Robert Mudie

Robert Mudie (1777–1842) was a newspaper editor and author.

He was born in Angus, Scotland on 28 June 1777, was the youngest son of John Mudie, a weaver, and his wife, Elizabeth, née 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. He taught himself Latin by beginning in the middle of Virgil, reading to the end, using a dictionary.

At the end of his four years of militia service he became master of a village school in the south of 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 much 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 (April–September 1816) and The Caledonian (June–October 1821).

On the failure of these, in the autumn of 1821 he 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 largely in the periodicals of the day.

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