Jones, Ebenezer

(1820-1860)

   Born in Islington, London, into a strict Calvinistic family of Welsh extraction, the family found itself removed from its comfortable life when the father died. At seventeen Ebenezer was employed as a clerk in a city firm connected with the tea trade, exposed to long working hours. Fired by the desire to be a poet, he devoted his time and meager income in trying to get his poems published. Sensation and Event was published in 1843 and Studies of Sensation and Event in 1879. The indifference by which his poems were received threw him into despair and he destroyed his unfinished poems, then earned his living as an accountant and as a journalist. He died of tuberculosis and his work was saved from obscurity by Dante Rossetti in Notes and Queries (1870) and mention in the Athenæum in 1878. Some of his other poems: "A Development of Idiocy," "A Warning," "A Winter Hymn-to the Snow," "Eyeing the Eyes of One's Mistress," "Feminine Goodness," "Feminine Spite," "High Summer," "The Hand," "Ways of Regard," "When the World is Burning," "Whimper of Awakening Passion."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry. E.A. Sharp and J. Matthay, eds. John Grant, 1924. 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 New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Christopher Ricks, ed. Oxford University Press, 1987. The Oxford Book of Nineteenth-Century English Verse. John Hayward, ed. Oxford University Press, 1964; reprinted, with corrections, 1965.