Author: Bird, James
Biography:
BIRD, James (1788-1839: ODNB)
He was born on 10 Nov. 1788 at Deerbolt’s Hall, Earl Stonham, Suffolk, the eighth of nine children of Samuel Bird (1749-1826), a farmer, and his wife Anne Wink (1748-1837), who had married in 1772. He was educated at the local village school and briefly at Needham Market Grammar School but appears to have been largely self-educated. He was apprenticed to a miller and worked as one until about 1820 when he started up in business as a bookseller, stationer, and druggist. He married Emma Hardacre (1792-1872), a bookseller’s daughter, on 23 Oct. 1816 at Hadleigh. They went on to have sixteen children but with three or four infant deaths. He contributed early poems to the Suffolk Chronicle edited by the eccentric anti-jacobin Thomas Harral (q.v.), who later wrote two accounts of his life. His works were popular in their day and were considered “historical novels, or historical pictures in verse” (Selections, xiii), but have never been reassessed. The Emigrants (1833), portraying the depressed state of British agriculture during the war and its effects on ordinary people, is worth another look. He also contributed to the Annuals. He died of consumption on 26 Mar. 1839 at Yoxford, where he was buried. He had anticipated his fate in a final poem, “A Word at Parting with the Year 1838” (Selections, 210-15). (ODNB 13 Jun. 2022; Copsey, 1: 52; ancestry.co.uk 13 Jun. 2022; Boyle, 27-8; Thomas Harral, “Memoir of the Late James Bird” prefixed to Selections from the Poems [1839], xi-xviii; “The Late James Bird and his Writings,” Aldine Magazine [1839] 1: 297-307; GM May 1839, 551; Ipswich Journal 30 Mar. 1839; GRO death cert; Letters, Literary Mss, Memoir of his Life, Ipswich RO, HD 497) AA