WELLS, CHARLES JEREMIAH

born , 1800?, London died Feb. 17, 1879, Marseille, Fr. English writer, author of Joseph and His Brethren (1823), a long dramatic poem in the style of the Elizabethan dramatists, which enjoyed an immense vogue among the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers after it was praised first by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and then, in 1875, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. As a young man, Wells was a member of the poet John Keats's circle of literary friends. He abandoned a legal career from boredom and ill health, leaving England in 1840 for France. He lectured in English in Brittany and finally settled in Marseille.