ABSTRACT
By the late 1740s, Henry Jones had ceased to identify himself as labouring-class, substituting his vocational title of bricklayer with that of poet once he relocated to England. Nonetheless, Jones remains one of the most productive and most interesting poets of labouring-class origins to publish during the middle of the eighteenth century. Jones was reputed to have a partiality to drink, although allegations about his behaviour are at odds with the pronouncements about virtue made in the poetry. While Jones wrote a good deal of poetry that is solely occasional and meant to flatter potential patrons, a careful reading of his poetry extends and enriches the contours of later eighteenth-century verse. Christmas's monograph, however, begins to correct such rumours with more accurate research. Jones's work, with the exception of the Earl of Essex, did not fare well in the nineteenth century and he is left out of most twentieth-century accounts and anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry.
