Joseph Ivimey

Joseph Ivimey (22 May 1773 – 8 February 1834) was an English Particular Baptist minister and historian.

Life He was the eldest of eight children of Charles Ivimey (died 24 October 1820), a tailor, by his wife Sarah Tilly (died 1830), and was born at Ringwood, Hampshire, on 22 May 1773. He was brought up under Arian influences, but became convinced by the Calvinism of the Particular Baptists. On 16 September 1790 he received adult baptism from John Saffery at Wimborne, Dorset.

Ivimey became a tailor at Lymington, Hampshire, where he moved on 4 June 1791. In April 1793 he sought employment in London; he finally left Lymington in 1794 for Portsea, Hampshire. Here he became an itinerant preacher. Early in 1803 he was recognised as a minister, and settled as assistant to Robert Lovegrove at Wallingford, Berkshire. He was chosen pastor of the Particular Baptist church, Eagle Street, Holborn in London, on 21 October 1804, and was ordained on 16 January 1805. It was republished in America, and formed part of an influential trend. From the 1820s onwards biographers of Milton took him as an advocate of the views of the English Dissenters, and so as a Whig. Other related biographies were those by William Carpenter, Cyrus Edmonds and Edwin Paxton Hood. Ralph Waldo Emerson's view of Milton matched quite closely what he read in Ivimey, as well as American patriotic comment of the time. In writing a lecture of 1835 on Milton, Emerson drew closely on Ivimey and the biography by Charles Symmons. Ivimey's Appendix of Animadversions on Samuel Johnson's view of Milton ended by calling him "the contracted Tory pensioner, dictionary compiler, high-church bigot, and semi-popish reviler".

Ivimey wrote also many single sermons and tracts, including funeral sermons for William Button and Daniel Humphrey (both 1821); memoirs of Caleb Vernon (1811), William Fox of the Sunday School Society (1831), and William Kiffin (1833); and anti-papal pamphlets (1819, 1828, 1829). He contributed to the Baptist Magazine from 1809, generally as "Iota"; from 1812 he was one of the editors. He edited, among other works, the 4th edition, 1827, of Persecution for Religion, by Thomas Helwys, originally published 1615; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with notes, 1821, and the 1692 Life of John Bunyan, 1832.

Family Ivimey married, first, on 7 July 1795, Sarah Bramble (died 1806), by whom he had two sons and four daughters: a son and daughter survived him; secondly, on 7 January 1808, Anne Price (died 2 January 1820), a widow (whose maiden name was Spence) with three children; by her he had no issue.

His nephew Joseph Ivimey (1845–1897) was the father of John Ivimey (1868–1961) an organist and composer.