James Montgomery
JAMES MONTGOMERY was born in Ayrshire in 1771. His parents were missionaries who died within a year of each other in the West Indies, leaving him to fend for himself in Britain. As owner of a newspaper, The Sheffield Iris, his political zeal led to two short periods of imprisonment, and their accompanying poems, Prison Amusements. He went on to compose several acclaimed long poems including The Wanderer of Switzerland, The West Indies, The World Before the Flood, Greenland and The Pelican Island, as well as many smaller verses, and almost 400 hymns. The last twenty years of his life were spent in and around Sheffield in civic work, where he is remembered as an influential citizen. He died in 1854.
