Periodical contributor, writer of stories and verse for children. Contributed to New Monthly, Little Folks, Newbery House Magazine, and other periodicals. Nine of her poems included in Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, 1865, a collection of poems for children. In 1864 submitted to Chapman & Hall a novel that was rejected by Meredith as the publishers' reader; also a second novel so rejected (Stevenson, Ordeal of George Meredith, pp. 153-154). Author of Tales Easy and Small for the Youngest of All, Maud's Doll and Her Walk in Picture and Talk, Insect Ways on Summer Days, and other children's books, some of them several times reprinted. Her Old Welsh Knee Songs, Lullabies, Frolic Rhymes, and Other Pastime Verse. Now First Collected and Issued in English Form was published in Caernarvon by Welsh National Press Co., 1894; 2nd ed. same year.

In the Office Book, "Walker" is assigned to "J.R.," the "R" being written over what seems to have been a "B". Written after the initials, in another hand than Wills's, appears the name "Jennett Humphreys". The "J.R." is obviously in error, and the "Jennett Humphreys" correct.

The H.W. article cites and discusses various of the comments on pronunciation, also some on word-coinages and borrowings, given in one of the early editions of John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. Miss Humphreys's interest in lexicography is evidenced by her article ‘If Among the Dictionaries", Cornhill, June, 1881. The Cornhill article, which traces the history of dictionary-making from the early glosses to the work in progress on the Oxford English Dictionary, does no more than refer to WaIker: "There was Walker, saying (on Sheridan's report), how Swift used to jeer the people who called the wind winn'd ... "; but the article quotes, in connection with Walker and Sheridan, the same two remarks that appear in the H.W. article.

To A.Y.R., under the editorship of Charles Dickens, Jr., Miss Humphreys contributed a series of some fifteen articles titled "Learning to Cook" and a series titled "Early Workers" (i.e., child workers), as well as articles on other subjects (A.Y.R. Letter-Book; see also EIlis, William Harrison Ainsworth and His Friends, II, 271).

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.