Kelly was born in Jamaica to a planter and merchant who became provost marshal of Jamaica. His play ‘The Islanders, or, Mad Orphan’ reflects Kelly's unsuccessful efforts to retrieve his estate from a group of London merchants alleged to have conspired with his father's West Indian executors (including Beckford himself) to defraud him of £30,000. He returned to Jamaica for a time and was fruitlessly embroiled in chancery proceedings until 1718. Thereafter his finances were permanently rocky, and he spent at least two periods in the Fleet, once in 1727–8, and again in 1738–9.

From an aristocratic family, Lady Susanna was a staunch, lifelong whig and fervent anti-Jacobite/anti-Tory, taking an active and prominent role in Whig elections and campaigns. In late July 1754 she was implicated in the Rag plot, the new interest's last attempt to smear the old interest with charges of Jacobitism before the election petitions were taken up by parliament.

Jubb was a clergyman who wrote occasional verse, some in Latin, published in an Oxford miscellany and GM. His wife was bequeathed an annuity of £350 in Jubb's will.

It was as an undergraduate at Jesus that he was given his first literary commission: his tutor, Styan Thirlby, had him produce a translation of Eustathius for the notes to Pope's translation of Homer. Jortin was a clergyman who held a number of preferments, but his primary interest was in writing. He published some Latin verse and a number of religious tracts which critiqued Roman Catholicism and offered the most significant Anglican ecclesiastical history of the eighteenth century.

In his own work and interests he represents many of the Welsh cultural activities of his day, as a poet, supporter of eisteddfodau, publisher, and itinerant bookseller, friendly with many of the leading literary figures of the time. Jones published a few ballads (1723–7), poems in chapbooks, ‘carols’ on topical and religious themes in the popular alliterative free-verse style, and other occasional verse, dedicatory poems in books, and elegies in the traditional strict-verse metres.

He was known as a folk poet before his conversion. By the request of some dissenting ministers, he translated the psalms and hymns of Isaac Watts. He also translated verses by Joseph Hart, John Cennick, Philip Doddridge, and Charles Wesley. His translations, adaptations, and original hymns proved popular. His rhyming and selection of metres in his hymns often reveal his origins as a country versifier. 

Jones was a poet with a relatively small output, but Jones's writings were much commended in his day. He was a clerk and "searcher" and poet. Little else is known about him.

The DNB explains that Jones composed a number of elegies and eulogies to his county's gentry, beginning in the 1730s with an elegy to the poet and almanac publisher Siôn Rhydderch (d. 1735) and continuing for the next thirty years. He was a master of the techniques of the learned strict metre poets and that he was well versed in their style and subject matter. Rhys copied seventy or so of his poems about 1764, and he presented the collection to his friend and neighbour William Vaughan, of Corsygedol, whom he addressed in several poems.

Jones was a poet who lived modestly with her brother but made wealthy friends with an aristocratic circle including two women of Queen Caroline's household: Martha Lovelace and Mrs Charlotte Clayton. She also follows the Domestic/coterie MS circulation pattern. Her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse claims that she began writing verses ‘at a very early age’ with no view to publication.

Ballad writing seems to have been Jones's primary occupation, though little is known about his origins. He was one of the most prolific ballad writers in eighteenth-century Wales, and 100 or so of his ballads survive. These are based on traditional themes, and were composed mainly between 1749 and 1780. His literary output includes five interludes. He would have received payment for his works, and he also profited by independently printing and selling his interludes throughout north Wales. He was imprisoned on two occasions, once, it seems, for non-payment of a printing debt.