James Kenney (dramatist)

James Kenney's second son, Charles Lamb Kenney (1823 – 25 August 1881), made a name as a journalist, dramatist and miscellaneous writer. Beginning as a clerk in the General Post Office in London, he joined the staff of The Times, as a drama critic. Having been called to the bar, he became in 1849 secretary to Ferdinand de Lesseps, and in 1857 published The Gates of the East, in support of the proposed construction of the Suez Canal.^[1]

Kenney wrote the words for a number of light operas and for several popular songs, the best known being Soft and Low (1865) and The Vagabond (1871). He also published a Memoir of M. W. Balfe (1875) and translated the Correspondence of Balzac. Thackeray and Dickens were among his friends in a literary coterie where he gained a reputation as a wit and a writer of society verse. He died in London in 1881.^[1]

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Kenney, James". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 15 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 732.

• Terry F. Robinson, "James Kenney." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 344: Nineteenth-Century British Dramatists. Detroit: Gale, 2008, pp. 206–224
• Terry F. Robinson, "James Kenney's Comedic Genius: Early Nineteenth-Century Character, Commerce, and the Arts" in Raising the Wind, The World!, and Debtor and Creditor," Literature Compass 3.5 (August 2006) pp. 1082–1106