This pencil study Return from the Market was sketched by George Edwin Hartnoll Hogg and was found as a loose-leaf insertion in a book used as a teaching resource by the Manchester Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. It was acquired by the Deaf Museum & Archive.
Who was he?
George E. H. Hogg was probably born deaf in Bideford, Devon, in February 1819. His father John Hogg was a chemist and a classical Latin scholar. At the age of eight he and his deaf brother John Jewell Hogg were educated at the West of England Institution for the Deaf and Dumb Exeter under the famed Henry Brothers Bingham. The school used a combined system and George was a pupil for seven years, excelling in arithmetic, and could mentally work out complicated numerical calculations in a short time. After Bingham became headmaster of the Manchester Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in 1834, Hogg joined his teaching staff two years later and stayed at the Institution as a teacher for 43 years and was its longest serving Deaf teacher. When the school decided to adopt the oral policy in 1879 Hogg resigned and became a lay-missioner in various towns in Lancashire. He lived at Sale in Cheshire with William and Sarah Cordingly, a Deaf farm labourer and his Deaf wife. William was a former pupil of George Hogg. In the 1891 census George is shown as living in Withington, Stretford, with another deaf couple, Ann and William Morton. At the late age
of 73 he married Louisa Williams, deaf dressmaker, aged 45 year old, born in Stockport in Shropshire in 1892. They moved to Macclesfield and then to Leicester where he died on 22nd April 1906 at the grand age of 86 years old.
He excelled at pencil drawing but he was a brilliant arithmetician and had a remarkable talent for mental calculations, especially division and multiplication. Henry Brothers Bingham wrote a book about George’s mental calculations.
Photo of George Hogg: An Old Deaf Teacher, British Deaf Monthly, 1901, Vol. 10, p. 204