Author: Wells, Charles Jeremiah
Biography:
WELLS, Charles Jeremiah (1799-1879: ancestry.com)
Pseudonym H. L. Howard
He was the son of James Turner Wells and his wife Jane Sears or Sayers, born in London on 25 Jan. 1799 and baptised on 17 Feb. 1799, who died in France on 17 Feb. 1879. On 18 May 1814 he was articled to a solicitor, Robert Brutton, at Featherstone Buildings, Holborn, London, and he practised as a solicitor in London until 1830. As a young professional man, he was part of the Hunt and Keats (qq.v.) circle in 1817-18, but a practical joke that he played on Keats’s dying brother Tom led to his being ostracised. His early publications appear to have been in part attempts to prove himself to that group. The adapted dramas of 1820 by “H. Howard” may not be his but the anonymous prose version of tales by Boccaccio, Stories after Nature (1822) certainly was, and Joseph and his Brethren by “H. L. Howard” (1824), which was taken up after 1835 by the Pre-Raphaelites and reissued in 1876 with final revisions by Wells himself, is the work upon which his reputation rests. The two last titles, pacè ODNB, attracted several moderately encouraging reviews. Wells married Emily Jane Hill (1807-74) at her parish church of St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, London, on 15 July 1825 and with her had at least four children who were baptised at Braxbourne, Hertfordshire, between 1827 and 1841. In 1841 the family moved to France, where Wells taught school for a time in Brittany before settling in Marseilles. He did not stop writing. A few prose contributions to magazines—a short story and two essays—appeared, but a historical romance in three volumes was rejected. Wells was predeceased by his wife Emily and claimed after her death to have burnt his remaining literary manuscripts, including a novel, lyric poems, and an epic. (ODNB 4 Jan. 2025; ancestry.com 4 Jan. 2025; H. Buxton Forman, “Charles Jeremiah Wells” in Alfred H. Miles, ed. The Poets and the Poetry of the Century [1898], 3:359-70) HJ
Other Names:
- C. J. Wells