James Montgomery was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 editor

Editing

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...

, hymnwriter and poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

. He was particularly associated with humanitarian causes such as the campaigns to abolish slavery and to end the exploitation of child chimney sweeps.

Early life and poetry

Montgomery was born at Irvine

Irvine, North Ayrshire

Irvine is a new town on the coast of the Firth of Clyde in North Ayrshire, Scotland. According to 2007 population estimates, the town is home to 39,527 inhabitants, making it the biggest settlement in North Ayrshire....

 in Ayrshire

Ayrshire

Ayrshire is a registration county, and former administrative county in south-west Scotland, United Kingdom, located on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. Its principal towns include Ayr, Kilmarnock and Irvine. The town of Troon on the coast has hosted the British Open Golf Championship twice in the...

, the son of a pastor and missionary of the Moravian Brethren. He was sent to be trained for the ministry at the Moravian School at Fulneck

Fulneck School

Fulneck school is a small, independent boarding school, situated in the Fulneck Moravian Settlement, in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, England. It provides education for pupils between the ages of 3 and 18.-History:...

, near Leeds

Leeds

Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...

, while his parents left for the West Indies, where both died within a year of each other. At Fulneck, secular studies were banned, but James nevertheless found means of borrowing and reading a good deal of poetry and made ambitious plans to write epics of his own. Failing school, he was apprenticed to a baker in Mirfield

Mirfield

Mirfield is a small town and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, England. It is located on the A644 road between Brighouse and Dewsbury...

, then to a store-keeper at Wath-upon-Dearne

Wath-upon-Dearne

Wath-upon-Dearne is a small town on the south side of the Dearne Valley in the historic county of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, lying 5 miles north of Rotherham, almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It has a population...

. After further adventures, including an unsuccessful attempt to launch himself into a literary career in London, he moved to Sheffield

Sheffield

Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...

 in 1792 as assistant to Joseph Gales, auctioneer, bookseller and printer of the Sheffield Register, who introduced Montgomery into the local Lodge of Oddfellows

Oddfellows

The name Oddfellows refers to a number of friendly societies and fraternal organisations operating in the United Kingdom. It also refers to a number of Lodges with histories dating back to the 18th century. These various organisations were set up to protect and care for their members and...

. In 1794, Gales left England to avoid political prosecution and Montgomery took the paper in hand, changing its name to the Sheffield Iris.

These were times of political repression and he was twice imprisoned on charges of sedition. The first time was in 1795 for printing a poem celebrating the fall of the Bastille; the second in 1796 was for criticising a magistrate for forcibly dispersing a political protest in Sheffield. Turning the experience to some profit, in 1797 he published a pamphlet of poems written during his captivity as Prison Amusements. For some time the 'Iris' was the only newspaper in Sheffield; but beyond the ability to produce fairly creditable articles from week to week, Montgomery was devoid of the journalistic faculties which would have enabled him to take advantage of his position. Other newspapers arose to fill the place which his might have occupied and in 1825 he sold it on to local bookseller John Blackwell.

Meanwhile Montgomery was continuing to write poetry and achieved some fame with The Wanderer of Switzerland (1806), a poem in six parts written in 7-syllable cross-rhymed quatrain

Quatrain

A quatrain is a stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines of verse. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China; and, continues into the 21st century, where it is...

s. The poem addressed the French annexation of Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 and quickly went through two editions. When it was denounced the following year in the conservative Edinburgh Review

Edinburgh Review

The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur from Publilius Syrus.In 1984, the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review,...

as a poem that would be speedily forgotten, Lord Byron came to its defence in the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Nevertheless, within eighteen months a fourth impression of 1500 copies was issued from the very presses that had printed the critique and several more were to follow. This success brought Montgomery a commission from the printer Bowyer to write a poem on the abolition of the slave trade, to be published along with other poems on the subject in a handsome illustrated volume. The subject appealed at once to the poet's philanthropic enthusiasm and to his own touching associations with the West Indies. The four-part poem in heroic couplet

Heroic couplet

A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine. Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in...

s appeared in 1809 as The West Indies.

Montgomery also used heroic couplets for The World before the Flood (1812), a piece of historical reconstruction in ten cantos. Following this he turned to attacking the lottery in Thoughts on Wheels (1817) and taking up the cause of the chimney sweeps' apprentices in The Climbing Boys' Soliloquies. His next major poem was Greenland (1819), a poem in five cantos of heroic couplets. This was prefaced by a description of the ancient Moravian church, its 18th century revival and mission to Greenland

Greenland

Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...

 in 1733. The poem was noted for the beauty of its descriptions:

The moon is watching in the sky; the stars

Are swiftly wheeling on their golden cars;

Ocean, outstretcht with infinite expanse,

Serenely slumbers in a glorious trance;

The tide, o’er which no troubled spirits breathe,

Reflects a cloudless firmament beneath,

Where poised as in the centre of a sphere

A ship above and ship below appear;

A double image pictured on the deep,

The vessel o’er its shadow seems to sleep;

Yet, like the host of heaven, that never rest,

With evanescent motion to the west,

The pageant glides through loneliness and night,

And leaves behind a rippling wake of light.

