Monument To James And Anna Marie Ware, South Enclosure

635-1/0/10257 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to James and Anna Marie Ware, South enclosure

GV II Chest tomb of James Ware, c1815

LOCATION: 532673.5, 182228.9

MATERIALS: Portland stone with sandstone and brick plinth

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of a stone chest with a coped lid, moulded base, and panels. The inscriptions reveal that the family tomb commemorates both James Ware (d.1815) and his daughter Anna Marie (d.1811).

HISTORY: James Ware (1756-1815) was a surgeon and oculist. Born at Portsmouth, the son of a master shipbuilder in the Royal dockyards, he was educated at the Portsmouth grammar school, served his apprenticeship to a naval surgeon and studied at St Thomas's Hospital, London. From 1777 Ware began to act as assistant to Jonathan Wathen, a surgeon who devoted himself principally to diseases of the eye, and with whom he entered partnership in March 1778. From 1791 he began to practise on his own account, chiefly but not entirely in ophthalmic surgery. Wathen and Ware did much to raise the status of eye surgery and to free it from its previous association with quackery. Ware published a number of books on the subject, including an English translation of Baron de Wenzel's seminal Traité de la Cataracte, and was regarded by contemporaries as one of the leaders of the profession, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1802. He was also - though his modesty made him reticent on the matter - a philanthropist, a co-founder in 1788 of the Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Medical Men in London, and the founder in 1800 of a school for the indigent blind.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915). D'A. Power, 'Ware, James (1756-1815), rev. A. L. Wyman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28730, accessed 5 Jan 2010]

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to James Ware is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It is a well-preserved early-C19 chest tomb, commemorating a renowned eye surgeon of the period. * It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure.