The Reverend James Augustus Hessey, D.C.L, 'Merchant Taylors' Headmaster and Clergyman

The Reverend James Augustus Hessey, D.C.L. (1814-1892), Headmaster and Church of England Clergyman, was born in London, the son of a bookseller and printer. Educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College, Oxford, Hessey was a fellow of his college from 1832 to 1846, where he gained his D.C.L. In 1845, Hessey was appointed headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School, in which capacity he initiated what was described in F.W.M. Draper's Four Centuries of Merchant Taylors' School, 1561-1961 (1962) as an 'unspectacular modernisation.' In 1847, he married. From 1850 to 1879, he was a preacher of Gray's Inn and was appointed to the stall of Oxgate, in St Paul's Cathedral. In 1865, he was chosen as Grinfield lecturer on the Septuagint, and in 1870, he was nominated as Boyle lecturer. Hessey resigned from Merchant Taylors' in 1870 and, in 1875, he was made Archdeacon of Middlesex. Towards the end of his career, he was a select preacher at the University of Cambridge and was sometime Chairman of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

He is full of reading, ready beyond belief with citations of authority.... He holds it to be an argument that Christianity must be true because it produces good effects.... He is a highly respectable man, with great character for piety, earnestness, and self-denial.

Vanity Fair, Men of the Day, No. 89, 1874.