Perhaps the only nineteenth-century poet to know both Keats and Swinburne, Charles Jeremiah Wells was a writer of limited productivity with a small but enthusiastic coterie of readers. The author of only two published books, the first appearing anonymously, the second under the pseudonym "H. L. Howard," Wells nonetheless received praise from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, George Meredith, and Edmund Gosse for his major poem, Joseph and His Brethren (1823). Keats addressed a sonnet to him in 1816; Rossetti offered to edit his work in 1850; Swinburne praised him in a critical essay in 1875. Although Joseph and His Brethren was neglected when it first appeared, the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered the work and strenuously sought to establish Wells's reputation as a major figure in nineteenth-century poetry.

Wells was born in London of moderately well-to-do parents who pledged him to law early in life, as Keats's parents had prepared him for a...