Charles Jeremiah Wells

Charles Jeremiah Wells (1799-1879). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Jeremiah Wells (25 January 1799 - February 17, 1879) was an English poet.

Life

Overview

Wells, born in London, where he practised as a solicitor, published in 1822 Stories after Nature, written in poetic prose, which attracted no attention, and a biblical drama, Joseph and his Brethren (1824), which had an almost similar fate until D.G. Rossetti called attention to it in 1863, giving it a high meed of praise. In 1874, stung by want of appreciation, he had burned his manuscripts of plays and poems; but on the new interest excited in his Joseph he added some new scenes. In his later years he lived in France.

Youth and education

Wells was born, probably in or near London, of parents of whom nothing is recorded except that they belonged to the middle class. According to his statement in writing, the year of his birth was 1800, but he spoke of himself at the close of his life as an octogenarian.

He had been the schoolfellow of Keats's younger brother Tom at Cowden Clarke's school at Edmonton, where Keats himself was educated, and where Richard Henry Horne was a pupil in Wells's time. He thus obtained introduction to the literary circle in London, of which Keats, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt were members. He appears to have been especially close to William Hazlitt.

He became acquainted with Keats, and was the friend "who sent me some roses," to whom Keats wrote a sonnet on 29 June 1816:—

"When, O Wells! thy roses came to me,

My sense with their deliciousness was spelled;

Soft voices had they, that, with tender plea,

Whisper'd of peace and truth and friendliness unquelled.

Unfortunately, Wells soon afterwards played a cruel practical joke on the dying Tom Keats, and reappears in the elder poet's correspondence as "that degraded Wells."

Career

Wells entered a solicitor's office, and, after serving his articles, commenced practice somewhere about 1820. He had been considered backward and inattentive at school, but he attended Hazlitt's lectures, and his first book shows that he must have been proficient in Italian.

Wells's Stories after Nature were published anonymously in 1822 (London, 12mo). They passed without remark, and, except for a notice in the Monthly Repository by Horne in 1836, were absolutely forgotten until in 1845 W.J. Linton reprinted a few in his Illuminated Magazine from "the only copy I ever saw," picked off a bookstall in 1842. The Stories were reissued by Linton in a limited edition in 1891.

Similar neglect attended Wells's next and much more ambitious performance, the dramatic poem Joseph and his Brethren, written, according to his own improbable statement, at 20, and published under the pseudonym of ‘H.L. Howard,’ in December 1823, with a title-page dated 1824. This fine work, though pronounced by Hazlitt "not only original but aboriginal," failed to elicit so much as an attack; and not a trace of it can be found until, in 1837, it was named with admiration by Thomas Wade.

Wells probably remained in town until 1830, for in that year he placed a memorial in St. Anne's, Soho, to Hazlitt, whose daily associate he had been in the past, but from whom he had latterly been estranged.

About this time, partly from real or imaginary apprehensions about his health, partly from general dissatisfaction with his position, he renounced his probably not very lucrative practice as a solicitor and retired to Wales, where he gave himself up almost entirely to field sports. In 1835 he moved to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, and followed the same course of life. About this time he married Emily Jane Hill, sister-in-law of William Smith Williams (1800–1875), whose name is remembered in connection with the literary history of Charlotte Brontë.

In 1840, possibly on account of impaired means, he moved to Brittany, and was for some time professor of English in a college at Quimper; he appears, however, to have continued to follow the chase with assiduity, and to have been on intimate terms with the Breton noblesse.

The literary connection with England, which seemed to have died away, was revived through W.J. Linton's action in reprinting some of the Stories after Nature. Wells, learning the fact through the younger Hazlitt, contributed a striking tale, "Claribel," to Linton's Illuminated Magazine for 1845, and offered another, which Linton declined, and which appears to have been lost. He also wrote 2 papers on Breton subjects in Fraser's Magazine.

Some time afterwards he came on a short trip to England and visited Linton, who describes him as "a small, weather-worn, wiry man, looking like a sportsman or fox-hunter." This may have been in 1850, when Mrs. Wells was in London endeavoring to find a publisher for Joseph and his Brethren, which had undergone a thorough revision. None could be tempted, and the revised copy went astray.

