James Boyer

Who was James Boyer?

The Reverend James Boyer was the tyrannical headmaster of Christ’s Hospital from the years 1778 to 1799.

These turbulent years at the end of the 18th century were when three of the school's most famous students attended: Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Boyer’s personality was immortalized in the writing of all three authors. Hunt made several references to Boyer in his autobiography, Lamb wrote of him in his two famous essays concerning his time at Christ’s Hospital, and Coleridge referred to him his Biographia Literaria.

Through the work of these three authors in particular Boyer became infamous for his capricious and unpredictable brutality reminiscent of the dreaded Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. Most famously, Boyer knocked one of Hunt’s teeth out by throwing a heavy copy of Homer at his head from across the room.

Lamb wrote this about the arbitrary violence of Boyer:

The arbitrary nature of Boyer’ tyranny is illustrated in a story Hunt tells of a boy referred to simply as C__ with whom the master took “every opportunity to be severe with him, nobody knew why.