the Grammar School, Aberdeen where he came first in the open exam for university bursaries and thus went to Marischal College at the University of Aberdeen. He studied Latin, Greek, Mathematics and Natural Science, frequently coming first in the exams.

His first job was as a tutor in the Bermudas, spending his free time collecting corals; in 1845 he brought home the finest preserved specimens of brain coral that professor Sir Richard Owen had ever seen.

Hunter was ordained as a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. In 1847, he went out to Nagpur, India as a missionary, to accompany the Rev. Stephen Hislop. Both men were keen geologists, and on their missionary travels they both recorded the local geology and fossils. Both of them wrote a number of geological papers, which were read in their absence at the Geological Society of London.

In 1855 Hunter was forced by ill health to return home. He wrote several articles for the British and Foreign Evangelical Review. In 1863 he published his History of India. Among his other activities, he ran services for the Presbyterian Church of England at Sewardstone,and was children's minister of the church at the Victoria Docks which was built for him by the sugar magnate, James Duncan.

In 1882 Hunter built a house, Forest Retreat (now Forest Villa) on Staples Road, in the hilly part of Loughton, Essex later called by some Little Cornwall. The house had views over Epping Forest and the Roding Valley.
On 23 February 1997, for the centenary of Hunter's death, Loughton Town Council placed a blue plaque on the house with the inscription "The Rev. Robert Hunter (1823-1897) Lexicographer and Naturalist lived here".

He died at the house in 1897. He is buried in the City of London Cemetery.