Charles Jeremiah Wells

Charles Jeremiah Wells (25 January 1799 – February 17, 1879) was an English poet.

His parents were James Turner Wells (1772 - 1838) and Jane Sears (? - 1832). On 15 July 1825 he married Emily Jane Hill (1807 - 1872), the daughter of a school-teacher. Their children were:

(Anna Maria entered a religious order as a nun; Florence Llewellyn is believed to have followed a similar path). The only son to reach adulthood, Charles Deville Wells, went on to be "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo".

He was born in Pentonville, London, on 25 January 1799. He was educated at Cowden Clarke's school at Edmonton, with Tom Keats, the younger brother of the poet, and with RH Horne. He became acquainted with John Keats, and was the friend who sent him some roses, to whom Keats wrote a sonnet on June 29, 1816: "When, O Wells! thy roses came to me, My sense with their deliciousness was spelled; Soft voices had they, that, with tender plea, Whisperd of peace and truth and friendliness unquelled."

Wells soon afterwards played a practical joke on the dying Tom Keats, and reappears in the elder poet's correspondence as "that degraded Wells." Both with Keats and Reynolds, Wells was in direct literary emulation, and his early writings were the result of this. In 1822 he published Stories after Nature--or rather, in the manner of Boccaccio, tempered by that of Leigh Hunt. At the close of 1823, under the pseudonym of H. L. Howard, appeared the Biblical drama Of Joseph and his Brethren (dated 1824). For the next three years Wells saw William Hazlitt, as he said, every night, but in 1827 the two men were estranged. When Hazlitt died, in September 1830, Wells took Horne to see his dead friend, and afterwards raised a monument to the memory of Hazlitt in the church of St Annes, Soho.

His two books passed almost unnoticed. Wells was now practising as a solicitor in London, but he thought that his health was failing and proceeded to South Wales, where he occupied himself with shooting, fishing and writing poetry until 1835, when he removed to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire.

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