John Hodgson (antiquary)
The son of Isaac Hodgson and Elizabeth, daughter of William Rawes, he was born at Swindale, in the parish of Shap, Westmoreland, on 4 November 1779; his father was a stonemason.
He learned a good deal of classics, mathematics, chemistry, botany, and geology, and acquired an interest in natural history and local antiquities, through rambles in the countryside.
[1] His parents were too poor to make a university education possible, and at the age of twenty he started work as the master of the village school at Matterdale, near Ullswater.
There in 1804, he succeeded in passing his examination for ordination, and became curate of the chapelries of Esh and Saltley, hamlets in the parish of Lanchester, where he still kept his school.
[1] In 1806, Hodgson left Lanchester for the curacy of Gateshead; in 1808 he was presented by a private patron, Mr. Ellison, with the living of Jarrow with Heworth.
[2] The income barely amounted to £100 a year; it was congenial to Hodgson's tastes to serve the church, which had been founded by Bede.
At Kirkwhelpington he was near two students of local antiquities, Sir John Edward Swinburne of Capheaton Hall, and Walter Calverley Trevelyan of Wallington, who gave him encouragement.
[1] John James Wilkinson, a London barrister with a Durham background, saw Hodgson's pamphlet, and published his own Proposals for the establishment of a Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines.
Bishop Shute Barrington saw Wilkinson's work, and gave Robert Gray, then at Bishopwearmouth, a free hand in setting up a society.
In November, John Buddle, a colliery manager, engineer and viewer, published a report on the ventilation of mines.
[1] In 1819 Hodgson visited London to work in the British Museum, and announced his book to appear in six volumes, published by subscription, limited to three hundred copies.
[1] It was not till 1827 that Hodgson was able to publish the second volume of his original prospectus, dealing with the parochial history of Northumberland, towards which he was helped by a subscription of £200 from Bishop Barrington.
Later, the Antiquarian Society of Newcastle upon Tyne commissioned John Hodgson-Hinde to write an additional volume containing an introductory sketch of the history of the county, which was published in 1858.
In 1810 he was employed to write the account of Northumberland for Edward Wedlake Brayley and John Britton's Beauties of England and Wales.
[1] In 1812 he wrote for a Newcastle publisher The Picture of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a guide-book to the town, including research about the Roman Wall and the early history of the coal trade.
40, &c.[1] Besides the works already mentioned Hodgson published The Nativity of Jesus Christ, &c. (Newcastle, 1810), and contributed papers to the Gentleman's Magazine from 1821 onwards, under the signature "Archæus".
