John Keats: Who was who?

by Ian Reynolds

This is the first in a series of linked posts

John Keats was born in London in 1795, the eldest of the four children of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings. His father died from falling from a horse in 1804 and his mother succumbed to consumption, now known as pulmonary tuberculosis, in 1810. Alice Jennings, the children’s grandmother, aged seventy-three, appointed Richard Abbey and John Sandell as joint guardians of the four children. When Sandell died in 1816, Abbey became the sole guardian of the children. In 1811, Keats left Clarke’s school in Enfield, and began an apprenticeship to become a surgeon and apothecary; brother George and Tom worked as clerks in Abbey’s office. Alice Jennings died in 1814 and the youngest sibling Frances ‘Fanny’ Keats moved in with Abbey.

The Apothecaries Act became law in 1815, which was the beginning of regulation of the medical profession in England and Wales. This Act required a formalised system of training be undertaken rather than the ad hoc arrangements which had existed previously. Keats enters Guy’s Hospital as a student. In 1816 he had his poem ‘O, Solitude, if I must with thee dwell’ published in The Examiner, a weekly newspaper. He abandoned medicine to pursue a career as a poet.

His newly married brother George emigrated to America in 1818, and his other younger brother Tom died of consumption aged nineteen later the same year. Keats’s own health breaks down, and in September 1820, he travelled to Italy in the hope that a milder climate might help with his illness.  He died of pulmonary consumption aged twenty-five on 23/24^th February 1821,  and is buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome.

In his lifetime, he published three volumes of poetry: Poems (1817), Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), and finally Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems (1820). During his brief career as a poet, it is thought that he sold no more than two hundred copies of his published works—fame and fortune had eluded him—but he retained a loyal band of friends who believed in his ability and unfulfilled potential as a poet, which was only fully recognized in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This series of posts looks at ‘Who was who’ in the life of John Keats—his family, influencers and mentors, friends and acquaintances. These biographical sketches of the people involved may help to give a broader view of John Keats’s short life—it should be noted, however, that whilst the factual information contained is hopefully accurate, some sketches may also include conjecture and the personal opinion of the author.

 

Family

George Keats (1797-1841)

Younger brother of Keats by sixteen months and also educated at Clarke’s school in Enfield. From school, George worked at their guardian Richard Abbey’s office as a clerk. Keats said of him in 1818 ‘George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend.’ In May 1818 George married Georgiana Wylie, and in June the newlyweds emigrated to America, settling in Louisville, Kentucky.  Their new life in America did not get off to an auspicious start as George was swindled of most of their savings within the first year and was in a difficult situation financially. When George learned that his younger brother Tom had died, he borrowed funds for the journey back to England, intent on collecting his share of Tom’s estate. It was a short visit, arriving in London 13^th January and departing from Liverpool 1^st February 1819.

The settling of Tom’s estate led to a rift between Keats’s friends (Haslam, Taylor, Brown and Severn), who believed George had short-changed Keats and taken the lion’s share of the funds from Tom’s estate. Keats was largely silent on the matter. In later years George was completely exonerated from any mishandling of the affair – George had previously advanced some money to Keats by way of a loan, and when Tom’s estate was settled the distribution of funds was adjusted accordingly. Ultimately it was George who settled all John’s debts after he died in Rome in 1821, including an itemized bill from Keats’s friend Charles Armitage Brown in relation to expenses that Keats had incurred during the period December 1819 to May 1820, a total of £75 4s & 5d covering rent at Wentworth Place, a half share in the drinks bill, four guineas for doctors, three shillings for coach hire, and six pounds sixpence for ‘sundries’.

George went on to become a successful businessman in Louisville, owning a lumber mill, a flour mill and various real estate investments. He was also a well-respected member of the local community, undertaking a number of civic duties, including terms of office on the town council. He played an important role in the creation of a public-school system. He had two sons and six daughters with Georgiana and he died of pulmonary consumption on Christmas Eve 1841.

