Career
He wrote travel stories and fantasies. Van Nievelt had a short stint at being a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies before he returned to the Netherlands. There he became an editor for the daily Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (1869) and a contributor to Los en vast.
Later he wrote book reviews using the pseudonym J. van den Oude voor the daily Nieuws van den Dagestan
In 1895 he moved to Wiesbaden in Germany, where he died in 1913 at the age of seventy.