James Losh

He was the second son of John Losh of Woodside, Wreay in Cumberland, born on 10 July 1763; John Losh (1756–1814), his elder brother, was father of Sara Losh,{{cite ODNB|id=38774|first=Charles|last=Plouviez|title=Losh, James}} while William Losh was a younger brother.{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|pages=x–xi|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}} His mother was Catherine née Liddell, and Joseph Liddell the industrialist and banker was his uncle.Diaries vol. i, p. xiii

With his brother John, Losh had instruction from the local curate, William Gaskin, and then went to the academy of John Dawson. He was trained up for university at school in Penrith, and matriculated in 1782 at Trinity College, Cambridge.{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|page=15|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}}{{acad|id=LS782J|name=Losh, James}} John Tweddell was a close friend from college, as was John Bell the barrister.{{cite book|author1=John Tweddell|author2=Robert Tweddell|title=Remains of the Late John Tweddell|url=https://archive.org/details/remainslatejohn00twedgoog|year=1815|page=[https://archive.org/details/remainslatejohn00twedgoog/page/n101 27]}}Diaries vol. i, p. xvii Another friend from this time was Charles Warren.Jeffrey Smith, James Losh: his ideas in relation to his circle and his time (PDF), at p. 29. EThOS download, http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.245210

Losh graduated B.A. in 1786, and M.A. in 1789. He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1789, and was called to the bar. His family's choice of career for him had been the church, rather than the law. But at Cambridge Losh had become a Unitarian, a change of view that has been attributed to William Frend.[http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/journal/issues/18(1999).pdf Jeffrey Smith, James Losh: Dissenter and Reformer, Enlightenment and Dissent No. 18 (1999)] at p. 18

In 1791 Losh made himself conspicuous by publishing an edition of Areopagitica by John Milton.{{cite book|author=Juliet Barker|title=Wordsworth: A Life|page=125|date=13 October 2009|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-185021-9}} He held republican views and joined a club in Carlisle for the like-minded. Even if inconclusively, he was the subject, with his brother John and others, of an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace. In the second part of 1792, he went to revolutionary Paris. In an uncomfortable visit, he attended the National Convention, and saw Danton speak. But he felt under threat, conceived a dislike for Robespierre and the disorder, and returned to England after the September Massacres.{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|pages=28–9|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}}

The Friends to the Liberty of the Press was set up on 18 December 1792, and in March 1793 Losh supported its dinner for Frend, who had been expelled as Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, for a pamphlet Peace and Union.{{cite book|author=Jenny Graham|year=2000|title=The Nation, the Law, and the King: Reform Politics in England, 1789–1799|volume=1|publisher=University Press of America|isbn=978-0-7618-1484-9|page=442}}{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=suS_sWzvHC4C&pg=PT66|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1|page=66}} In 1793, for the Society of the Friends of the People, Losh worked with George Tierney on the drafting of a reform petition. It was then presented to parliament by Charles Grey.[http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/journal/issues/18(1999).pdf Jeffrey Smith, James Losh: Dissenter and Reformer, Enlightenment and Dissent No. 18 (1999)] at pp. 20–1 Losh returned to the subject with a pamphlet in 1831.{{cite book|title=Observations on Parliamentary Reform ... To which is Added the Petition from the Society of the Friends of the People Presented to Parliament ... 1793|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cvAYMwEACAAJ|year=1831|publisher=London}}

