Author: Jones, Jacob
Biography:
JONES, Jacob (1798-1879: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 16 Oct. 1798 at Finsbury Square, London, and baptised on 20 November at St. Luke’s, Finsbury, the eldest of eight children of Jacob Jones (1765-1830), surgeon, and Elizabeth Eleanor Keysall (1769-1839), who had married at St. Pancras Old Church the previous year. It is not known where he went to school but he proceeded to Brasenose College, Oxford, although there is no record of him in the registers. He then entered the Inner Temple on 17 Oct. 1823 and was called to the bar on 3 July 1829. It is unclear how long he practised law but by 1851 he declared himself “not in practice.” He married Hannah Hull (1793-1882) on 1 Aug. 1829, at St. Mary’s, Islington, shortly after being called to the bar. They had six children prior to the marriage and a further six afterwards, with later baptisms regularising some of the earlier births. (He was not mentioned in his father’s will, written on 11 Nov. 1829, which made provision for three younger sons and daughters, possibly as a result of the relationship with Hannah Hull. He was still excluded from his mother’s 1839 will although she made bequests to his children.) They lived at various addresses in Islington before moving to Ivy House, Tottenham, in the 1830s, and finally to 6 Horbury Crescent, Notting Hill, London, in the 1840s. He died there on 12 Jan. 1879 and was buried the following day at Highgate cemetery, leaving an estate of around £4000 with four daughters as executrices. His widow, Hannah, then took a house at 9 Clare Villas, Hendon, now north London, with three unmarried daughters; she died there on 12 Feb. 1882 and was also buried at Highgate. His first work, Thoughts on Prison Labour (1824)--not attributed to him in library catalogues but widely known to be his and acknowledged--set out the case against the treadmill system as a violation of natural rights, “an OBJECT OF TERROR . . . a novel TERROR to our penal laws” (6). In addition he published further plays and poetry: The Anglo-Polish Harp (1836), Spartacus (1837), The Cathedral Bell (1839), Regulus (1841), and A Century of Sonnets (1866). (ancestry.co.uk 19 Nov. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 19 Nov. 2023; archives.innertemple.org.uk; LES 15 Jan. 1879; John Bull 18 Jan. 1879; St. James’s Gazette 19 June 1830, 24 Feb. 1882) AA