 

Georgiana Wylie Keats Jeffrey (c.1797-1879)

Not much is known about George’s wife Georgiana, but Keats mentioned her often in correspondence, and had the habit of calling her ‘sister’—‘I like her better and better’ he wrote to his friend Bailey.  Two years after George’s death she married again, to John Jeffrey who was a Scottish Civil Engineer twenty years her junior. He survived her and she died in Lexington, Kentucky.

 

Tom Keats (1799-1818)

John Keats’s youngest brother, whom he nursed until his death from consumption a few days after his nineteenth birthday on 1^st December 1818—‘poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort’. A gentle soul, he worked for a time in Richard Abbey’s office until ill health intervened. After Tom’s death, Keats collected his possessions, including correspondence which contained the so-called ‘Amena Bellafila’ letters, forged by their mutual friend Charles Wells. These had been sent to Tom two years earlier, purporting to be from a French girl who was in love with him—it was actually part of an elaborate hoax conceived for reasons that remain unclear. Robert Gittings argues that Keats saw his dead brother as the victim of a delusion which hastened his death. It remains unclear whether Tom knew that the Amena letters were fake before his death.  Keats wrote ‘It was no thoughtless hoax, but a cruel deception on a sanguine Temperament with every show of friendship’.

 

Frances ‘Fanny’ Keats Llanos (1803-1889)

After the death of her grandmother, Alice Jennings, in 1814, Fanny went to live with the family of her guardian, Richard Abbey. Keats and his brother George did not see much of her, but Keats wrote many warm and affectionate letters to her. She is poignantly mentioned in almost the very last sentence of Keats’s last ever letter: ‘[write] also a note to my sister, who walks about my imagination like a ghost; she is so like Tom.’

After Keats departed for Italy in September 1820, Fanny Keats became friends with Fanny Brawne and they frequently exchanged letters (thirty-one between 1820-1824). In 1824, she asked Keats’s friend  Charles Wentworth Dilke to act as her trustee, enabling her to claim the funds from Chancery related to the Jennings bequest and her deceased brothers’ money.  This amounted to around £4,500, a not insignificant sum. In 1826, Fanny married Valentin Maria Llanos y Gutierrez, a Spanish poet, writer and later diplomat. Probably thanks to Dilke’s connections, the couple moved into the half of Wentworth Place where Keats had lodged in 1819, staying there for the period 1828-31.

By another bizarre coincidence, Fanny’s future husband had actually been presented to Keats in Rome, three days before he died in February 1821.  The couple left England in 1833 never to return—in 1861-64 they lived in Italy and met Joseph Severn the ‘selfless and devoted friend of Keats’.  They had six children, and lived mainly in Spain. Fanny died in Madrid aged eighty-five. Her husband predeceased her in 1885, aged ninety.

 

Richard Abbey

Tea Merchant. After the death of Keats’s mother in 1810, his seventy-three-year-old grandmother Alice Jennings was left with the responsibility of the four orphaned children, John, George, Tom and Fanny. She executed a deed appointing two trustees to manage the funds left to her by her husband. Abbey was one of the trustees (the other took no part and later died).  Keats’s youngest sister Fanny became Abbey’s ward. He controlled the purse strings and gave somewhat limited help to the children as they grew up.  It was an uneasy relationship.

 

Mentors and influencers   

Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877)

Publisher and lecturer. Son of the headmaster at Clarke’s school in Enfield which Keats attended. Eight years Keats’s senior, Clarke was a major influence on the young Keats, introducing him to the works of Edmund Spenser and Chapman’s Homer. Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner was regularly read by the boys at Clarke’s school; Cowden Clarke was acquainted with Hunt and presented Keats to him in October 1816.  Clarke later moved into music publishing, marrying the daughter of Vincent Novello, the celebrated organist and composer.

 

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

 

Poet, essayist, editor, publisher. Hunt was the editor of the leading liberal weekly The Examiner (and later the short lived The Indicator). Both supported parliamentary reform and an end to corruption in public life, particularly in the monarchy. Hunt and his brother John were imprisoned for two years (1813-1815) for seditious libel against the Prince Regent following the article ‘The prince on St Patrick’s day’. To the Tory press, particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review, Leigh Hunt and The Examiner was the very antithesis of everything that they stood for—they took every possible opportunity to attack Hunt and anyone associated with him.