In the aftermath of arrests at a London Corresponding Society meeting at Chalk Farm, treason charges were laid against Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke among others; Losh, Frend and associates (John Cartwright, Godfrey Higgins, William Maxwell (1760–1834), Gilbert Wakefield and the publishers Joseph Johnson and J. S. Jordan) formed a committee to raise defence funds.{{Cite journal |last=Roe |first=Nicholas |date=1983 |title=Citizen Wordsworth |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24041016 |journal=The Wordsworth Circle |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=21–30 |issn=0043-8006}} When Joseph Priestley emigrated to America that year, Losh, with Frend, Higgins and Tweddell presented him with an inkstand.{{cite book|last=Knight|first=Frida|author-link=Frida Knight|title=University Rebel: The Life of William Frend 1757–1841|url=https://archive.org/details/universityrebell0000knig|url-access=registration|year=1971|publisher=Victor Gollancz Ltd.|location=London|isbn=978-0575006331|pages=[https://archive.org/details/universityrebell0000knig/page/113 113–4]}} At this period he also involved himself with the investigations of Edward Christian into the circumstances of the Mutiny on the Bounty, assisting with interviews of mutineers who been brought back to the United Kingdom.{{cite book|author1=Timothy Fulford|author2=Peter J. Kitson|title=Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=o1o9SdtCD-0C&pg=PA110|date=3 November 2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-02206-4|page=110}}{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|page=59|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}}

Losh belonged to the London radical circle of William Godwin: they are thought to have met on 3 February 1794 at a dinner given by James Mackintosh.{{cite book|author=W. Godwin|title=De La Justice Politique|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cpvjwBbF4VUC&pg=PA13|publisher=SUNY Press|isbn=978-1-4384-0421-9|page=13|language=fr}}{{cite web|url=http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/people/LOS01.html|title=Person record for Losh, James, godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk|work=University of Oxford|access-date=24 August 2015}} He attended a noted tea party on 27 February 1795, held by Frend, at which Godwin was a guest. It served to introduce the poet William Wordsworth to the London group: Losh and Wordsworth were already connected via family (William Losh was a school contemporary of Wordsworth) and their expatriate period in Paris.{{cite book|author=Juliet Barker|title=Wordsworth: A Life|pages=106 and 125|date=13 October 2009|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-185021-9}} Losh has been suggested as the source of Wordsworth's introduction, but Gill writes that more likely it was William Mathews, his closest college friend. It was later that Wordsworth and Losh became good friends.{{cite book|author=Stephen Charles Gill|title=William Wordsworth: a life|pages=[https://archive.org/details/williamwordswort00g55/page/64 64 and 90]|date=1 June 1989|publisher=Clarendon Press|isbn=978-0-19-812828-1|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/williamwordswort00g55/page/64}}{{acad|id=MTWS787W|name=Mathews, William}}

In 1795 Losh left London for Bristol. He encountered there William Wordsworth, whom he already knew; and through Wordsworth he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and then Robert Southey, at a breakfast given by Coleridge with Thomas Beddoes and Charles Lloyd as other guests, in November 1796.{{cite book|author=William Arthur Speck|title=Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters|url=https://archive.org/details/robertsoutheyent0000spec|url-access=registration|year=2006|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-11681-6|page=[https://archive.org/details/robertsoutheyent0000spec/page/66 66]}} Losh was often mentioned in Southey's correspondence.{{cite web|url=http://www.rc.umd.edu/node/59981|title=Losh, James (1763–1833), Romantic Circles|access-date=22 August 2015|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151125220549/http://www.rc.umd.edu/node/59981|archive-date=25 November 2015}}

At this period Losh was in poor health, with tuberculosis and possibly having suffered a breakdown. He was a patient and supporter of Beddoes, and through him encountered Humphry Davy.{{cite book|author=June Z. Fullmer|title=Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist|url=https://archive.org/details/younghumphrydavy0000full|url-access=registration|date=1 January 2000|publisher=American Philosophical Society|isbn=978-0-87169-237-5|page=[https://archive.org/details/younghumphrydavy0000full/page/123 123]}} He had radical contacts in Bristol, but went to stay in Bath, Somerset. He translated a work of Benjamin Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s'y rallier (1796), as Observations on the Strength of the Present Government in France (1797). In it, Constant supported the Directoire by now ruling France, and argued that the aims of the First Coalition attacking it went well beyond restoring the House of Bourbon.{{cite book|author1=Pierre Serna|author2=Antonino De Francesco|author3=Judith A. Miller|title=Republics at War, 1776-1840: Revolutions, Conflicts, and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fC2wAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA71|date=11 October 2013|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=978-1-137-32882-3|pages=71–2}} Losh attended a Bath anti-war meeting of 1 February 1797, of a group in which Edward Long Fox, William Coates and the banker Joseph Edye were prominent. He also joined the Catch Club of the loyalist Henry Harington.[http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/files/34499329/408189.pdf Stephen Poole, Popular Politics in Bristol, Somerset and Wiltshire, 1791–1805 (PDF), pages 93–4 and 241]

Losh in 1796 and 1797 paid visits to the north-east, where a family alkali business was being set up at Scotswood-on-Tyne in partnership with Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald.{{Cite journal |last=Barker |first=T. C. |last2=Dickinson |first2=R. |last3=Hardie |first3=D. W. F. |date=1956 |title=The Origins of the Synthetic Alkali Industry in Britain |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2550954 |journal=Economica |volume=23 |issue=90 |pages=158–171 |doi=10.2307/2550954 |issn=0013-0427|url-access=subscription }} He married in 1798, and spent time at Shirehampton.{{cite book|author=Juliet Barker|title=Wordsworth: A Life|page=153|date=13 October 2009|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-185021-9}} In March Wordsworth announced, by letter from Alfoxton House, his long poem The Recluse to Losh and James Webbe Tobin.{{cite book|author=Stephen Gill|title=The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hM_7-0f62VAC&pg=PA25|date=12 June 2003|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-64681-9|page=25}} Losh found Shirehampton bad for his health, however, and moved back to Bath. There he and Wordsworth dined as guests of Richard Warner in July 1798.{{cite book|author=Juliet Barker|title=Wordsworth: A Life|page=154|date=13 October 2009|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-185021-9}} E. P. Thompson concluded from Losh's diary at this period that he was quitting radical politics, discouraged.{{cite book|author=E. P. Thompson|title=The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i-htvMk5ROsC&pg=PA58|date=1 April 1999|publisher=The New Press|isbn=978-1-56584-510-7|page=58}}

Losh moved back north, to Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1799. The match had caused a cooling of his relationship with his uncle Joseph Liddell, who up to this point had given him generous support. First staying with his brother George, he then lodged with Thomas Bigge. In time he bought a house in Jesmond, The Grove, where he and Cecilia his wife settled.{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|page=67|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}}{{cite book|author=Henrietta Heald|title=William Armstrong: Magician of the North|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=opfKCEOzUY4C&pg=PA17|date=3 December 2013|publisher=McNidder & Grace|isbn=978-0-85716-035-5|page=17}}

Losh supported Bigge in producing The Oeconomist, Or, Englishman's Magazine, an anti-war monthly. In 1802 he backed the creation of the New Institution for Permanent Lectures, for which Bigge was pushing.{{cite book|author=John Fenwick|title=Obituaries of James Losh, esquire, mr. John Bruce, Robert Hopper Williamson, esquire, and the rev. Robert Wasney [ed. by J. Fenwick|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ih4IAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA9|year=1836|page=9}} In activist causes he was an ally also of William Turner, Unitarian minister with a congregation in Hanover Square.{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=Elizabeth Gaskell|date=22 December 2010|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-26666-1|page=62}}

In Newcastle, Losh prospered both as a lawyer, and in business;{{cite book|author=John Chapple|title=Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=46NSp2wZRkAC&pg=PA394|date=15 June 1997|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-0-7190-2550-1|page=394}} comments in his diaries from 1812 onwards suggest profitable legal work in bankruptcy and arbitration.{{cite book|author=James Alan Jaffe|title=Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in England, 1815-1865|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QwlEd1oLj3cC&pg=PA222|year=2000|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-0-7190-4952-1|page=222}} He was partner in the family alkali works; a shareholder in a brewery in Hexham; and held partnerships in coal mines. He was left land by both his brother-in-law and an uncle.{{cite book|author=M. L. Bush|title=Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ndgFBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA120|date=15 July 2014|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-317-89681-4|page=120}} The stoppage of the local bank Sanders, Burdon & Co. on 30 June 1803 did cause him losses, which he sustained by selling coal and brewing interests.{{cite web|url=https://archive.org/stream/historyofbanksba00philrich#page/68/mode/2up|title=A history of banks, bankers, & banking in Northumberland, Durham, and North Yorkshire, illustrating the commercial development of the north of England, from 1755 to 1894|last=Phillips|first=Maberly|year=1894|work=Internet Archive|publisher=E. Wilson & Co.|page=69|access-date=9 September 2015|location=London}}

