Every Christmas Eve, churches around the world sing the hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” without knowing who wrote it. Behind it stands James Montgomery, an English poet who knew loss at a young age and turned pain, imprisonment, and indignation into verses that still echo today.
Born in 1771 in Irvine, Scotland, he was the son of a Moravian Church pastor. In 1783 his parents left as missionaries for Barbados, in the Caribbean, leaving the boy at the Moravian School in Fulneck, England, to be trained for ministry.
The separation proved final. The family went on to serve also in Tobago, where his mother died in 1790. His father died in Barbados the following year. Orphaned before he turned twenty, Montgomery would carry for the rest of his life the memory of parents who gave their own lives to missionary work.
In 1792 he moved to Sheffield and began working for a reformist newspaper run by Joseph Gales. When Gales left the country due to political persecution in 1794, Montgomery took over as editor and renamed the periodical the Sheffield Iris, which he would direct for more than three decades.
The newspaper demanded justice without mincing words, and that came at a cost. Montgomery was imprisoned twice, in 1795 and 1796, for publishing texts considered seditious, among them a poem about the fall of the Bastille and an account of a magistrate’s violence against a popular protest. Months in York Castle did not silence him.
Once free, he devoted part of his pen to the abolitionist cause. His 1809 poem “The West Indies” denounced the slave trade in verse, celebrating the abolition decreed by England two years earlier and giving literary form to the indignation of an entire Christian generation.
At the same time, he was writing hymns, some 400 over his lifetime. “Angels from the Realms of Glory” appeared at Christmas 1816; “Prayer Is the Soul’s Sincere Desire” arose from a request for a treatise on prayer; “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed” was first sung among the Moravians of Fulneck and later recited at a missionary meeting in Liverpool.
Not everything he wrote withstood the test of time. Part of his extensive poetic output drew harsh criticism even in his own day, including from the influential Edinburgh Review, and of the hundreds of hymns he composed, only a few dozen remain in use today. It is for a handful of texts, not his entire body of work, that his name lives on.
He died in Sheffield in 1854, given a public funeral paid for by the city that saw him as its moral conscience. A poet who was imprisoned for telling the truth and the son of missionaries who died in the field, he left in his hymns a call to worship, justice, and mission that has crossed borders and centuries.