Reynolds, John Hamilton

(1796-1852)

   Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the son of a master at Christ's Hospital School, he was educated at St. Paul's School, London. He started work for the Amicable Insurance Company, then took up law and became a partner of James Rice, a friend of John Keats. Under the pseudonym Edward Herbert he wrote reviews for the London Magazine, Edinburgh, Westminster, and Retrospective, and various items for the Athenaeum, of which he was one of the proprietors. Latterly he was clerk to the county court on the Isle of Wight, where he died. Possibly through his father's connections he became friendly with Leigh Hunt (see Hunt, James Henry Leigh) and John Keats (see entry), both Christ Hospital boys. Keats and Reynolds collaborated on a series of metrical versions of Boccaccio's tales (1818); Reynolds' contributions were "The Garden of Florence" and "The Ladye of Provence." Some of his publications: The Eden of Imagination, 1814. The Naiad, With Other Poems, 1816. Peter Bell, 1819. The Garden of Florence, 1821. Odes and Addresses, 1826. Some of his poems: "Farewell to the Muses," "Gallantly Within the Ring," "The Fairies," "To Keats," "To Spenser."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Folk Songs. John Williamson Palmer, ed. Charles Scribner and Company, 1867. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Parodies: An Antholog y from Chaucer to Beerbohm - and After. Dwight Macdonald, ed. Modern Library, 1960. Sprints and Distances: Sports in Poetry and the Poetry in Sport. Lillian Morrison, ed. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Regency Verse 1798-1837. H.S. Milford, ed. Oxford University Press, 1928. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Sonnet: An Anthology. Robert M. Bender and Charles L. Squier, eds. Washington Square Press, 1987.