To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked.
Poor Jones had been so upset that he wrote no more poetry until the eve of his death aged 40 in 1860. It was all the worse because he’d hoped to escape through poetry the City counting house where, since he was 17 and his father died, he had slaved for 12 hours a day.
Already a victim of unrequited love, he married unhappily. He suffered dyspepsia and pulmonary consumption. In the photo in my 1883 edition of his poems he lacks his right hand, a detail about which I can’t find biographical mention.
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