Extracts, however, had got about, and after several years came into the hands of Algernon Charles Swinburne, who, under the additional stimulus of a highly appreciative notice of Wells by D.G. Rossetti in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, composed an eloquent and generous panegyric which unfortunately did not appear until published in the Fortnightly Review for February 1875, just too late to prevent the burning of all his manuscripts which Wells had made upon his wife's death in the preceding year — "a novel," he says, "three volumes of stories, poems, one advanced epic." 2 tragedies titled Dunstan and Tancrede, and a poem on Bacchus and Silenus, are also mentioned as having once been in existence.

Swinburne's encomium, however, produced the long-lacking publisher for Joseph, and Wells, who was now living at Marseilles, where his son was working as an engineer, once more started into activity, and produced another revision, which appeared in 1876, under the editorial care of Buxton Forman, with a prefatory note by Swinburne. An additional scene, considered too long an interpolation, was retrenched, but was printed by Forman in the 1st volume of Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (1895).

Between 1876 and 1878 Wells carried out a new revision of his work, with copious additions. The title was to have been altered, not very felicitously, into the Egyptian form of Joseph's name, Sephenath-Phaanech, and it was to have been dedicated to Horne]].

During the last year of his life Wells was confined to bed by a painful and incurable malady, but wrote nevertheless to Mr. Forman, "I am as cheerful as the day is long." He died at 2 Montée des Oblats, Jardin de la Colline, Marseilles, on 17 February 1879.

Writing

Wells's Stories after Nature are the nearest approach to the Italian novelette that our literature can show. Simple in plot, yet generally founded on some striking idea, impressive in their conciseness, and highly imaginative, they are advantageously distinguished from their models by a larger infusion of the poetical element, but fall short of them in artistic structure and narrative power, and the style is occasionally florid. They would have been highly appreciated in the Elizabethan age, but the great subsequent enrichment and expansion of the novel left little room for them in Wells's day.

Stories after Nature being but a slight though a charming book, Wells's reputation must rest chiefly upon his dramatic poem, Joseph and His Brethren. It is truly poetical in diction, and often masterly in the delineation of character; but its especial merit is the fidelity with which the writer reproduces the grand Elizabethan manner with no approach to servility of imitation. He is as much a born Elizabethan as Keats is a born Greek; his style is that of his predecessors, and yet it seems his own.

It must have been impossible for him to draw Potiphar's spouse without having Shakespeare's Cleopatra continually in his mind, and yet his Phraxanor is an original creation. The entire drama conveys the impression of an emanation from an opulent nature to which production was easy, and which, under the stimulus of popular applause, might have gone on producing for an indefinite period.

The defect which barred the way to fame for him was rather moral than literary; he had no very exalted standard of art and little disinterested passion for it, and when its reward seemed unjustly withheld, it cost him little to relinquish it.

Recognition

Wells's portrait, from a miniature taken about 1825, has been reproduced in the 2nd edition of Joseph and his Brethren (1876) and in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century.

A new edition of Joseph, with essays by Theodore Watts-Dunton and A.C. Swinburne, was issued in ‘The World's Classics’ in 1908.

Publications

Poetry

• Joseph and His Brethren: A scriptural drama, in two acts. London: G. & W.B. Whittaker, 1824; London: Chatto & Windus, 1876; London, New York, & Toronto: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1908.

Short fiction

• Stories after Nature. London: T. & J. Allman, 1822.

Juvenile

• Dramas: Adapted for the representation of juvenile persons. London: C. Whittaker, 1820.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

•  Garnett, Richard (1899) "Wells, Charles Jeremiah" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 60 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 225-227 . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 8, 2017.

External links

Poems

• from Joseph and His Brethren

Books

• Charles Jeremiah Wells at Amazon.com

About

• Charles Jeremiah Wells in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Wells, Charles Jeremiah in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Wells, Charles Jeremiah