Richard Adams Locke was born on September 22, 1800, at East Brent, Somersetshire (now Somerset), England. Some works of biography have given New York as his birthplace. He was not, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote of him, a lineal descendant of John Locke. The descent was collateral, through the philosopher's uncle, Louis Locke. Their common ancestor first mentioned in the written pedigree was John Locke, sheriff of London in 1460. The father of Richard Adams Locke was Richard Locke of Highbridge House, Burnham, and of East Brent, Somersetshire, a land surveyor entered as "gentleman" in the College of Arms pedigree; the grant of arms to the Lockes was made by Queen Mary in 1555. His mother was Anne Adams of East Brent.
Education
He studied at Cambridge University.
Career
Locke started his first periodical London Republican, an organ of democracy, after leaving Cambridge. This and his second literary venture, the Cornucopia, were failures. In 1832 he emigrated to New York City and became a reporter on the Courier and Enquirer. In the summer of 1835 he joined the Sun, then a struggling penny paper, at a salary of twelve dollars a week. He was taken on by the founder of the paper, Benjamin H. Day, and not, as Edgar Allan Poe says, by Moses Yale Beach, the second owner.
In August 1835 Locke wrote for the Sun the celebrated "Moon Hoax, " which purported to reveal the discovery, by Sir John Herschel with his new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, of men and animals on the moon. The revelations pretended to be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, although that periodical was then defunct. Locke peopled the moon with winged humans and invented a variety of animals, including biped beavers from whose houses smoke issued. The hoax was so well written and so sprinkled with astronomical terms as to deceive most of the Sun's readers. A delegation came from Yale College to ask to see the original Journal of Science. The articles were reprinted in pamphlet form in Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Poe wrote that, having found the hoax anticipative of all the main points of his own "Hans Phaall, " he let that tale remain unfinished.
It has been suggested--Augustus De Morgan took it for granted in his Budget of Paradoxes (1872)--that the hoax was the work of Jean Nicolas Nicollet, French astronomer who, like Locke, came to America in 1832. There is no real evidence to support the suggestion. Locke resigned from the Sun in the autumn of 1836 and, with Joseph Price, started the New Era, a penny daily. In this he attempted to duplicate the success of the "Moon Hoax" with "The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park, " a fabrication which purported to tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer. The public, knowing Locke, was not again deceived. When the New Era failed Locke became an editorial writer on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Later he was employed in the New York custom house. He died at his home at the age of seventy years.
Achievements
Richard Adams Locke was most remembered today for his series of articles "Great Moon Hoax" that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper. They increased the Sun's circulation to more than nineteen thousand, the largest of any daily of that time.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Like most men of true imagination, Mr. Locke is a seemingly paradoxical compound of coolness and excitability. He is about five feet seven inches in height, symmetrically formed; there is an air of distinction about his whole person--the air noble of genius. His face is strongly pitted by the smallpox and, perhaps from the same cause, there is a marked obliquity in the eyes; a certain calm, clear luminousness, however, about these latter amply compensates for the defect, and the forehead is truly beautiful in its intellectuality. I am acquainted with no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke. " - Edgar Allan Poe
Connections
Locke married Esther Bowering of East Brent, probably in 1826. He had a daughter Adelaide.
