William Henry Hudson

William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 – 18 August 1922), known in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, was an Anglo-Argentine author, naturalist and ornithologist. Born in the Argentine pampas where he roamed free in his youth, he observed bird life and collected specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. The Patagonian birds Knipolegus hudsoni and Asthenes hudsoni are named after him. He would later write about life in Patagonia that drew special admiration for his style. His most popular work Green Mansions (1904), a romance set in the Venezuelan forest inspired a Hollywood movie and several other works.
Hudson was the fourth child of Daniel Hudson (1804–1868) and his wife Caroline Augusta née Kemble (1804–1859), United States settlers of English and Irish origin. His paternal grandfather was from Clyst Hydon in Devon. He was born and lived his first years in a small estancia called "Los Veinte-cinco Ombues" which was on the banks of the Arroyo Conchitas stream which flows into the Plata river in what is now Ingeniero Allan, Florencio Varela, Argentina.
In 1846, the family established at a pulpería further south, Las Acacias, in the surroundings of Chascomús, not far from the lake of the same name. In this natural environment, Hudson spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. He was taught by three tutors who lived on the ranch. He became keenly interested in the life of the pampas, and grew up with gaucho herders, native Indians, settlers with whom he explored the pampas and developed a special love for Patagonia.
At the age of 15 he suffered from a serious typhus fever and still later suffered from rheumatic fever. At 16 he read Gilbert White's Natural History of Selbourne and was deeply influenced to study natural history. In 1859, his mother, a devout Christian, died, and in the same year he read Darwin's Origin of Species. From 1866, he collected bird skins for S. F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution but he would note later the glory of birds in life and the ugliness of taxidermy. In 1866, he also served in the Argentinian army during the war with Paraguay. He later collected insect specimens for Hermann Burmeister in Buenos Aires and sent bird specimens to the Zoological Society of London from 1870. In 1870, he wrote his a series of nine letters on the ornithology of Buenos Ayres that were published by Philip Sclater in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society. In his third letter of 1870, Hudson takes on some statements made by Darwin on Patagonian birds. Darwin noted that the woodpecker Colaptes campestris occurred on the Pampas where not a tree grew and Hudson argued that there were indeed trees on the La Plata and that in much vaster grassland areas, the woodpecker was never found. Darwin responded, accepting that he may have been mistaken in some of his observations, but that there was no wilful error and clarified the location where he had made his observations. In 1872 Hudson sent specimens of birds from Patagonia, including a species Sclater would describe and name after Hudson as Cnipolegus hudsoni (spelling used in the paper). Hudson was initially skeptical about evolution but he would later be a grudging evolutionist.
Hudson saw the pampas being destroyed by European immigrants and in April 1874 he boarded the steamer Ebro for England. He slept in Hyde Park after arrival and struggled to find employment. He met John Gould in the hope of finding work but found a cold response from Gould who was ill and the sight of dead hummingbirds all around sickened Hudson. He then sought to work as a genealogy researcher for a Chester Waters who turned out to be deeply indebted and unable to pay. In 1876, he married singer Emily (1829-1921) daughter of John Hanmer Wingrave and lived in her home at Southwick Crescent where she ran boarding houses. They later moved to rented rooms and she tried to make a living by giving music lessons. They later moved to a larger three-story house in Bayswater that Emily inherited. They lived in a flat and rented out the others which paid back their debts. They had no children.
Hudson struggled to make a living through writing and among the few that he managed to write was an article in a women's magazine in 1876 that he wrote under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. In 1880, he met Morley Roberts and through his connections he was able to contribute stories to magazines. He wrote several books including a two-volume work on Argentine Ornithology (1888), Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), and The Naturalist in La Plata (1892). He began to travel in England and wrote Nature in Downland (1900). His books on the English countryside, all of them set in Wiltshire, including Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909), and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
He was a supporter of the Society for the Protection of Birds from its early days and was often the only man who sat in the meetings organized by Eliza Phillips. He later wrote some pamphlets for the organization in 1898 against the trade in plumes. Hudson became a British citizen in 1900 and in 1901 he received a Civil list pension of £150 per year for his writings on natural history. This was made possible by the influence Sir Edward and his wife Lady Dorothy Grey.
Hudson was over six feet tall. He loved to talk to people from rural working classes and would live among them during his travels in the countryside. Hudson was a friend of the late-19th century English author George Gissing, whom he met in 1889. They corresponded until the latter's death in 1903, occasionally exchanging their publications, discussing literary and scientific matters, and commenting on their respective access to books and newspapers, a matter of supreme importance to Gissing. In September 1890, Morley Roberts, Gissing and Hudson went to Shoreham and were involved in rescuing three drowning girls even though Hudson could not swim. Other close friends included Cunninghame Graham. He campaigned (1900) against the building of the National Physical Laboratory in the grounds of Kew Gardens.
Hudson began to write fiction, his most popular work being Green Mansions (1904), which was set in a Venezuelan forest. In 1959 it was made into a movie. Other works of fiction included The Purple Land (1904), A Crystal Age (1906), Tales of the Pampas (1916), and A Little Boy Lost (1905). He wrote an autobiographical book Far Away and Long Ago (1918).
In 1911, his wife became invalid and she was taken care of by nurse in Worthing, Sussex, until her death in 1921. Hudson lived in London with a weak heart and died on 18 August 1922, at 40 St Luke’s Road, Westbourne Park, Bayswater, and was buried in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery, Worthing, on 22 August 1922, next to his wife, who had died early in 1921. He left some bequests but nearly his entire estate of £8225 was left to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (including earnings from his works) of which he was an early member. His Executors were the publisher Ernest Bell and Wynnard Hooper, a journalist. He wanted his notebooks and papers to be destroyed and did not want his life to be written about.
Hudson was an advocate of Lamarckian evolution. Early in his life he was a critic of Darwinism and defended vitalism. He was influenced by the non-Darwinian evolutionary writings of Samuel Butler. Hudson considered himself an animist and although he was familiar with Christian tradition from his mother he did not belong to any denomination.
In 1925, a memorial to him was inaugurated in Hyde Park by Stanley Baldwin. A stone panel made by Jacob Epstein depicting Rima from Green Mansions. The engravings are by the designer Eric Gill. It stands in the Hudson Memorial Bird Sanctuary in Hyde Park, not far from where he slept upon arrival to England.
At the headquarters of the RSPB in Sandy, Bedfordshire, a portrait of Hudson painted by Frank Brooks hangs over the fireplace noting his role in the early days of the Society and for his bequest.
Ernest Hemingway referred to Hudson's The Purple Land (1885) in his novel The Sun Also Rises, and to Far Away and Long Ago in his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986). He listed Far Away and Long Ago in a suggested reading list for a young writer. Joseph Conrad stated that Hudson's writing "was like the grass that the good God made to grow and when it was there you could not tell how it came."
James Rebanks' 2015 book The Shepherd's Life about a Lake District farmer was inspired by Hudson's work of the same name: "But even more than Orwell or Hemingway, W.H. Hudson turned me into a book obsessive ..." (p. 115), and: "One day, I pulled A Shepherd's Life by W.H. Hudson from the bookcase ...and the sudden life-changing realization it gave me that we could be in books – great books." (p. 114)
In Argentina, Hudson is considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. A town in Berazategui Partido and several other public places and institutions are named after him. The town of Hudson in Buenos Aires Province is named for him.
The complete collected works of Hudson produced in 1922-3 went to 24 volumes. Many of his works were translated into other languages. Hudson's best-known novel is Green Mansions (1904), which was adapted into a film starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, and his best-known non-fiction is Far Away and Long Ago (1918), which was also made into a film.