Author: Irwin, Eyles
Biography:
IRWIN, Eyles (1751-1817: ODNB)
He was born in Calcutta and baptised on 23 Feb. 1751, the son of Captain James Irwin of Roscommon, Ireland, and his wife Sarah Palmer (formerly Beale, later Mapletoft), who had married in Calcutta in 1745. He received a classical education at the academy in Chiswick of Dr. William Rose (1719-86), the editor of Robert Dodsley’s Preceptor, and in London. He joined the EIC (writer 1766, factor 1774, junior merchant 1776) and in 1771 was appointed surveyor of the Black Town and superintendent of Madras lands. He was suspended in 1776 for supporting the Governor of Madras, George Pigot, in a dispute with the Council. He returned to England in 1777 via Arabia and Egypt to seek reinstatement and redress and published an account of his journey, A Series of Adventures in the Course of A Voyage (1780)--the third edition of which (1787) included an account of his return journey via Aleppo, Baghdad, and Busrah in 1780-1. Reinstated as senior merchant, in 1783 he was appointed superintendent of revenue for the Tinnevelly and Madura districts in southern India. He returned to England in 1785 due to ill health, served briefly in China in 1792, and stood unsuccessfully for a directorship in 1795, whereafter he retired and devoted himself to literature. He married Honoria Brooke (1751-1848), daughter of the Rev. William Brooke, on 12 May 1778, at Granard, co. Longford, Ireland. They had five children, including the poet Frances Sally Caulfeild (q.v.). He died on 12 Aug. 1817, at Clifton, Bristol, and was buried there. He also published two short elegies: on the Fall of Saragossa (1808, no copy located) and on the death of his son, James Brook Irwin, at Fort Erie, Canada, in 1814 (copy at Trinity College Dublin). Other poems were published in the Poetical Register. An unpublished manuscript, The Ruins of Madura, or the Hindoo-garden (c.1790) is at Yale (Osborn c234). His topographical odes and elegies from the Derwent to the Maduras are almost unique in their geographical range for the literature of the period, and his Eastern Eclogues (1780) treat Indian culture under British rule sympathetically. (ODNB 28 Jan. 2024; DNB; ancestry.co.uk 28 Jan. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 28 Jan. 2024; EM Mar. 1789, 179-81; GM Jan. 1818, 93-4; Annual Biography and Obituary [1818], 2: 221-36; Watkins, 174; London Courier 5 Sept. 1817) AA