James Long (Anglican priest)

James Long (1814–1887) was an Anglo-Irish priest of the Anglican Church. A humanist, educator, evangelist, translator, essayist, philanthropist and a missionary to India, he resided in the city of Calcutta, India, from 1840 to 1872 as a member of the Church Mission Society, leading the mission at Thakurpukur.

Long was closely associated with the Calcutta School-Book Society, the Bethune Society, the Bengal Social Science Association and The Asiatic Society. He also published the English translation of the play Nil Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra, an act for which he was subsequently prosecuted for libel, fined, and briefly jailed.

James Long was born in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland in 1814, when Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom, to John Long and his wife Anne. At the age of twelve he was enrolled at the newly opened Bandon Endowed School, where he learnt "Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and English languages; Euclid, Algebra, Logic; Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Reading, Writing, History and Geography". He proved an excellent student, distinguishing himself especially in theology and the classics.

Long's application to join the Church Mission Society was accepted in 1838 and he was sent to the Church Missionary Society College, Islington. Following two years's training at Islington the Reverend Long was sent to Calcutta to join the CMS mission there. He arrived in Calcutta in 1840, briefly returning to England in 1848 to marry Emily Orme, daughter of William Orme.

From 1840 to 1848, Long taught at the school for non-Christian students run by the CMS at its premises located on Amherst Street. Returning to India a married man in 1848, he was placed in charge of the CMS mission in Thakurpukur, at the time a hamlet a day’s journey out of Calcutta in the Bengal Presidency. By 1851, Long had set up a vernacular school for boys in Thakurpukur, while his wife Emily ran a corresponding school for girls. In an 1854 letter to F. J. Halliday of the Council of Education, he boasts a roll-call of "about 100 boys, Hindu, Mussulman, and Christians." His work Bengali Proverbs (1851) has been called a significant addition to Bengali literature. He studied Bengali proverbs and folk literature for another two decades, publishing A Catalogue of Bengali Newspapers and Periodicals from 1818 to 1855 (1855), and the Descriptive Catalogue of Vernacular Books and Pamphlets which was forwarded by the Government of India to the Paris Exposition of 1867 .

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