Charles Jeremiah Wells was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

.

Life

He was born in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, probably in the year 1798. He was educated at Cowden Clarke's school at Edmonton

Edmonton, London

Edmonton is an area in the east of the London Borough of Enfield, England, north-north-east of Charing Cross. It has a long history as a settlement distinct from Enfield.-Location:...

, with Tom Keats, the younger brother of the poet, and with RH Horne

Richard Henry Horne

Richard Hengist Horne was and English poet and critic most famous for his poem Orion.-Early life:...

. He became acquainted with John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

, and was the friend who sent me 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

Reynolds

-Places:In the United States:*Reynolds, California**Reynolds, Marin County, California**Reynolds, Mendocino County, California**Reynolds, Tulare County, California* Reynolds, Georgia* Reynolds, Illinois* Reynolds, Indiana* Reynolds, Nebraska...

, 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

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...

, 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

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is...

, 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

Solicitor

Solicitors are lawyers who traditionally deal with any legal matter including conducting proceedings in courts. In the United Kingdom, a few Australian states and the Republic of Ireland, the legal profession is split between solicitors and barristers , and a lawyer will usually only hold one title...

 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

Broxbourne

Broxbourne is a commuter town in the Broxbourne borough of Hertfordshire in the East of England with a population of 13,298 in 2001.It is located 17.1 miles north north-east of Charing Cross in London and about a mile north of Wormley and south of Hoddesdon...

 in Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

.

In 1840 he left England, never to set foot in it again. He settled at Quimper, in Brittany, where he lived for some years. A story called Claribel appeared in 1845, and one or two slight sketches later, but several tragedies and a great deal of miscellaneous verse belonging to these years are lost. Wells stated in a letter to Horne (November 1877) that he had composed eight or ten volumes of poetry during his life, but that, having failed to find a publisher for any of them, he burned the manuscripts at his wife's death. The only work he had retained was a revised form of Joseph and his Brethren, which was praised in 1838 by Thomas Wade

Thomas Wade (writer)

Thomas Wade was an English poet and dramatist.Wade a.k.a Wade Lavender by his early readers was born at Woodbridge, Suffolk. He early went to London, where he began to publish verse of considerable merit under the inspiration of Byron, Keats and especially Shelley...

, and again, with great warmth, by Horne, in his New Spirit of the Age, in 1844. The drama was then once more forgotten, until in 1863 it was read and praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

.

The tide turned at last; Joseph and his Brethren became a kind of shibboleth

Shibboleth

A shibboleth is a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important...

--a rite of initiation into poetic culture. Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

 wrote a study of it in the Fortnightly Review in 1875, and the drama itself was reprinted in 1876. Between 1876 and 1878 Wells added various scenes, which came in the possession of Buxton Fornian, who published one of them in 1895. After leaving Quimper, Wells went to reside at Marseilles, where he held a professorial chair.

Wells's wife, née Emily Jane Hill, died in 1874. Their son Charles Deville Wells, after his father's death, achieved a notoriety which was unpoetical, although recorded in popular song, for he was the once-famous "man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is an administrative area of the Principality of Monaco....

."

Swinburne said that there are lines in Wells "which might more naturally be mistaken, even by an expert, for the work of the young Shakespeare, than any to be gathered elsewhere in the fields of English poetry." In 1909 a reprint was published of Joseph and his Brethren, with Swinburne's essay, and reminiscences by Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton.