Charles Jeremiah Wells

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

Life
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 [q. v.] was a pupil in Wells's time. He thus obtained introduction to the literary circle in London, of which Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt were members. He appears to have been especially intimate with Hazlitt, and was on friendly terms with Keats until their acquaintance was dissolved by a practical joke thoughtlessly and cruelly played off by Wells upon Keats's invalid brother Tom, of which Keats speaks with bitter resentment. Wells meanwhile had 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,’ published anonymously in 1822 (London, 12mo), 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. They passed without remark, and, except for a notice in the ‘Monthly Repository’ by R. H. 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.