 Partly because he was never acknowledged by George Stephenson (although the younger Robert and other engineers remained sympathetic), James received little recognition for his work and written memorials to Parliament for financial help both by himself around 1826 and, after his death, on behalf of his children in 1846 were abandoned.Annoyed by her father’s treatment in Samuel Smiles’s biographies of Stephenson one of James’s daughters, Ellen Paine, wrote a defence of him in which, as even a sympathetic historian, L. T. C. Rolt, concludes, she "defeats her own object by overstating her case" and it was not until 2007 that a substantive biography appeared.He is commemorated by a plaque on a former residence in Henley-in-Arden and a scheme to restore a Stratford and Moreton Tramway wagon in Stratford.