Legh Richmond

He is noted for tracts, narratives of conversion that innovated in the relation of stories of the poor and female subjects, and which were subsequently much imitated.

[1] He was also known for an influential collection of letters to his children, powerfully stating an evangelical attitude to childhood of the period, and by misprision sometimes taken as models for parental conversation and family life, for example by novelists, against Richmond's practice.

[2][3] He was born on 29 January 1772, in Liverpool, the son of Henry Richmond, physician and academic, and his wife Catherine Atherton.

[4][7][8] He began taking pupils at the rectory, two being Charles Longuet Higgins and Walter Augustus Shirley, while teaching his own sons, but was not effectual and passed tuition on to his curates.

A collected edition of his stories of village life was first published by the Religious Tract Society in 1814 under the title of Annals of the Poor.

Sixteen years after Richmond's death, the engraver George Brannon[15] published a supplement to Annals of the Poor under the title The Landscape Beauties of the Isle of Wight (1843).

[16] Richmond also edited a series of Reformation theological works, with biographies, in eight volumes called Fathers of the English Church (1807–12).