Author: James, Paul Moon
Biography:
JAMES, Paul Moon (1780-1854: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 16 Jan. 1780 at Castle Street, Bristol, the sixth of eight children, to William James (1739-1806), originally a grocer and woollen-draper but later an umbrella maker, and his wife Priscilla Moon (1743-1813), who were both Quakers and had married in 1766. They died in London and were buried at Bunhill Fields. He left Bristol for Birmingham in 1805 to take up a post in a bank and married Olivia Lloyd (1783-1854), daughter of a wealthy Quaker banker and sister of Charles Lloyd (q.v.) on 3 Aug. 1808. The couple had no children. James was still active in Bristol and with his old friend Edward Hogg (1783-1848) edited the posthumous collection of William Isaac Roberts's (q.v.) Poems and Letters (1811), and corresponded with Southey (q.v.) concerning subscribers. While in Birmingham, he published Poems (1821). He remained there for over twenty years, working for the bank Galton and Co. (later going into partnership with its founder, Samuel Galton, to form Galton and James). His one other publication was professional, A Summary Statement of the One Pound Note Question (1828). In 1834 he was baptised into the Established Church. He moved to Manchester in 1836 to run the Manchester and Salford Bank which he did until his death. He issued a revised and shorter edition of Poems (Manchester 1841) and privately printed but did not publish a final edition, Poems (Manchester 1853) which contained new autobiographical material and his later poems. Although recorded in two nineteenth-century catalogues, no copy has been located and the autobiographical information is known only through quotation by Proctor (1880). It contained his late poem, "King Coal at the Great Exhibition," first printed in the Manchester Guardian on 30 July 1851. He died of a heart attack at Pendleton, Manchester, on 13 July 1854. His wife Olivia died later that year at their other home in the Lake District, Crag Brow, Bowness. (ancestry.co.uk 13 May 2021; findmypast.co.uk 13 May 2021; Romantic Circles [Southey Correspondence]; Cumberland Pacquet 12 Dec. 1854; Ellezer Edwards, Personal Recollections of Birmingham [1877], 57-8; R. W. Proctor, Memorials of Byegone Manchester [1880], 13-20; John Martin, Bibliographical Catalogue of Privately Printed Books [1854], 554; Friends' Books [1893] 206; Ruth I. Aldrich, Charles Lamb Society Bulletin Apr. 1974, 124-6) AA
Other Names:
- P. M. James