Background
He was born in London, probably in the year 1798.
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Charles Wells
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated at Cowden Clarke"s school at Edmonton, with Tom Keats, the younger brother of the poet, and with RH Horne.
Career
Thy roses came to me, My sense with their deliciousness was spelled. Soft voices had they, that, with tender plea, Whisperd of peace and truth and friendliness unquelled."
Wells soon afterwards played a practical joke on the dying Tom Keats, and reappears in the elder poet"s correspondence as "that degraded Wells." Both with Keats and Reynolds, Wells was in direct literary emulation, and his early writings were the result of this. In 1822 he published Stories after Nature--or rather, in the manner of Boccaccio, tempered by that of Leigh Hunt.
Foreign the next three years Wells saw William Hazlitt, as he said, every night, but in 1827 the two men were estranged.
When Hazlitt died, in September 1830, Wells took Horne to see his dead friend, and afterwards raised a monument to the memory of Hazlitt in the church of Street Annes, Soho. His two books passed almost unnoticed.
Wells was now practising as a solicitor in London, but he thought that his health was failing and proceeded to South Wales, where he occupied himself with shooting, fishing and writing poetry until 1835, when he removed to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. In 1840 he left England, never to set foot in it again.
He settled at Quimper, in Brittany, where he lived for some years.
A story called Claribel appeared in 1845, and one or two slight sketches later, but several tragedies and a great deal of miscellaneous verse belonging to these years are lost. Wells stated in a letter to Horne (November 1877) that he had composed eight or ten volumes of poetry during his life, but that, having failed to find a publisher for any of them, he burned the manuscripts at his wife"s death. The drama was then once more forgotten, until in 1863 it was read and praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a study of it in the Fortnightly Review in 1875, and the drama itself was reprinted in 1876.
Between 1876 and 1878 Wells added various scenes, which came in the possession of Buxton Fornian, who published one of them in 1895. After leaving Quimper, Wells went to reside at Marseilles, where he held a professorial chairman
Wells"s wife, née Emily Jane Hill, died in 1874.
