Ernest Jones
Ernest Charles Jones was a significant figure born in 1819 in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Major Charles Jones, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, and he grew up at the Prussian royal court before moving to England in 1838. An accomplished writer from a young age, he published his first stories and poems during his childhood and was proficient in multiple languages by the age of eleven. After marrying Jane Atherly in 1841, Jones initially pursued a legal career following his admission to the Middle Temple, although he did not practice law until 1860. His early literary work, including the novel *The Wood-Spirit*, received modest acclaim, but his fortunes changed dramatically after personal losses in 1845 led to his involvement in the Chartist movement. This political engagement came as he sought to support his family, ultimately overshadowing his earlier literary pursuits. Jones became a prominent voice in advocating for working-class rights, effectively intertwining his political endeavors with his writing, which resonated deeply with the struggles of his time.
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Ernest Jones
- Born: January 25, 1819
- Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
- Died: January 26, 1868
- Place of death: England
Biography
Ernest Charles Jones was born in 1819 in Berlin, Germany, the son of Major Charles Jones, a veteran of the battle of Waterloo, and his wife, who was the daughter of a landowner in Kent. Jones was named after his godfather, the duke of Cumberland, Queen Victoria’s uncle, to whom his father was equerry, and Jones spent his early years at the Prussian royal court in Berlin. After his father retired, the family moved to a small estate purchased in Holstein on the border of the Black Forest. As an only child, Jones was educated by tutors, and his family encouraged his every endeavor. When he was nine, one of his stories was published in a juvenile collection, and in 1830 his father arranged for a Hamburg publisher to bring out a collection of his childhood poems. By the time he was eleven, Jones was proficient in English, German, French, and Italian.
In 1838, after a successful school career in the exclusive military College of St Michael at Lüneburg, Germany, from which he graduated with highest honors, Jones and his parents moved to England, where he continued to develop his literary and artistic talents. In the spring of 1840, he became engaged to Jane Atherly, the daughter of an old Cumberland family, and they were married with great pomp in June, 1841. Jones was presented at court by the duke of Beaufort in 1841, and, as his diaries from 1839 to 1847 reveal, he participated in a social life filled with theater visits, dinners, and associations with the literary world.
Jones entered the Middle Temple in March, 1841, and was called to the bar on April, 20, 1844, but he did not practice law until 1860, after the last of his Chartist journals folded. The numerous rejections that his poems and articles received may have prompted his pursuit of a legal career. Jones had an early success with The Wood-Spirit: A Novel, which was modestly acclaimed by contemporary critics. A romance between an itinerant medieval knight and the queen of the fairies, the novel is typical of Jones’s literary style in the early 1840’s.
In the autumn of 1844, Jones purchased an estate in Kent, for which he paid an enormous amount of money. His financial position deteriorated and in 1845, both of his parents died. His house in Kensington was sold; his wife’s jewelry was pawned; and the family, which by then included two sons, retreated to a cottage in Hampstead. It seems likely that this loss of the affluent life to which he was accustomed led to Jones’s dramatic political conversion in the winter of 1845 to 1846. For the first time, Jones needed to earn a living, and he found a job as secretary to the Leek and Mansfield Railway Company. On January, 21, 1846, Jones spoke at a meeting in favor of free trade, the first political reference in his diary. After he was discharged from the Bankruptcy Court, he devoted his life to politics and was involved in the working-class Chartist movement. Jones’s political reputation has eclipsed his renown as a poet and novelist but in Chartism he found the audience and the subject matter for his best writing.