Author: Rodgers, James
Biography:
RODGERS, James (1796-1840: Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine)
He was born at Nottingham on 21 Apr. 1796 to a father who died young and to a mother who, according to his biographer, was devoid of religious convictions. Having been “brought up to the profession of music,” he supplemented his primary income—he was a shoemaker in Broadway, Westminster—by giving musical accompaniment at balls to “great pecuniary advantage.” It was an activity he later believed to be deeply shameful. On 25 Dec. 1814 at St Mary, Lambeth, the poet married Elizabeth Ann Marston (1796-1857), with whom he had two children. His interest in teaching infants followed his 1818 conversion at the Romney Terrace Wesleyan Chapel, Westminster, where he taught Sunday school. He moved his shoemaking business to Chelsea in about 1821; joined the Sloane Terrace Wesleyan Chapel; and at an evangelical teachers’ training school obtained instruction under Thomas Bilby (q.v.). He disposed of his profitable business to become in 1826 master of a Church of England infant school at Cheltenham. The appointment was brief. His attendance at a Methodist chapel gave “great offence” and he was dismissed from his post in 1828. In Dec. 1833, the evangelical vicar of Crickhowell, Wales, the Rev. Henry Vaughan, invited him to take charge of the local infant and juvenile school. Two years later, upon Vaughan’s enthusiastic recommendation, the non-denominational Mico Charity (now the Mico Foundation) appointed him teacher and sent him to the West Indies to minister to the children of emancipated slaves. With “zeal and unwearied diligence in the cause of religion,” he was to instruct the children in “humility, prudence, and deference to those in authority.” He arrived with his family at Jamaica on 1 Sept. 1836, took charge of the Mico Institution in St Thomas the Vale East and St Mary, Kingston; moved to Bath in the parish of St Thomas in the East—where he established an infant school for seventy children and an evening and Sunday school for two hundred; and was appointed general inspector of the Mico Schools in the Jamaica county of Surrey. The poet died of yellow fever on 23 Aug. 1837. (J. Edney, “Memoir of Mr. James Rodgers,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 19 [Apr. 1840], 273-82; H. Vaughan, Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Henry Vaughan [1862], 88; P. McCann, F. A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement [2016], 99, 100, 184) JC