Author: Jones, Charles Hugh
Biography:
JONES, Charles Hugh (1829-87: ancestry.com)
Mental illness drove the poet to a life of destitution, starvation, and a lonely death on the Caversham Road. Born in London on 1 May 1829, the eldest son of a porter, Hugh Jones, and his wife, Elizabeth, he was baptised twenty-one days later at St George, Hanover Square. He must have received an excellent education or he taught himself well, for by 1851 he was a teacher of English and Latin at Gloucester. Three years later, on 31 Jan. 1854 he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, as a mature student receiving assistance. His world then collapsed. He was admitted as a pauper patient on 8 Sept. 1854 to Peckham House, a private London asylum for the mentally ill (discharged Jan. 1855). From then to the end of his life he was almost always either homeless, an inmate in the St Marylebone, Westminster, workhouse (1859, 1860, 1867, 1868, 1871), or a patient in one of several London mental hospitals. In Apr. through June 1860, he was confined to the Hanwell Pauper and Lunatic Asylum, borough of Southall; in July 1872 to Jan. 1873 to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, borough of Barnet. During a period of lucidity, in the late 1870s and mid-1880s he was “Tutor Author Lecturer” in Berkshire and an assistant to a Bristol schoolmaster. In June 1887, he reached his nadir at Wantage, Oxfordshire, when he was arrested for begging. The Reading Mercury, 18 June 1887, closes his record: “Death from Destitution in the Caversham Road … Charles Hugh Jones, 58 years of age … a stranger in the town.” An English rare book dealer, Charles Cox, first attributed A Pensive Wanderer (1850) to Jones. The reviews of the volume were devastating: Lady’s Newspaper, “the absurd predominates … fearfully tedious;” Fraser’s Magazine, “inane ‘stuff and nonsense’.” Worst of all was the Morning Post’s sarcastic, cruel, and outrageously lengthy review (two-and-a-half columns). The reviewer sniped that Jones was not a poet and never would be one. (ancestry.com 30 Nov. 2023; London Post Office Directory [1843], 898; QR 180 [Dec. 1849], 71; Illustrated London News, 30 Mar. 1850; Morning Post, 8 Apr. 1850; Lady’s Newspaper, 4 May 1850; Fraser’s Magazine 41 [1850], 640) JC