Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

Working-class poet, editor, and children’s writer. Attended charity school. Worked in a furrier’s warehouse, then as a porter and business owner at Billingsgate Fish Market in London. Birthdate derived from biographical headnote to his poem in Chambers’s Journal for 28 August 1858. Attended Henry Morley’s King’s College literature lectures in the winter terms of 1860-1861 and 1862 (according to the dedication in The Blacksmith’s Daughter). Author of Clare, the Goldseeker, the Elfin Revel and Other Poems (1858), Fun, Feeling, and Fancy: being a series of lays and lyrics (1861), Pictures of English Life, after Original Studies by R. Barnes and E. M. Wimperis, engraved by J. D. Cooper, with Descriptive Poems (1864), The Blacksmith’s Daughter, and other poems (1874), and editor of the illustrated anthology Lays for Little Folk (1867). Biographical information: Reilly, Mid-Victorian Poetry, p. 487. (AC)