Richard Hodgson (publisher)

Richard Hodgson (1804, in Wimpole Street, Marylebone, Central London – 4 May 1872, in Chingford, Essex) was an English publisher and amateur astronomer.

Educated at Lewes, Hodgson worked for some years at a banking-house in Lombard Street. In 1834 he joined Boys & Graves to form Hodgson, Boys & Graves.[1] In 1836 he formed with Henry Graves the publishing company Hodgson & Graves.[2] In 1839 their company founded The Art Journal. In 1841 Hodgson retired from publishing to work on daguerrotypy. In the late 1840s he created the Hawkwood estate.[3] After a number of years of achieving considerable success in daguerrotypy, he worked on telescopic and microscopic observations.

According to his obituary in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society:[4]

In 1852 he built an observatory at Claybury, in Essex, in which a 6-inch refractor was mounted equatorially. This was afterward moved to Hawkwood, and a transit-room added, which now contains the 4-inch instrument formerly in the possession of Dr. Lee of Hartwell. In 1854 he designed the diagonal eye-piece for observing the whole of the Sun's disc without contraction of the aperture of the object-glass, a description of which appeared in the Monthly Notices of that year. For many years he was a constant observer of the Sun, and made a series of drawings of many solar spots. Whilst so engaged, at 11.20 A.M. on the 1st of September 1859, he was fortunate in witnessing the remarkable outbreak in a large spot which was simultaneously observed by Mr. Carrington at Redhill.

Hodgson was made in 1848 a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 1849 a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.