SOURCE: Jones, Leonidas M. Introduction to The Letters of John Hamilton Reynolds, pp. ix-xxxvi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

In the following excerpt, Jones presents an overview of Reynolds's literary career.

John Hamilton Reynolds and the Keats Circle

John Hamilton Reynolds's father's family background entitled him to his place as a member of the Cockney school of English poetry. His great-grandfather, Thomas Reynolds, was a tanner of Tottenham, and his grandfather, Noble Reynolds, a barber of the same parish.¹ His father, George, after attending Christ's Hospital from 1774 to 1779, taught school for most of his long life in London at the Lambeth Boys Parochial School, the Lambeth Female Asylum, and at Christ's Hospital, though from the early 1790s until about 1806 he left the city to teach at Shrewsbury School. Active in his profession, he was a specialist in the Bell system of education, who was once sent by Christ's...