Robert Hope Moncrieff[note 1] (1846–1927) was a prolific Scottish author of children's fiction and of Black's Guides.
The couple had married the previous year in St Brides Church in Liverpool on 2 June 1845.
His father married a second time on 27 June 1854 to Maria Wilks Williamson Rodgers (1830 – 30 March 1859) in Kilkenny, Ireland.
Her father was not a soldier, but the Captain of a ship trading in Asia[6] with the permission of the East India Company.
The 1861 Census shows both Moncrieff (15) and his brother John (13) boarding at the Circus Place School in Edinburgh.
Moncrieff wrote nearly fifty years later that his mother had died before he knew her and that: my father also was taken too soon, leaving me precociously independent.
[11] Not one of his father's three marriages lasted five years, all ending prematurely with the death of either wife or husband.
[14] Moncrieff says that he had have made awkward attempts at more than one handicraft, with the view of gathering straw for literary bricks.
After a boyish visit to Paris, my travels began with a cruise in the Mediterranean and a stay in Italy, still heaving from Garibaldi's exploits.
[9] He wrote that his work seldom brought him into contact with fellow authors, and that still less had he cultivated what is called smart society.
The following is a very incomplete list, drawn from Steve Holland's British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index.
In the semi-autobiographical A Book About Authors (1914) Moncrieff wrote that: For more than forty years I have been an author of all work, what the contemptuous call a hack...[19] His range was very broad and included: This following section lists the guides that Moncrieff worked on, while this section lists books other than the guides.