Journalist and poet. Born in London, he was the youngest son of John Mosley Watts and his wife Sarah. His parents separated when he was very young and a lengthy suit in Chancery followed. He was educated at Wye College Grammar School, Kent, and then at a school in Ashford. After that he held a variety of posts, including usher, private tutor, clerk and assistant teacher. By the late 1810s he was determined on a literary career and from January to June 1819 edited the New Monthly Magazine. He married Priscilla (Zillah) Maden Wiffen (1799–1873) in 1821. Her Quaker family disowned her after the marriage. In the early 1820s he contributed to the Literary Gazette and the Gentleman’s Magazine and published Poetical Sketches (1822). He was editor of the Leeds Intelligencer (1822–1825) and the Manchester Courier (1825–6). A Tory, Watts claimed that between 1827–1847 he was involved in the setting up of over twenty conservative periodicals. These included the London evening paper, The Standard, in 1827. Watts played a key role in the emergent market for annuals. He was the editor, and latter proprietor, of the influential annuals the Literary Souvenir (1824–1835) and the Cabinet of Modern Art (1836–1837). He owned the Literary Magnet from 1825–1828 and published a collection of contemporary verse, Fugitive Poetry (1828–1829). In the 1840s he encountered serious financial difficulties and was made bankrupt in 1849. His situation was eased by the award of a civil list pension of £100 p.a. in 1854 for his services to literature and art. He edited the biographical compendium Men of the Time in 1857 and spent his later years re-reading and annotating the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton and Dryden. Watts and Southey had shared Tory sympathies and literary interests. They corresponded intermittently from 1824. Southey also contributed to the Literary Souvenir in 1826 and 1827.