Keats was introduced to Hunt through Charles Cowden Clarke, and they first met in October 1816. Shortly thereafter, on 1^st December, The Examiner ran an article written by Hunt which introduced readers to the ‘Young poets’ of the age: Shelley, John Hamilton Reynolds and the ‘youngest of them all’ John Keats. Hunt was a great champion of Keats in the early years, offering encouragement and support. In June and July 1817, The Examiner published a detailed review of Keats’s first collection Poems, which was dedicated to Leigh Hunt.  This attracted the wrath of the Tory critics, which intensified after the publication of Endymion in 1818 – the issue was not so much about the content, but the fact that they considered Keats a mere acolyte of Hunt.

Keats and Hunt drifted apart in the years that followed, but when Keats’s health broke down in 1820, Hunt and his family cared for him in their rather chaotic home, filled with noisy children. At the end it was Leigh Hunt who wrote perhaps the most moving tribute to Keats. This is contained in a letter to Severn 8^th March, 1821 (Hunt was unaware that Keats had died some two weeks before):

‘…tell that great poet and noble-hearted man that we shall all bear his memory in the most precious parts of our hearts, and that the world shall bow their heads to it as our loves do. Or if this…will trouble his spirit, tell him we shall never cease to remember and love him, and that Christian or Infidel, the most skeptical of us has faith enough in the high things that nature puts into our heads, to think that all who are of one accord in mind or heart are journeying to one and the same place and shall meet somehow or other again, face to face, mutually conscious, mutually delighted. Tell him he is only before us on the road, as he was in everything else; or whether you tell him the latter, or no, tell him the former, and add, that we shall never forget that he was so, and that we are coming after him.’

 

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

Essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, and social commentator. Keats wrote to Haydon in 1818 that ‘There are three things to rejoice at in the Age—The Excursion [Wordsworth’s poem]. Your Pictures, and Hazlitt’s depth of Taste’. Hazlitt was a polymath. Keats met with him on numerous occasions and attended his series of lectures held in early 1818 at the Surrey Institution. They met for the last time on 25^th March 1820, the first day of the exhibition of Haydon’s painting ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem’ . Both Hazlitt and Keats are depicted in the crowd, as is Wordsworth.

 

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846)

Painter and lecturer, and friend of Keats, Charles Cowden Clarke introduced Keats to Haydon in 1816. Haydon was a talented painter, writer, lecturer but blighted by a quick temper and arrogance—he had a tendency to fall out with friends, critics and patrons alike. He specialised in historical paintings on the grand scale. He introduced Keats to the Elgin Marbles, having lobbied for their acquisition. He hosted the ‘Immortal Dinner’ , held on 28^th December 1817, when Keats met Wordsworth and others such as essayist Charles Lamb. Haydon’s painting of ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem’  featured Keats, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Newton, Voltaire and others in the crowd scene.

Keats was initially thrilled and proud of his friendship with such a notable as Haydon, but the good relationship turned sour by 1819, primarily because Haydon was pestering Keats to borrow money.  After Keats’s death Haydon served two years in prison for debt-related matters. He committed suicide by shooting himself, and then  by knife, in 1846.

 

 

Bibliography and source material

The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1878, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 Vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1948; revised edition 1965)

Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Heinemann: London, 1968)

Grant F. Scott, Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs (Aldershot/Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2005)

Joanna Richardson, Keats and his Circle, (London: Cassell, 1980)

Grant F. Scott, Ed. Selected Letters of John Keats, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)

https://www.oxforddnb.com/

 

Ian Reynolds is a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Oxfordshire.  He has a personal interest in those associated with the Keats-Shelley Circle, and poets of the Romantic period, especially John Keats.  He is unaffiliated.  Ian’s other interests include reading, listening to music, particularly rock and jazz, road cycling and wine.