Mudie was born in
Angus, Scotland, was the youngest son of John Mudie, a
weaver, and his wife Elizabeth (née Bany). He spent some time as a shepherd in the Sidlaw Hills. 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, studied mainly from 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 spent some time as weaver in Bucklemaker Wynd in Dundee. 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. His first writing was the poem ‘The Maid of Griban’ (1810) and his first novel
Glenfergus came out a decade later in 1820. 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. About 1838, Mudie moved to
Winchester, where he was employed by a bookseller named Robbins in writing books, including a
History of Hampshire (3 vols., 1838) and a stream of other topographical volumes. The enterprise failed, and Mudie returned to London, impoverished and in broken health. He edited
The Surveyor, Engineer and Architect, a monthly journal; it began publication in February 1840 but was not a financial success. Throughout this unsatisfactory and ultimately wretched career, Mudie maintained a steady flow of publications. His first works were The
Maid of Griban (1819) (verses) and
Glenfergus (3 vols., 1819), a novel. In the 1820s, he turned to
topography, often writing in a moralizing tone, and produced a long list of volumes, of which two on London,
Babylon the Great (2 vols., 1825) and
A Second Judgment on Babylon the Great (2 vols., 1829) are the most striking.
For Things in General (on London and elsewhere, 1824) he used the pseudonym Laurence Langshank. Mudie became a keen
ornithologist and published several volumes, such as
The Feathered Tribes of the British Islands (2 vols., 1834) and
The Natural History of Birds (1834); he also wrote on other aspects of biology. He was also the author of books on
natural philosophy, mental and
moral philosophy,
China,
India,
copyright, and the seasons of the year. Mudie wrote the greater part of the natural history section of the
British Cyclopaedia (1834), the text to Gilbert's
Modern Atlas of the Earth (1840), and a topographical account of Selborne prefixed to
Gilbert White's
Natural History of Selborne (new edn, 1850). Mudie died at
Pentonville on 29 April 1842, leaving destitute the widow of his second marriage, Frances Wallace Urquhart, second daughter of Captain John Urquhart, a sea captain of the
East India Company with four daughters and one son. He wrote and compiled altogether about 90 volumes according to the
Cyclopædia of English Literature (1844), He furnished the letter-press to Gilbert's
Modern Atlas, the "Natural History" to the
British Cyclopaedia, and numerous other contributions to periodical works. He was editor of the
Caledonian Quarterly Magazine, as well as its illustrator and chief contributor. He hand-carved the woodcuts used to illustrate the
Caledonian Quarterly. == References ==