Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants

However, let us return to the narrative of owners and occupiers of the house, where there were brief echoes of the house’s former grandeur. Its purchaser in 1858 was Richard Moulton, a London law stationer with a business in Chancery Lane, who perhaps bought it as an investment. The first occupant of whom we have record during Moulton’s ownership is James Hunt, who appears under ’Exmouth House’ in the Hastings list of gentry and clergy in Melville’s Sussex Directory for 1858. Hunt is also listed with the same address as a subscriber to Charles Roach Smith’s Illustrations of Roman London in 1859, with his name accompanied by the initials ‘Ph.D., F.S.A., M.R.S.C.’ (these stand for Doctor of Philosophy, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry). Hunt is a significant figure, the only occupant of Exmouth House to merit an entry in The Dictionary of National Biography. His livelihood evidently came from the practice of speech therapy (in 1856 he had purchased his doctorate from the University of Giessen, Germany), and from 1858 he is known to have run a residential clinic at Ore House, Ore, for patients afflicted with speech defects; these included Charles Dodgson (i.e. Lewis Carroll). His residence at Exmouth House took place early in this period, evidently before he had accommodation at Ore: he later moved into Ore House, where he died in 1869. In parallel with his career as a therapist, Hunt was also active in first the Ethnological Society and then the Anthropological Society (which he founded), becoming notorious for his racist opinions, though he also ‘helped to place anthropology on a sound basis’.53

53 W.H. Brock, ‘Hunt, James (1833-69)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.