Richard Heber (1774 - 1833)

Born 5 Jan 1774 in Westminster, London, England

Ancestors

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Biography

Richard Heber is Notable.

Richard was born in 1774. He was the son of Reginald Heber of Marton in Craven, Yorkshire and Mary Baily. He was baptised at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 20 April 1774.^[1]

Richard studied at Brasenose College, Oxford where he edited editions of some Latin poetry. In 1804 he inherited his father’s estates in Yorkshire and Shropshire. In 1821 he was High Sheriff of Shropshire. From 1821 to 1826 he represented Oxford University in Parliament. He was one of the founders of the Athenaeum Club in London, England.

Richard’s private life was the subject of gossip and speculation, with rumours of homosexual relationships, which were illegal at the time. In 1826, following innuendoes in two issues of the periodical John Bull, one of his friends won a libel suit.

Richard Heber is most famous as a bibliophile. He amassed a collection of some 105,000 books, collecting both in britain and in travels in continental Europe. His collection was housed in eight houses, some in England and some in other European countries. He once declared that “No gentleman can be without three copies of a book, one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers."

Richard passed away in 1833 and was buried at Hodnet, Yorkshire.

Heber's role in the Quarterly Review

--by Jonathan Cutmore (c) 2023

A Member of Parliament, book collector, and classical scholar, Richard Heber was the half-brother of Reginald Heber, the second Bishop of Calcutta. He was a friend of notable politicians and literary men, Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, John Murray, William Gifford, Lord Dudley, George Ellis, and John Hookham Frere. Scholars have for the most part overlooked Heber’s important role in the early years of the Quarterly Review. He was present at the Oct. 1808 meeting at Ashiestiel when the London publisher John Murray informed Scott that some high political figures wished to see a conservative journal established to rival the Edinburgh Review. Moreover, as can be discovered in the many references to him in John Murray and William Gifford’s correspondence, he recruited writers for the Quarterly and the editor, the publisher, and Sir Walter Scott often sought his opinion on articles.

Heber and Scott first met in late 1799 in Edinburgh at the bookseller-publisher Archibald Constable’s shop. Heber then assisted Scott in the publication of The Minstrelsy. He frequently visited the great Scottish writer and the two men often corresponded. In a number of cases, it was thanks to Heber’s prodding that Scott roused himself to produce a review for the Quarterly. He acted as Scott’s conscience, determining if Scott’s submissions were sufficiently up to standard.

Heber took it upon himself not only to recommend prospective reviewers to Gifford—many of Gifford’s coadjutors did that—but, without bothering to tell the editor or the publisher, he also assigned books for review. More than once he thus put Gifford in the unenviable position of having to tell a co-founder such as Walter Scott or William Erskine that they should stop working on a particular article because a writer nominated by Heber had already supplied one on the same topic. In May 1810, Gifford wrote to Heber requesting ‘that in future no distribution may be made without [his] being instantly informed of it’ .

Sources

1. ↑ Westminster baptisms, FindMyPast, subscription site

• Dugdale's Visitation of Yorkshire with additions, vol.2, pub. William Pollard, 1907, pp.381-2
• Wikipedia: Richard Heber

Additional Sources

• Bodl. Lib., MSS. Eng. lett. d. 214
• BL Add. MSS. 34567–68
• National Library of Scotland, John Murray Archive
• NLS MS. 3874, Scott corr.
• Foster, Oxford Alumni
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Gentleman's Magazine, 2nd ser., 1 (1834), pp.105–109
• T. F. Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life 2 vols (1836)
• The Heber Letters, 1783–1832, ed. R.H. Cholmondeley (1950)
• The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (1972)