Author: Imray, J. W.
Biography:
IMRAY, James William (b 1801: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 14 Nov. 1801 in Brick Lane, East London, and baptised on 6 Dec. at Christ Church, Spitalfields, the fifth of six children of James Imray (1743-1814), baker, and his wife Mary Pinn, who had married in 1784 at St. George’s in the East, Wapping. Nothing is known of his education. He married Mary Sitch (1800-76) on 1 Sept. 1823 at St. Martin in the Fields. They had two daughters, Mary Ann and Emily Eliza. At some point in the 1820s he seems to have come into contact with the radical atheist Richard Carlile (1790-1843), who ran a printshop combined with a School of Free Discussion and Infidel Library Reading Room at 62 Fleet Street, and was frequently imprisoned for blasphemy. He began to contribute poems to Carlile’s journal The Lion (1828-29): “An Infidel’s Ode to his Lyre” (9 May 1828), “A Word or Two to Christians” (25 Jul. 1828), “Reminiscences; or, the Early Life of Somebody” (1 Aug. 1828), “The Solitaires” (8 Aug. 1828), “Lines on My Twenty-Sixth Birthday” (21 Nov. 1828), and “An Ode to the Memory of Lord Byron” (10 Oct. 1828). The work listed here, Altamont (1828), first appeared in The Lion(13 Jun. 1828) and was later published by Carlile. In 1829 Carlile called him “unquestionably a poetic and philosophic genius” (Lion 3: 138). Imray was a bookbinder up until the 1840s when he had several spells in Castle Lane Workhouse, Westminster (1843-48). On his last discharge, the Board of Guardians advanced funds for him to set up as a fish-seller. Thereafter there is no trace of him. His daughter Emily Eliza is recorded with her grandmother, Martha Sitch, in the Long Acre, Covent Garden, almhouses in the 1851 Census and died there in 1853. Her sister Mary Ann married a landscape painter in 1847. His wife also lived in an almshouse and died in the Islington workhouse infirmary in 1876. (ancestry.co.uk 12 Jul. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 12 Jul. 2022; Richard Carlile, The Lion [1828-9]; Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers [1889], 183) AA
Other Names:
- I. W. Imray