Ebenezer Jones--clerk, poet, and political writer--was born in Canonbury Square, Islington, a suburb of London; he was the third child of Robert and Hannah Sumner Jones. His father was of Welsh extraction; his mother came from a long-established Essex family. Material comforts were adequate in the Jones household; spiritually, the family adhered to the strictest form of Calvinism. All books considered to be of a "worldly nature" were excluded from the family's library of mainly religious works: the writings of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, and Carlyle were especially frowned upon by his parents. Rigorous discipline was also enforced upon Ebenezer and his older brother, Sumner, when they attended boarding school in Highgate beginning in 1828. The boys' father died before they graduated.

Most of the biographical information extant on Jones appears in the two memorial notices contributed by Sumner Jones, himself a minor poet, and by W. J. Linton...