after the death of her husband but not published till 1806 (since often reprinted), a work not only valuable for the picture which it gives of the man and of the time in which he lived, but for the simple beauty of its style, and the naïveté with which the writer records her sentiments and opinions, and details the incidents of her private life.
See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by C. H. Firth (1885); Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 25,901 (a fragment of the Life), also Add. MSS. 19, 333, 36,247 f. 51; Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422; Monk’s Contemporaries, by Guizot.
HUTCHINSON, JOHN (1674–1737), English theological writer,
was born at Spennithorne, Yorkshire, in 1674. He served as
steward in several families of position, latterly in that of the
duke of Somerset, who ultimately obtained for him the post
of riding purveyor to the master of the horse, a sinecure worth
about £200 a year. In 1700 he became acquainted with Dr
John Woodward (1665–1728) physician to the duke and author
of a work entitled The Natural History of the Earth, to whom he
entrusted a large number of fossils of his own collecting, along
with a mass of manuscript notes, for arrangement and publication.
A misunderstanding as to the manner in which these should
be dealt with was the immediate occasion of the publication
by Hutchinson in 1724 of Moses’s Principia, part i., in which
Woodward’s Natural History was bitterly ridiculed, his conduct
with regard to the mineralogical specimens not obscurely
characterized, and a refutation of the Newtonian doctrine of
gravitation seriously attempted. It was followed by part ii.
in 1727, and by various other works, including Moses’s Sine
Principio, 1730; The Confusion of Tongues and Trinity of the
Gentiles, 1731; Power Essential and Mechanical, or what power
belongs to God and what to his creatures, in which the design of
Sir I. Newton and Dr Samuel Clarke is laid open, 1732; Glory or
Gravity, 1733; The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist Delineated,
1736. He taught that the Bible contained the elements not only
of true religion but also of all rational philosophy. He held
that the Hebrew must be read without points, and his interpretation
rested largely on fanciful symbolism. Bishop George Home
of Norwich was during some of his earlier years an avowed
Hutchinsonian; and William Jones of Nayland continued to
be so to the end of his life.
A complete edition of his publications, edited by Robert Spearman and Julius Bate, appeared in 1748 (12 vols.); an Abstract of these followed in 1753; and a Supplement, with Life by Spearman prefixed, in 1765.
HUTCHINSON, SIR JONATHAN (1828– ), English surgeon
and pathologist, was born on the 23rd of July 1828 at Selby,
Yorkshire, his parents belonging to the Society of Friends.
He entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital, became a member of the
Royal College of Surgeons in 1850 (F.R.C.S. 1862), and rapidly
gained reputation as a skilful operator and a scientific inquirer.
He was president of the Hunterian Society in 1869 and 1870,
professor of surgery and pathology at the College of Surgeons
from 1877 to 1882, president of the Pathological Society, 1879–1880,
of the Ophthalmological Society, 1883, of the Neurological
Society, 1887, of the Medical Society, 1890, and of the Royal
Medical and Chirurgical in 1894–1896. In 1889 he was president
of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was a member of two
Royal Commissions, that of 1881 to inquire into the provision
for smallpox and fever cases in the London hospitals, and that
of 1889–1896 on vaccination and leprosy. He also acted as
honorary secretary to the Sydenham Society. His activity
in the cause of scientific surgery and in advancing the study
of the natural sciences was unwearying. His lectures on neuro-pathogenesis,
gout, leprosy, diseases of the tongue, &c., were full
of original observation; but his principal work was connected
with the study of syphilis, on which he became the first living
authority. He was the founder of the London Polyclinic or
Postgraduate School of Medicine; and both in his native town
of Selby and at Haslemere, Surrey, he started (about 1890)
educational museums for popular instruction in natural history.
He published several volumes on his own subjects, was editor of
the quarterly Archives of Surgery, and was given the Hon. LL.D.
degree by both Glasgow and Cambridge. After his retirement
from active consultative work he continued to take great interest
in the question of leprosy, asserting the existence of a definite
connexion between this disease and the eating of salted fish.
He received a knighthood in 1908.
HUTCHINSON, THOMAS (1711–1780), the last royal governor
of the province of Massachusetts, son of a wealthy merchant
of Boston, Mass., was born there on the 9th of September 1711.
He graduated at Harvard in 1727, then became an apprentice
in his father’s counting-room, and for several years devoted
himself to business. In 1737 he began his public career as a
member of the Boston Board of Selectmen, and a few weeks
later he was elected to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay,
of which he was a member until 1740 and again from 1742 to
1749, serving as speaker in 1747, 1748 and 1749. He consistently
contended for a sound financial system, and vigorously
opposed the operations of the “Land Bank” and the issue of
pernicious bills of credit. In 1748 he carried through the
General Court a bill providing for the cancellation and redemption
of the outstanding paper currency. Hutchinson went to England
in 1740 as the representative of Massachusetts in a boundary
dispute with New Hampshire. He was a member of the Massachusetts
Council from 1749 to 1756, was appointed judge of
probate in 1752 and was chief justice of the superior court of
the province from 1761 to 1769, was lieutenant-governor from
1758 to 1771, acting as governor in the latter two years, and
from 1771 to 1774 was governor. In 1754 he was a delegate
from Massachusetts to the Albany Convention, and, with Franklin,
was a member of the committee appointed to draw up a plan of
union. Though he recognized the legality of the Stamp Act
of 1765, he considered the measure inexpedient and impolitic
and urged its repeal, but his attitude was misunderstood; he
was considered by many to have instigated the passage of the
Act, and in August 1765 a mob sacked his Boston residence
and destroyed many valuable manuscripts and documents.
He was acting governor at the time of the “Boston Massacre”
in 1770, and was virtually forced by the citizens of Boston,
under the leadership of Samuel Adams, to order the removal
of the British troops from the town. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary
disturbances in Massachusetts he was the representative
of the British ministry, and though he disapproved
of some of the ministerial measures he felt impelled to enforce
them and necessarily incurred the hostility of the Whig or
Patriot element. In 1774, upon the appointment of General
Thomas Gage as military governor he went to England, and
acted as an adviser to George III. and the British ministry
on American affairs, uniformly counselling moderation. He
died at Brompton, now part of London, on the 3rd of June
1780.
He wrote A Brief Statement of the Claim of the Colonies (1764); a Collection of Original Papers relative to the History of Massachusetts Bay (1769), reprinted as The Hutchinson Papers by the Prince Society in 1865; and a judicious, accurate and very valuable History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (vol. i., 1764, vol. ii., 1767, and vol. iii., 1828). His Diary and Letters, with an Account of his Administration, was published at Boston in 1884–1886.
See James K. Hosmer’s Life of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1896), and a biographical chapter in John Fiske’s Essays Historical and Literary (New York, 1902). For an estimate of Hutchinson as an historian, see M. C. Tyler’s Literary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1897).
HUTCHINSON, a city and the county-seat of Reno county,
Kansas, U.S.A., in the broad bottom-land on the N. side of
the Arkansas river. Pop. (1900) 9379, of whom 414 were
foreign-born and 442 negroes; (1910 census) 16,364. It
is served by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, the Missouri
Pacific and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways. The
principal public buildings are the Federal building and the county
court house. The city has a public library, and an industrial
reformatory is maintained here by the state. Hutchinson is
situated in a stock-raising, fruit-growing and farming region
(the principal products of which are wheat, Indian corn and
fodder), with which it has a considerable wholesale trade. An
enormous deposit of rock salt underlies the city and its vicinity,