William Henry Wills

William Henry Wills JP (13 January 1810 – 1 September 1880) was a British journalist, playwright, a newspaper editor and a close friend and confidant of the author Charles Dickens, who entrusted Wills with the task of forwarding his letters to his mistress Ellen Ternan.

Early career Born in Plymouth in 1810, his father, at one time a wealthy ship-owner and prize-agent, met with misfortunes, and the family moved to London in 1819. On the death of his father the responsibility of supporting his mother and brother and sister fell on William Henry, or Harry Wills as he was always called. After leaving school he became a wood-engraver in the office of J. H. Vizetelly before becoming a journalist, contributing to periodicals such as the Penny Magazine and Saturday Magazine, John Ramsay McCulloch's A Dictionary, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical before being appointed sub-editor of The Monthly Magazine. His play The Law of the Land was produced at the Surrey Theatre in 1837. In the same year he first met Charles Dickens who was then the editor of Bentley's Miscellany.

In 1850 Wills edited Sir Roger de Coverley by the Spectator, illustrated with engravings from designs by Frederick Taylor (Boston, Massachusetts, 1851; reissued in the Traveller's Library, 1856). At the end of 1851 Wills accompanied Dickens on his theatrical tour in connection with the Guild of Literature and Art, a philanthropic organisation founded by Dickens, Augustus Egg and Edward Bulwer Lytton, intended to provide welfare payments to struggling artists and writers who had fallen on hard times. Wills was honorary secretary of the Guild.

Personal life Wills married Janet Chambers (1812–1892), the youngest sister of William and Robert Chambers, the Edinburgh publishers. There were no children of the marriage. Janet Wills was a woman of strong character, and a great favourite with Dickens, in whose correspondence her name frequently appears and who wrote the part of Nurse Esther in The Frozen Deep (1857) for her; she played the role "to much acclaim", in one of Dickens's amateur theatricals held at Tavistock House.

She had an extensive knowledge of Scottish literature, and a large fund of anecdotes, and was for many years the centre of a wide literary and social circle. She died on 24 October 1892. At her death the sum of £1,000 accrued to the newspaper press fund, in which Wills had interested himself after the failure of the Guild of Literature and Art.