Author: Stringer, James
Biography:
STRINGER, James (1803-34: ancestry.co.uk)
The sole source hitherto for his life was Venn’s unusually short account in ACAD which gave his father’s name, his school, and his Cambridge college, but nothing else. His collection of prose and poetry, A Cantab’s Leisure, provides some clues: his mother went to India and his father died before 1829. It therefore seems likely that he was the James Stringer baptised at Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, on 10 Apr. 1803, the only son of James Stringer and his wife Leah Tunstall, who married at St. Marylebone, London, on 19 Oct. 1802. Venn records that he went to Charles Burney’s Madras School at Greenwich and then proceeded to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1822 and was readmitted in 1826. No degrees are recorded. He failed to secure the Chancellor’s poetry prize with “The Invasion of Russia” (1828). His father was an architect who worked in Madras and died in delirium (fever) on 5 June 1822, at Vepery. This may account for his not remaining in Cambridge. His mother died at Kilpauk on 29 Mar. 1830. He married Augusta Sarah Wilkinson (1807-1862), 12 December 1829, at St. Pancras Old Church, London. They had two daughters, Fanny Augusta and Matilda Sophia. His occupation is unknown but a newspaper reported his death at an unspecified location as 5 Aug. 1834 and identified him as the son of a Madras engineer, leaving a widow and two infant daughters. He was buried at St. Peter’s, Walworth, Surrey (now South London), on 8 Aug. 1834, aged 31, with his address given as North Street. In 1837, his widow married a hatter and the two daughters became milliners and haberdashers before marrying. It is unclear what happened to family finances. As master bricklayer and architect, his grandfather and father are likely to have amassed wealth in India. His mother must have had difficulty accessing his father’s estate and gone out to India in 1829 where she died. (ancestry.co.uk 23 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 23 Apr. 2022; Asiatic Journal Dec. 1822, 612, and Oct. 1830, 82; Reading Mercury 18 Aug. 1834) AA