His "very moderate" Whig positions, wide contacts and sympathy with certain workers' grievances led Losh to be involved in a number of industrial disputes. In the keelmen's strike of 1819 he came out on their side.{{Cite journal |last=McCord |first=N. |date=1970 |title=The Government of Tyneside, 1800-1850 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678760 |journal=Transactions of the Royal Historical Society |volume=20 |pages=5–30 |doi=10.2307/3678760 |issn=0080-4401|url-access=subscription }} In 1832 he was appointed recorder of Newcastle; the position was open to him as a Unitarian only after the legislation of 1828, as was remarked at the time. On the previous occasion, in 1829, Christopher Cookson was unopposed when he replaced Robert Hopper Williamson.{{cite book|author=Henrietta Heald|title=William Armstrong: Magician of the North|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=opfKCEOzUY4C&pg=PA25|date=3 December 2013|publisher=McNidder & Grace|isbn=978-0-85716-035-5|page=25}}{{cite book|author1=John Sykes|author2=John Sykes (of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.)|title=Local Records|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eqQDAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA262|year=1833|publisher=sold|page=262}}{{cite book|author=Sylvanus Urban (pseud. van Edward Cave.)|title=Gentleman's Magazine, and Historical Chronicle|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x_lfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA568|year=1832|publisher=Edward Cave|page=568}}

In the period before the Great Reform Bill, Losh took part in public reform meetings, in Newcastle and Durham. A moderate, he noted the strength of feeling against the bishops, but deprecated it, despite being a Unitarian, and feeling there was some justification. He was deterred from speaking in Durham, on 31 October 1831.{{cite book|author=E. A. Varley|title=The Last of the Prince Bishops: William Van Mildert and the High Church Movement of the Early Nineteenth Century|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jLqpg38BTDAC&pg=PA146|date=11 April 2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-89231-5|page=146}} His moderation was not shared by all, and the Northern Reform Union, represented by Charles Attwood, John Fife and Charles Larkin, tried to take over a major meeting in 1832, a move Losh countered.Diaries vol. 1 p. xvii

Losh spoke at meetings that supported the Anti-Slavery Society's petitions of the mid-1820s, with John Ralph Fenwick M.D. (1761–1855).{{cite web|url=http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/constituencies/newcastle-upon-tyne|title=Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1820–1832, History of Parliament Online|access-date=21 August 2015}} On 29 January 1833 he was introduced to William Knibb, by the Quaker William Beaumont;Diary, vol. 2 p. 147 their speeches at a meeting the following day, for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies, at the Brunswick Place Chapel in Newcastle, were published together.{{cite book|author1=James Losh|author2=William Knibb|title=Speeches of James Losh, esq., and the rev. William Knibb, on the immediate abolition of British colonial slavery|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qzJcAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA4|year=1833|page=4}}

Losh had progressive views on education, and took an interest in many facets of it.{{cite book|author=Henrietta Heald|title=William Armstrong: Magician of the North|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=opfKCEOzUY4C&pg=PA15|date=3 December 2013|publisher=McNidder & Grace|isbn=978-0-85716-035-5|page=15}} During his time in the south-west, he collaborated with Beddoes on religious education (Sunday Schools) and vocational education (Schools of Industry, in the contemporary terminology).{{cite book|author1=Ian Inkster|author2=Jack Morrell|title=Metropolis and Province|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UqqNqzHvvLoC&pg=PA217|year=2007|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-415-41804-1|page=217}} In a diary entry for 1814 he dismissed the educational reformers Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster as "very useful but very vain men", anticipated in essentials by Pestalozzi.Diaries' vol, 1, p. 34