(Canto 1, lines 1-14)

Later career

After retiring from newspaper editorship, Montgomery's only other long poem is The Pelican Island (1828), nine cantos of descriptive blank verse

Blank verse

Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

 of which he was scarcely a master. But Montgomery himself expected that his name would live, if at all, in his hymns. Some of these, such as "Hail to the Lord's Anointed", "Prayer is the Soul's Sincere Desire" and the carol "Angels from the Realms of Glory

Angels from the Realms of Glory

"Angels from the Realms of Glory" is a Christmas carol written by English poet James Montgomery. It was first printed in the Sheffield Iris on Christmas Eve 1816, though it only began to be sung in churches after its 1825 reprinting in the Montgomery collection The Christian Psalmist and in the...

", are still sung. The earliest of his hymns dates from his days in Wath on Dearne and he added to their number over the years. The main boost came when the Revd James Cotterill arrived at the parish church (now the cathedral) in 1817. He had compiled and published A Selection of Psalms and Hymns Adapted to the Services of the Church of England in 1810 but to his disappointment and concern he found that his new parishioners did not take kindly to using it. He therefore enlisted the help of James Montgomery to help him revise the collection and improved it by adding some hymns of the poet's own composition. This new edition, meeting with the approval of the Archbishop of York (and eventually of the parishioners of St Paul’s), was finally published in 1820. In 1822 Montgomery published his own Songs of Zion: Being Imitations of Psalms, the first of several more collections of hymns. During his life he composed some 400, although less than a hundred are current today.

From 1835 until his death Montgomery lived at The Mount

The Mount, Sheffield

The Mount is a Grade II* listed building situated on Glossop Road in the Broomhill area of Sheffield in England. It stands just over 2 km west of the city centre. It is a neoclassical building which was originally a terrace of eight houses but since the 1950s has been used for commercial office...

on Glossop Road in Sheffield. He was very well regarded in the city and played an active part in its philanthropic and religious life. Following his death in 1854, he was honoured by a public funeral. In 1861 a monument designed by John Bell (1811-1895) was erected over his grave in the Sheffield cemetery at the cost of £1000, raised by public subscription at the initiative of the Sheffield Sunday School Union, of which he was among the founding members. On its granite pedestal is inscribed 'Here lies interred, beloved by all who knew him, the Christian poet, patriot, and philanthropist. Wherever poetry is read, or Christian hymns sung, in the English language, 'he being dead, yet speaketh' by the genius, piety and taste embodied in his writings.' There are also extracts from his poems "Prayer" and "The Grave". After it fell into disrepair the statue was moved to the precinct of Sheffield Cathedral in 1971, where there is also a memorial window.

Elsewhere in Sheffield there are various streets named after Montgomery and a Grade II listed drinking fountain on Broad Lane. The meeting hall of the Sunday Schools Union (now known as the Sheffield Christian Education Council), situated in Surrey Street, was renamed in his honour in 1886; it also houses a small theatre which also bears his name. Elsewhere, Wath on Dearne, flattered by being called 'the queen of villages' in his work, has repaid the compliment by naming after him a community hall, a street and a square. His birthplace in Irving was renamed Montgomery House after he paid the town a return visit in 1841 but has since been demolished.

Other works

• Verses to the Memory of the Late Richard Reynolds, of Bristol, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816
• Poetical Works, four editions in 1828, 1836, 1841, and 1854
• ed. The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend and Climbing-Boy's Album, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824. Garland facsimile, intro. by Donald H. Reiman, 1978
• ed. The Christian Psalmist; or, Hymns, Selected and Original, Glasgow: Chalmers and Collins, 1825. 6th edn. 1829
• ed. The Christian poet; or, selections in verse on sacred subjects, Wm Collins, Glasgow, 1825
• Original Hymns For Public, Private, and Social Devotion, London: Longman, Brown, Green, 1853
• Sacred Poems and Hymns: for Public and Private Devotion, New York: Appleton, 1854
• Prose by a Poet, 2 vols, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824
• Lectures on Poetry and General Literature, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833
• A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America; and the State of the Cotton Manufacture of that Country Contrasted and Compared with that of Great Britain; with Comparative Estimates of the Cost of Manufacturing in both Countries, Glasgow: J. Niven, 1840

External links

• The 1854 illustrated edition of Montgomery's poems
• http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-Rs6AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+holland+%22sheffield+park%22&source=bl&ots=ZU8tzsyPfz&sig=vmbC_Hc5LzVUph-UQU0PCrdyJtY&hl=en&ei=lItWTP7ZFs2v4Abyzs2mBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBgQ6AEwATgU#v=onepage&q=john%20holland%20%22sheffield%20park%22&f=falseJohn Holland and James Everett, Memoirs of the life and writings of James Montgomery: including selections from his correspondence, remains in prose and verse, and conversations on various subjects, London, 1855]