Jones

Jones, EBENEZER, poet, was born at Islington, 20th January 1820. He was brought up in the strictest sect of the Calvinists, but at thirteen was writing verses, and in secret devouring the Waverley novels. In 1837 he was forced by his father's long illness to turn clerk in a City warehouse: his hours were eight to eight six days a week. Yet he published his Studies of Sensation and Event (1843), poems 'full of the very essence of poetry,' and admired by such poets as Browning and Rossetti. But the world rejected them, and he published no more, save a pamphlet on the Land Monopoly (1849), which anticipated Henry George by thirty years in proposing to nationalise the land. A Chartist he was not, but a disciple of Carlyle in politics, as of Shelley in poetry. In 1844 he married, miserably, the niece of Edwin Atherstone; and he died at Brentwood, 14th September 1860. See three long articles by Theodore Watts in the Athenæum (1878); and two notices by Sumner Jones (elder brother of the poet, and a poet himself) and W. J. Linton prefixed to a reprint of the Studies (1879).