Author: Ireland, John
Biography:
IRELAND, John (1749-1808: ODNB)
John Ireland was born at the Trench Farm, near Wem, Shropshire, the son of a farmer, Thomas Ireland (1717-1795), and his wife, Sarah Holland (1720-1764). She was a daughter the Rev. Thomas Holland, minister of Wem, and a great-granddaughter of the nonconformist divine Philip Henry. Ireland was educated by his maternal uncle, the Rev. Philip Holland, a dissenting minister at Bolton, Lancashire. Following a brief period in London, he apprenticed with a Shrewsbury watchmaker, Isaac Wood. Ireland is said to have married at a young age. His wife probably was Alice Whittle (b 1750) of Prescot parish, who, on 20 Apr. 1767, married “John Ireland Watch-toolmaker” at Rainsford Chapel, Lancashire. From as early as 1769, he had a shop in Maiden Lane, St Paul, Covent Garden, where he manufactured high-quality watches and clocks (bankrupt 1780). At meetings of the Shandean Club in Maiden Lane, and at the Three Feathers coffee-house on Leicester Square, in the 1770s and 1780s he socialized with actors, writers, and artists, including John Henderson (his particular friend) and John Taylor (qq.v.), Thomas Gainsborough, John Mortimer Hamilton, and others. In addition to The Emigrant; a Poem (1785), he published Letters and Poems by the late Mr. John Henderson. With Anecdotes of his Life (1786). His primary contributions to literature are his intelligently edited books on William Hogarth: Illustrated Hogarth (1791); and A Supplement to Illustrated Hogarth (1798). The Hogarth books sold rapidly, were enthusiastically reviewed, and continue to be respected by curators and scholars. In the 1790s, he distributed his books from his residence at 3 Poet’s Corner, Old Palace Yard. Ailing and in debt, in 1800 he moved to Knightsbridge where he lived at 47 Hans Place, Sloane Street. The 5gns granted him in Apr. 1808 by the RLF was sent to an address in Steward Street, Spitalfields. Later that year, he was living in the vicinity of Birmingham, where he died. A lifelong nonconformist, he was buried on 20 Nov. 1808 at the Old Meeting House, Birmingham. A contemporary described Ireland as “a thin, consumptive-looking man, with a soft, drawling manner of speaking, that savoured strongly of affectation” (Raimbach, 20). (ODNB 20 June 2023; RLF file 218; ancestry.com 20 June 2023; GM [1808], 1189; J. Taylor, Records of My Life [1832], 1:247; A. Raimbach, Memoirs and Recollections [1843]; Salopian Shreds and Patches 27 Jan. 1875, 73) JC
Other Names:
- J. Ireland