ABSTRACT
John Jones was already ‘on the wrong side of fifty’ when he introduced himself to Robert Southey as ‘a poor, humble, uneducated domestic’ who had attempted ‘stringing together a few pieces in verse … chiefly composed when in the exercise of my domestic duties, and frequently borne on my memory for two or three weeks before I had time to ease it of its burden’ (Attempts in Verse, p. 1). The exercise of duties began early for Jones. Born in the Gloucester village of Clearwell, the son of a gardener and a village shopkeeper, he learnt only the rudiments of ‘letters and spelling’ at dame school, after which he scraped a few writing lessons on winter evenings from a local stone-mason. Jones snatched moments in between tasks to read the books of the houses where he worked. Clandestine access to literature fired his ambition to write, and Jones’s request for patronage did eventually bear fruit with the publication of Attempts.
