MCKENNY

The last paragraph of McKenny Hughes’s entry in the Oxford DNB deals with his marriage, noting that his wife was ‘a keen amateur archaeologist, a botanist, and a distinguished artist, and under his tuition she became a valuable geologist’, and that the couple ‘travelled together on field excursions’, being accompanied on a trip to the Balkans by an armed guard. Six boxes of her papers are among the rest of those of the Hughes family in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. The present item is 64pp, 4to, mostly on the rectos of a ruled ‘Universal Exercise Book.

2pp., 12mo. Bifolium. In very good condition, lightly aged. Had he known that Hughes's wedding was 'coming off so soon' he would have been 'in time with a little gift'. As it is, he asks him to choose for himself, 'with the aid of your wife': 'Are you and she sick of the Oxford Books of Verse? Is Shakspeare's England too weighty (avoirdupois) for war-time establishments?

Hughes's mother Margaret - wife of Rev. Joshua Hughes (1807-1889) - was the daughter of Sir Thomas McKenny (1832-1917), Lord Mayor of Dublin. According to his entry in the Oxford DNB, Hughes and his wife 'attended the International Geological Congress of 1891 in the USA, where they were part of a small group which visited the national parks of North America, including the Grand Canyon, into which descent was made from the north rim. Much of the journey was made on horseback, through territory still under Native American occupation.' 2pp., 8vo. In ink and pencil.

Thomas McKenny Hughes was the son of Rev. Joshua Hughes and his wife Margaret, daughter and of Sir Thomas McKenny, Lord Mayor of Dublin. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1853 (B.A., 1857), and joined the Geological Survey in 1861. He was Woodwardian Professor of Geology, Cambridge University, 1873-1917, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1889. He was the prime mover behind the creation of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge. In November 1882 he married Mary Caroline Weston, daughter of Canon G. F. Weston.