Franz Hedrich

Franz Hedrich (1823-1895) was a German-Bohemian author and ghostwriter to Alfred Meissner.

Life
Hedrich's impressive house at 6 Rosebery Crescent, Edinburgh
The grave of Franz Hedrich, Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

He was born on 30 July 1823 near Pisek in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). His family moved Prague when his father went there as a bassoonist in the city theatres.

In the 1840s, he was introduced through Moritz Hartmann to the literary circle known as the Young Bohemians, where he befriended Alfred Meissner and began aiding in his literary work.

During the Revolutions of 1848, Hedrich was elected to the regional council in Frankfurt representing the northern Bohemian district of Tannwald in the Jizera Mountains. He was a party leader representing the extreme left in 1848/49. In 1849 he returned to Prague.[1]

He was arrested in 1852 and afterwards changed his place of residence several times during the following years. From 1871 he spent much of his time with Meissner and his rich wife, Jeannette Annie Barron. From 1883 they lived together in Lindau on Lake Constance. Hedrich consumed a large proportion of Meissner's wife's fortune. Hedrich appears to have then blackmailed Meissner, resulting in his suicide in Bregenz in 1885.[2]

In 1889, Hedrich published "Alfred Meissner - Franz Hedrich" an exposé on the arrangements which had been in place, causing a degree of scandal in the literary world. Hedrich appears to have left Europe soon after and arrives in Edinburgh in Scotland where the literary scandals were unknown.

In the late 1890s he lived at 6 Rosebery Crescent in Edinburgh's West End.[3]

On 31 October 1895 Franz Hedrich died in Edinburgh in Scotland. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard just south-west of the church.[4]

Family

Around 1893 he married Janet Anne Barron (d.1914), a widow known as Janet Bartholomew, in Edinburgh.

Publications
  • Cain (dramatic poem in three acts) (1851)
  • Lady Esther Stanhope, the Queen of Tadmor (tragedy in three acts) (1853)
  • Moccagama (drama) (1853)
  • Baron and Countess (drama), 1855
  • In the High Mountains (1862)


References
  1. Biographical lexicon on the history of the Bohemian countries.
  2. A History of the Germans in Bohemia (1881)
  3. Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1894-5
  4. http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-gravestone-of-the-author-and-poet-franz-hedrich-1823-1895-in-greyfriars-36498352.html



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