Mark Boyd (author)

Mark Boyd (1805–12 September 1879, London) was an English author.

Mark Boyd was born in Surrey near the Thames, the younger son of Edward Boyd of Merton Hall, Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, a merchant. His brother was Benjamin Boyd. He mainly spent his childhood on the Scottish estate, which was near the River Cree. He later pursued an active business career in London, becoming London director of a Scottish insurance society, and a lively promoter of the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and of other useful public undertakings. He travelled much in Europe. He published an account in the London and Shetland Journal of a journey in the Orkney Isles in 1839. On 23 December 1848 he married Emma Anne, the widow of 'Romeo' Coates, who had been run over and killed in the previous February. He died at the Alexandra Hotel, Hyde Park on 12 September 1879, aged 74.^[1]

Works

In 1864 Boyd published a pamphlet about Australia, where his brother had settled.^[1] His Reminiscences of Fifty Years (1871) was dedicated to the Australian colonists, and Social Gleanings (1875, written from Oatlands, Walton-on-Thames) was dedicated to Dean Ramsay.

References

1. Jennett Humphreys, rev. Dean Wilson, ‘Boyd, Mark (1804/5–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 1 Feb 2011

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1886). "Boyd, Mark (1805?-1879)". Dictionary of National Biography. 6. London: Smith, Elder & Co.