Author: Jones, Joseph
Biography:
JONES, Joseph (1791-1823: ancestry.com)
pseudonym Beppo Cambrienze
A surgeon and apothecary of Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, and of Fisher Street, Swansea, Wales, he was the eldest son of Joseph Jones of Bryn, Caernarfon, Wales, the owner of a colliery. His younger brother, John, was a minister in the Welsh established church. His habitual behavior appears to have been that of a miscreant. On 18 Jan. 1818, he was committed to prison for two days for having in a state of abject drunkenness assaulted two female servants at Penllergaer. He was the “certain rhyming apothecary” who repeatedly attacked Ann Julia Hatton (q.v.), a novelist of the Minerva Press. Their verbal rencontre commenced in 1815 when, offended by her novelistic portrayals of Welsh locals, he sent her an insulting rhyming epistle. She retorted with “Lines addressed to Mr. J. Surgeon, Llanelli, in answer to a Valentine sent to Mrs. H. on her performance of Lady Randolph (in School for Scandal) where he calls her ‘old, wrinkled, smutty, fat and lame’.” Writing as “Robin Rough”, he publicly attacked her in his 1816 volume, Poetical Epistles addressed to Hagne (Mrs Hatton). In Chronicles of an Illustrious House (1819), in the guise of one of her characters, she called Jones “the vilest compound of presumption, cowardice, vanity, and insolence, that ever contaminated society.” As “Beppo Cambrienze,” he again satirized her in Ambition: A Poetical Essay. Jones died on 9 July 1823 at Swansea. Years later, J. A. Symons referred to him in passing in Meddlings with the Muse (1840). (ancestry.com 13 Dec. 2023; “Journals of Lewis Weston Dillwyn,” transcribed by R. Morris, Swansea University Historical Collections, 11 Dec. 2023; Cambro-Britain [Dec. 1821], 126; GM 93:2 [1823], 94; Herford Journal, 16 July 1823; Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 16 June 1838; Journal of Glamorgan History 32-33 [1988], 75; J. Henderson, “Ann of Swansea: A Life on the Edge,” Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru—National Library of Wales Journal 34:1 [2006], 1-47) JC
Other Names:
- Jos. Jones