At the end of his life, in 1832, Losh criticised publicly his fellow coal owners for a short-sighted view, in leaving pitmen illiterate. One owner who heeded him was Robert William Brandling.{{Cite journal |last=Heesom |first=A. J. |last2=Duffy |first2=Brendan |date=1981 |title=Coal, Class and Education in the North-East |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/650719 |journal=Past & Present |issue=90 |pages=136–151 |issn=0031-2746}} The context was the rise in the early 1830s of the North-East Pitmen's Union: Brandling who chaired the local coalowners had addressed Losh in the Newcastle Chronicle on the union's power, while Losh had publicly denied the owners were a cartel.{{Cite journal |last=Jaffe |first=James A. |date=1988 |title=The State, Capital, and Workers' Control during the Industrial Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the North-East Pitmen's Union, 1831-2 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3788010 |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=21 |issue=4 |pages=717–734 |issn=0022-4529}}

File:Lit & Phil, Newcastle upon Tyne, June 2015 (04).JPG

Losh was the first chairman of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway.{{cite book|author=John Chapple|title=Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=46NSp2wZRkAC&pg=PA351|date=15 June 1997|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-0-7190-2550-1|page=351}} In 1824 there was opposition to the idea from Armorer Donkin and William Armstrong, who proposed a canal; but Losh carried the day.{{cite book|author=Henrietta Heald|title=William Armstrong: Magician of the North|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=opfKCEOzUY4C&pg=PA20|date=3 December 2013|publisher=McNidder & Grace|isbn=978-0-85716-035-5|page=20}} Involved as chairman and shareholder in the company from 1825, he led a deputation to London in May 1833 that obtained an exchequer loan to finance ongoing work.{{cite journal|last=Rennison|first=R. W.|title=The Newcastle and Carlisle Railway and its Engineers; (1829–1862)|journal=Transactions of the Newcomen Society|volume=72|issue=2|pages=203–233, at pp. 210 and 224|url=http://www.pubs-newcomen.com/tfiles/72bp203s.pdf|url-status=usurped|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150924083108/http://www.pubs-newcomen.com/tfiles/72bp203s.pdf|archive-date=2015-09-24|doi=10.1080/03720187.2000.12023613|year=2000|s2cid=115799255}}

He was a member of The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1799 to 1833, being a vice-president from 1802. The Society had a bust of Losh made, by David Dunbar the younger;Diaries, p. xiv{{cite book|author=John Chapple|title=Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=46NSp2wZRkAC&pg=PA383|date=15 June 1997|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-0-7190-2550-1|page=383}} and in 1836, after his death, a statue by John Graham Lough.[http://217.204.55.158/henrymoore/works/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=17645&x=13 A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851, record]{{dead link|date=January 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} He was a vice-president also of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne.{{cite book|author1=Thomas Campbell|author2=Samuel Carter Hall|author3=Edward Bulwer Lytton |author4=Theodore Edward Hook |author5=Thomas Hood |author6=William Harrison Ainsworth |title=The New Monthly Magazine|url=https://archive.org/details/newmonthlymagaz38ainsgoog|year=1830|publisher=Henry Colburn|page=[https://archive.org/details/newmonthlymagaz38ainsgoog/page/n189 179]}}

Losh collected meteorological data in Newcastle from 1802.{{cite news | last = Henderson| first =Tony | title =The remarkable record of what Newcastle's weather was like some 200 years ago | newspaper =Chronicle | location = Newcastle, England| language =en | publisher = chroniclelive.co.uk | date = 24 November 2019| url =https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/james-losh-newcastle-weather-jesmond-17298083

| access-date = 8 March 2020 }} He collected a million items of meteorological data from 1802 to 1833, this data has contributed to climate change studies in 2019. Losh's data highlighted the River Tyne froze over for a whole month in January 1814. This attracted a fair and visitors, with tents pitched on the ice by the Newcastle bridge.

