Augustus Hare Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834, 1903) was an English writer best known for richly detailed travel books and for memorial biographies drawn from family letters and diaries. He was born in Rome during a period when his family had strong ties to Italy and to the Anglican intellectual circle centered on Hurstmonceaux in Sussex. As an infant he was adopted by his aunt by marriage, Maria Hare, the widow of the clergyman and essayist Augustus William Hare. The adoption, agreed upon at his birth, shaped the whole course of his life. Maria, a woman of devout piety and quiet strength, became the central influence on his character and education; he later honored her in the work that first made his name as a biographer, Memorials of a Quiet Life. Through her, he was also drawn into the orbit of another uncle, Julius Charles Hare, the learned rector of Hurstmonceaux, whose scholarship and moral seriousness helped to form the young Augustus's sense of vocation. The literary reputation of these two uncles, best remembered for the reflective essays Guesses at Truth, stood behind his earliest efforts and introduced him to a world where letters, faith, and travel were inseparably linked.

Formation and Early Travels
Hare's childhood and youth were divided between the cultivated seclusion of English country life and long periods abroad, especially in Italy. Under Maria's guidance he learned to observe with care: churches and streets, frescoes and altarpieces, the pattern of a piazza, the story each building told about its city. What began as filial companionship during his adoptive mother's travels became a lifelong habit of attention. He did not simply study art or topography in the abstract; he learned to treat places as repositories of memory, layered with human stories. The letters and diaries kept within the Hare family taught him to value documents as living voices, and that instinct, respect for the written trace of a life, would later shape both his biographical writing and his approach to travel.

Travel Writing and the Art of the Walk
In the 1870s Hare emerged as one of the most read English guidebook authors of his time. Walks in Rome introduced his characteristic method: instead of a gazetteer, he offered itineraries that unfolded street by street, with historical asides, reflections on art, and a chorus of voices from earlier travelers and residents. He followed it with Days near Rome, Cities of Northern and Central Italy, Wanderings in Spain, Walks in London, and Walks in Venice, along with multi-volume guides to regions of France and Italy. These books married the practical pacing of a guide with the cultivated digressions of a literary companion. He wrote to be read while walking, placing the reader's feet and eyes in the cityscape and then supplying enough history, legend, and anecdote to make each stop resonate. His tone was personal and conversational, and his sympathy for the past, especially medieval and early modern religious art, gave his descriptions an elegiac, sometimes devotional hue.

Memorials, Letters, and Lives
Parallel to the travel books ran Hare's work as a memorialist and biographer, nurtured by the archive he inherited through Maria and extended through friendships with prominent families. Memorials of a Quiet Life, centered on his adoptive mother's letters and journals, is both a portrait of a woman and a record of a moral world that prized inner discipline, dutiful affection, and attentive charity. Its success encouraged further ventures. In The Story of Two Noble Lives he assembled the correspondence and recollections surrounding Charlotte, Lady Canning, and Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, women admired for artistic talent, philanthropy, and steadfastness under trial. He also produced The Gurneys of Earlham, an expansive family chronicle that preserved the voices of a remarkable Quaker lineage whose members influenced nineteenth-century philanthropy and reform. In each of these projects, the people around him, kin, friends, and their circles, became subjects whose letters, diaries, and domestic histories he brought before the public, confident that the private sphere could illuminate the moral and cultural life of the age.

Circle, Character, and Style
Hare moved with ease among country houses and continental pensions, a welcome guest whose conversation blended anecdote, historical memory, and a gift for storytelling. He never married, and his friendships, especially with women of artistic and philanthropic inclination, were central to his daily existence and to his books. Maria Hare remained the enduring presence in his imagination; Julius Charles Hare, with his theological gravity, offered an intellectual standard; and the families he chronicled, among them the Cannings, the Waterfords, and the Gurneys, provided both archives and sympathetic readerships. He could be fastidious and was sometimes judged sentimental, but he was tireless in turning private papers into public remembrance. As a travel writer he preferred the pedestrian scale, the street corner and side chapel; as a biographer he favored the intimate letter over the grand public gesture. His pages are dotted with minor legends and local traditions, and he had a pronounced relish for the uncanny. Later volumes of reminiscence included ghost stories and strange happenings told with a straight face, not as fiction but as part of the texture of remembered life.

The Story of My Life
In the 1890s he gathered decades of diaries and correspondence into The Story of My Life, a multi-volume autobiography. It is a massive work, capacious in incident and generous in quotation, and it preserves the flow of conversation, rumor, and travel that animated his world. The book is filled with portraits of the people who sustained him, hosts and hostesses, artists and clergy, old Italian friends, Sussex neighbors, and it preserves many episodes that would otherwise have vanished with their tellers. The autobiography also records the domestic routines and spiritual reflections he had learned from Maria, offering an elegy for the manners and ethos of a Victorian milieu already passing from the scene.

Home in Sussex and Final Years
Although he ranged across Europe for much of his life, Hare's base in later years was in Sussex, near Hastings, where he established a house and garden suited to his habits of reading and receiving guests. From there he issued new editions of the Walks and further regional volumes, revising and enlarging them as travel changed and readers' expectations shifted. His health was often delicate, and travel, paradoxically, served both as restorative and as work; he continued to revisit favorite cities in Italy and France to keep his descriptions accurate, his eye alert. He died in 1903 in Sussex, remembered by family connections and a wide circle of readers who felt they had walked beside him.

Legacy
Hare's legacy lies in two entwined achievements. First, he shaped a genre of cultivated guidebook that taught generations of English readers to look with patience, to connect the plan of a street with the rhythms of its history, and to treat art as the visible memory of a place. Second, he preserved, with unusual fullness, the letters and lives of the people around him, his adoptive mother Maria Hare, his uncles Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare, and the aristocratic and philanthropic families whose papers he tended and edited. Taken together, these works form a social and moral panorama of nineteenth-century Britain and the English abroad. His books have the peculiar durability of volumes meant to be carried and handled: they still reward the traveler willing to walk, and they still speak for the private virtues he cherished, attention, gratitude, and fidelity to memory.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Augustus, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Leadership - Mother.