After his education at Shrewsbury School he served from 1879 as an attaché in Paris, and then took up a teaching position as an assistant master at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight for two years.

In 1884 he married Helen Uttley and migrated to Australia, where he started work as a tutor on a station at Jerilderie, New South Wales, but soon moved on to Sydney and then Queensland, dedicating himself to writing.

His novel, A Child of the Age, a reworking of Leicester, an Autobiography, was brought out posthumously in 1894 by John Lane as the fourth book in its Keynote Series.

[5] It describes vividly the schooldays (at "Glastonbury") and poverty-stricken struggles of a would-be poet and scholar, Bertram Leicester, in a way understandably suffused with a fin-de-siècle melancholy.

[6] Other posthumous publications were Tiberius – a striking drama with an introduction by William Michael Rossetti, presenting a new view of the Emperor's character, and finally, Essays in Modernity in 1899.

As a self-professed "child of his age", Adams combined in his life and work many distinctive features of fin de siècle British culture and Australian radical nationalism in the 1890s, including a strong sympathy with socialist and feminist movements.

Some of his verse provoked resentment in Conservative circles, but Adams was part of a rapidly growing political working class movement fired by poverty and exploitation in Britain.