Losh died at Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, on 23 September 1833. He was buried at Gosforth on 3 October, with a well-attended funeral.{{cite book|author1=Thomas Fordyce|author2=John Sykes|title=Local Records: or, Historical register of remarkable events which have occurred in Northumberland and Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, a continuation of the work by J. Sykes|publisher=T. Fordyce|url=https://archive.org/details/localrecordsorh05sykegoog|year=1867|page=[https://archive.org/details/localrecordsorh05sykegoog/page/n20 10]}}

Losh kept a diary from January 1797, for the rest of his life. It is preserved, in 33 volumes, that were kept at Tullie House, and then went to the Carlisle Public Library.{{cite book|author=William Matthews|title=British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written Between 1442 and 1942|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U2wdSecEXJEC&pg=PA327|year=1967|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-05358-8|page=327}} An edition in two volumes of the diaries from 1811 was published by the Surtees Society, from 1962, edited by Edward Hughes.{{cite book|author=James Losh|title=The Diaries and Correspondence: Of James Losh.... Diary 1811–1823|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=odHUAAAAMAAJ|year=1962|publisher=Society}} He expressed a private view in the diary, as a colliery owner, that industrial relations in mining were too adversarial, and the owners and "viewers" excessive in their wish to exploit labour.{{cite book|author=James Alan Jaffe|title=The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800-1840|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gv-ozGV_OIYC&pg=PA113|date=13 November 2003|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-52941-9|page=113}}

File:Cecilia Losh.jpg

Losh married Cecelia or Cecilia Baldwin, daughter of Roger Baldwin F.R.S., rector of Aldingham, then in Lancashire. There was a connection through Wordsworth, whose student time at St John's College, Cambridge had overlapped with Cecilia's brother John Baldwin's. They had a family of five sons and three daughters, with one child, the first-born, who died shortly.{{cite ODNB|id=37689|first=T. S.|last=Dorsch|title=Losh, James}}{{acad|id=BLDN735R|name=Baldwin, Roger}}{{cite book|author=Dorothy Wordsworth|title=The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals|url=https://archive.org/details/grasmerealfoxden00word|url-access=registration|date=16 May 2002|publisher=Oxford University Press, UK|isbn=978-0-19-160632-8}}{{acad|id=BLDN789J|name=Baldwin, John}}

Of the daughters:

• Cecilia (1801–1866) married William Gale, a cousin;{{cite book|author=Jenny Uglow|title=The Pinecone|page=130|date=4 September 2012|publisher=Faber & Faber|isbn=978-0-571-29045-1}}
• Margaret Catherine (1813–1894) married Edmund Townson on 9 July 1836;{{cite web|url=http://www.lan-opc.org.uk/Cartmel/priory/marriages_1832-1844.html|title=Lancashire OnLine Parish Clerk Project: Marriages at Priory Church of St Mary and St Michael in the Parish of Cartmel; Marriages recorded in the Register for the years 1832–1844|access-date=22 August 2015}}
• Jemima Christophina (1817–1891) married Richard Blomley Postlethwaite on 10 April 1841.

Of the sons, William Septimus Losh (1810–1888) was the survivor, and his son James Arlosh (1834–1904), who took the old form of the family surname, was an only child, the last in the male line. Arlosh was a patron of Edward Burne-Jones; on his death, childless, his money went to Manchester College.[https://www.unitarian.org.uk/sites/default/files/1932_Manchester_College.pdf V. D. Davis, A History of Manchester College (1932) (PDF)], at p. 178{{cite book|author1=Joseph Sterrett|author2=Peter Thomas|title=Sacred Text -- Sacred Space: Architectural, Spiritual and Literary Convergences in England and Wales|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8aLsNEnd0GQC&pg=PA248|date=11 November 2011|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-20299-3|page=248}}

File:James Arlosh.jpg

• The Worthies of Cumberland, Henry Lonsdale, published by George Routledge & sons, 1873
• William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, Robert Woof, published by Routledge, 2001
• The Diaries and Correspondence of James Losh. Diary, 1811–1823, published for the Society by Andrews & Co, 1962
• The James Losh Diaries, 1802-1833: Life and Weather in Early Nineteenth Century Newcastle-upon-Tyne, edited by Deborah Smith, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, {{ISBN|978-1-5275-3114-7}}

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