Author: White, James
Biography:
WHITE, James (1803-62: ODNB)
Pseudonyms Q.U.I.Z.; a country curate
No birth record has been located; dates on offer vary only from Mar. 1803 (ODNB) to 1804 (1851 census). White was the son of John White of Dunmore, Stirling, Scotland, and his wife Elizabeth Logan. He studied at Glasgow University before entering Pembroke College, Oxford, at the age of 20 in Dec. 1823 (matric. 1823, BA 1827) and receiving ordination as deacon and priest at Oxford in 1827. His first published work Mary Gray was a jeu d’esprit written when he was an undergraduate in response to a challenge to produce a “gross and palpable imitation” of a well-known poet (George Crabbe, q.v.). In Apr. 1829 he married Rosa Hill at Godshill, Hampshire, and they had seven children together. She owned some property at Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight. After five years as a curate in Suffolk White published The Village Poor-House (1832) to counteract what he saw as the “apathy” of even well-meaning people with regard to “the sufferings of the poor.” He was a strong advocate of universal literacy. GM commented approvingly of that poem that it was not like Crabbe at all, but rather like “Cowper’s poems in rhyme.” In 1833 White became the vicar of Loxley, Warwickshire, but in 1839 he resigned that living to retire to Bonchurch, where he lived “without cure of souls” and established himself as a man of letters. Charles Dickens was a good friend. White wrote for the stage a series of Scottish historical tragedies (1845-47), besides translations of Schiller (q.v.), a joint biography of Scott and Burns, qq.v. (1858), and some historical works including the highly regarded Eighteen Christian Centuries (1858) and a History of France (1859). He died on 26 Mar. 1862 after a short illness, described in a newspaper report as an “internal inflammation, which suddenly and unexpectedly took an unfavourable turn.” (ODNB 4 Jan. 2025; findmypast.com 4 Jan. 2025; GM July 1834, 72-3; Fife Herald 1 Apr. 1862; Alumni Oxonienses; CCEd 4 Jan. 2025) HJ