(born 27 April 1811; died aged 52, therefore in 1863 or 1864), clergyman and author. Born in Banffshire, Scotland. Parents: James Innes Knight and his wife Ann Cuthbert Rae. In the year of his birth his parents took him to Canada. They later returned to Britain, then went back to Canada, where his father died. Robert was sent to the Royal Grammar School, Montreal. “In his childhood his [Robert’s] health had not been very good, but being sent to stay with his uncle, Dr. Rae [John Rae the economist], in the Scotch settlement of Glengarry, he there mixed freely with the young Highlanders in their games, laying in a stock of health, and acquiring a taste for athletic sports which was never afterwards lost.” He became a Church of England clergyman in 1836. Many details of his life remain obscure and to some degree in conflict. But if we assume that he was married more than once, we can reconcile the 1841 date of his son’s birth with the statement that Robert married (this being, therefore, not his first marriage) in 1847. He settled in England, perhaps in connection with his marriage or marriages, and in that country he was a clergyman and schoolmaster and the author of books on St. Paul (1854) and on Scriptural Predestination (also 1854) and The Plurality of Worlds: an Essay, 2nd edn. (London, Eng., 1878). His son Robert Skakel Knight, who wrote an impassioned biographical sketch of his father, published as an introduction to the work last named, complains there that his father was neglected by the Church of England authorities with the result that he was forced to accept a humiliating and exhausting life in marginal clerical roles and as a teacher and book reviewer, and never obtained a tolerable clerical position till almost the end of his life.

Aforementioned biog. sketch by his son (QF) * James, I, 127 (biog. sketch), & index * R. Warren James, “John Rae: the Lost Letters,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 23:3 (Sept. 2001) 343-352