Author: Sayers, James
Biography:
SAYERS, James (1748-1823: ODNB)
James Sayers (alt. Sayer) was baptized on 31 Aug. 1748 at St Nicholas church, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the son of William Sayers (1715-1780?), master of a trading vessel, and his wife, Sarah (d July 1809). On 25 Mar. 1764, Sayers commenced a five-year clerkship at Great Yarmouth with attorney Thomas Clowes. His failed attachment to a local girl, and a substantial inheritance from his father, motivated his move, in 1780, to London. On 18 Nov. 1789, he commenced an apprenticeship with Craven Ord, attorney of the Exchequer Office; on 1 July 1797, he entered Staple Inn; and, from 1804, he managed a stream of attorney’s business at offices in London and Great Yarmouth. Sayers began publishing drawings in the early 1770s, and, in the 1780s, satirical caricatures. The Whig leader, Charles James Fox, was the subject of his most famous drawing, “Carlo Khan’s Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street” (5 Dec. 1783). For supporting William Pitt he was granted sinecure appointments for life. They were worth, together, more than £1,000 per annum: Marshal, Court of Exchequer, £180; Receiver, Sixpenny Writ Duty, £100; Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer, £500; King’s Remembrancer, £170; and cursitor in Chancery for Devon and Kent, between £250 and £600. His sister, Elizabeth (bap. 4 Oct. 1750, d unmarried, 25 Aug. 1839, at Abington Pigotts Rectory, Cambridge), is the subject of his 1804 comic poem, The Foundling-Chapel Brawl (2d part, 1805). One of his published poems, An Heroic Epistle to Mr Winsor (1808), is often misattributed to William Gifford (q.v.). From 1790, perhaps earlier, he lived with his mother and sister at 10 Great Ormond Street, Queen’s Square. In about 1817, he moved with his sister to 34 Curzon Street, Mayfair, where he died, unmarried, on 20 Apr. 1823. He was the cousin, friend, executor, and, with his sister, the primary legatee of Frank Sayers (q.v.). Among his close friends were John Taylor (q.v.) and Isaac Reed. The folio of drawings he presented in 1818 to his friend Robert Appleyard is preserved in the National Portrait Gallery. The album of drawings he gave to Sarah Banks, the sister of Sir Joseph Banks, is in the British Museum. (ODNB 6 Apr. 2023; freereg.org.uk 6 Apr. 2023; ancestry.com 19 Apr. 2023; Examiner, 1 Sept. 1839; Dawson Turner, The Perlustration of a Market Town [1849], 72; E. Williams, Staple Inn [1906]) JC