William Josiah Irons

William Josiah Irons was an English Anglican priest, theologian, hymn writer, translator, and editor. Born at Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, in 1812, he was the son of Independent minister and hymn writer Joseph Irons. He studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1833 and later receiving advanced degrees, including the D.D. in 1854. Ordained in the Church of England in 1835, he served a succession of parishes and church appointments, including St Peter’s, Walworth, Brompton, and St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London.

Irons became a Prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1860 and delivered the University of Oxford’s Bampton Lectures in 1870, later published as Christianity as Taught by St Paul. His extensive writings addressed doctrine, biblical interpretation, ecclesiology, social questions, and the controversies of the Victorian Church of England.

In hymnody, Irons is especially remembered for his English translation of the medieval Latin Dies irae, prepared in 1848 and subsequently revised in hymnals, and for his Psalms and Hymns for the Church, issued in several enlarged editions from the 1870s onward. His hymn writing combines biblical eschatology, resurrection hope, and the formal diction characteristic of nineteenth-century Anglican worship.