author
1818–1854
Best known by the pen name “Falconbridge,” he was a lively American newspaper humorist whose sketches of everyday life found an audience in the mid-1800s. His work was popular enough to be gathered after his death in The Humors of Falconbridge in 1856.
Jonathan Falconbridge Kelly was an American journalist and humorist from Philadelphia, born on August 14, 1817. He wrote under several pen names, including “Falconbridge,” “Jack Humphries,” “O.K.,” “Cerro Gordo,” and “J.F.K.,” and became known for humorous pieces published in Spirit of the Times.
He later wrote a biography of comic actor Dan Marble, and he was briefly connected with a comic journal in Boston called The Aurora Borealis. A posthumous collection of 111 of his sketches, The Humors of Falconbridge, appeared in November 1856 and helped preserve work that had first reached readers through the press.
Sources consulted during this search agree that he died in 1855, possibly of cholera, in Cincinnati, and that his writing is little remembered today. I wasn’t able to confirm a suitable portrait image from the pages available, so no profile image is included.