The second in a series of linked posts
by Ian Reynolds
My first post looked at ‘Who was who’ in the life of John Keats and considered his family, influencers and mentors. In this follow-up post we now turn to the friends and acquaintances of John Keats. 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.
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.
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 23/24th 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.
The friends and acquaintances of John Keats
John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852)
English poet, satirist, critic and solicitor. Often called Keats’s ‘dearest friend’. He joined the staff of John Scott’s liberal weekly newspaper The Champion in 1815, principally to write theatre and literary reviews. At this time, he was still working as a clerk in an insurance company. In addition to theatre and literary criticism he also wrote occasional essays and a number of his own poems. He was quick-witted, a skillful satirist, and competent journalist. By April 1816 he was doing sufficiently well to give up his day job to become a full-time writer; he also contributed to other journals in addition to his Champion work.
John Hamilton Reynolds by Joseph Severn, 1818, NPG London
In the summer of 1816 Taylor and Hessey published a volume of Reynolds’s poems The Naiad – A Tale with other poems. The Naiad was allegedly based on a piece of Dumfries and Galloway folklore—a poem had been previously written on it by the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham (1784-1842) called ‘The Mermaid of Galloway’. Some scholars consider that Keats may have been influenced by The Naiad/Mermaid of Galloway in relation to his later 1819 poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ as there are similarities in both poetic structure and theme. The Naiad collection of poems was well received and favourably reviewed. It was thought that it was Reynolds who introduced Keats to the publisher John Taylor, of Taylor and Hessey—both were to share the same publisher. It is clear that as close friends, Reynolds was privy to the ongoing work of Keats, as he had a peculiar habit when writing theatrical reviews to stitch in some lines from, as yet, unpublished poems.
Reynolds met Keats through Leigh Hunt, probably in October 1816. Keats then became a frequent visitor to the Reynolds family household and was on good terms with Reynolds’s sisters; Jane, Marianne, Eliza and Charlotte. In December 1816 Leigh Hunt’s Examiner included an article written by Hunt which introduced readers to the ‘Young poets’ of the age; Shelley, John Hamilton Reynolds, and John Keats. In 1817 Reynolds reviewed Keats’s first collection Poems for the Champion and he praised the work enthusiastically, presciently observing that Keats’s reputation would surely rise and eclipse those of his contemporaries.
Towards the end of 1817, he became engaged to be married, and wished to follow a more secure career path; with the assistance of friend James Rice he decided to train to become a solicitor. Rice paid the £110 fee for him to become articled at the law office of Francis Fladgate, the intention being that after qualifying, Reynolds would join the law firm of James Rice, on the retirement of Rice’s father. In early 1818 Reynolds left the Champion, and whilst he could not write full-time, he continued to write poems, essays, and undertake literary criticism for journals of the period.
He was always a staunch defender and promoter of Keats; when he published his long lyric poem Endymion in 1818, Reynolds set about trying to encourage favourable reviews to help promote it. He anticipated that Keats might be attacked by the Tory magazines of the day, notably, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review, because of his past association with Leigh Hunt. Reynolds tried to prevent this by introducing Keats to a friend and fellow law student, Jonathan Henry Christie. Christie was a friend and later an associate of the co-editor of Blackwood’s, John Gibson Lockhart, who commonly used the pseudonym of either ‘Z’ or ‘The Scorpion’. Reynolds hoped this intervention would secure a more lenient treatment of Endymion, if and when it was reviewed.
Meanwhile, after the Quarterly Review posted an unfavourable review, Reynolds wrote a riposte for a west country paper, entitled ‘The Quarterly Review—Mr Keats’. Leigh Hunt reprinted this in the Examiner and it was this (probably exacerbated by Benjamin Bailey’s clumsy intervention in July 1818) which led to a savage attack on Keats by Lockhart in the August 1818 edition of Blackwood’s. This was entitled ‘The Cockney School of Poetry No IV —John Keats: the muse’s son of promise and what feats he yet may do’. The ‘muse’s son’ comment was a reference to Leigh Hunt. The review ran to over five pages full of caustic vitriol and was littered with personal information probably supplied – unwittingly – by Bailey. For example: ‘The phrenzy of the “Poems” but did not alarm half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of “Endymion”’, and towards the conclusion “It is better and a wiser thing to be a starving apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to “plaster, pills and ointment boxes &c”’. Reynolds’s good intentions had rather spectacularly backfired.
Despite this setback Reynolds continued to promote Keats’s work. Following the publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and other poems in July 1820 he wrote a personal letter to Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, a more liberal-leaning journal, providing additional background information about Keats: ‘…Owing to Leigh Hunt’s fatal patronage, Keats name and fate have been joined with his in the Quarterly and Blackwoods magazine. By his friends he is very much beloved; and I know of no one who with such talents is so unaffected and sincere, or with such personal abuse, as he has suffered, could be so cheerful and so firm…’. Jeffrey obliged with a positive review.
In 1819 Reynolds wrote what would become his most famous poem ‘Peter Bell’. Having learned that William Wordsworth was shortly to publish a new poem of the same name, Reynolds quickly wrote his ‘Peter Bell’, as a parody of Wordsworth’s rather sentimental style of poetry, complete with mock preface and other notes. Reynolds’s ‘Peter Bell’ was written and published only days before Wordsworth’s. It was a successful parody running to three editions in two months.
He married in 1822 and had one child, Lucy, who died aged ten in 1835. By 1847 Reynolds retired from London and took up a relatively modest position of assistant clerk to the county court in Newport, Isle of Wight, where he remained until his death in 1852.
Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842)
Brown was born in Lambeth, the son of a Scottish broker and his Welsh wife. He left school aged fourteen to join a counting-house, to learn book-keeping. At eighteen he travelled to St Petersburg to join his older brother John’s business. This venture failed and he returned to England after five years, becoming a part-time book-keeper and tutor. He wrote a comic opera Narensky drawing on his experiences in Russia, which was produced at Drury Lane in 1814 to moderate success. Another brother, James, died in the Far East the following year and Brown received a significant bequest; sufficient for him to become a man of leisure, free to pursue his literary ambitions. He had a long-term friendship with Charles Wentworth Dilke, who was already known to Keats. Brown and Dilke then moved into a newly constructed semi-detached villa in Hampstead known as Wentworth Place.
Self portrait by Charles Armitage Brown c1827, Private collection
Brown first met Keats in 1817 through the Dilke connection, and they were soon firm friends. In the early summer of 1818 Brown and Keats set off together on a walking tour of the English Lake District, which included a brief interlude to the northern part of Ireland, and then onwards north through the lowlands and highlands of Scotland. After Tom Keats died on 1st December 1818, Keats lodged with Brown at Wentworth Place at the cost of £5 per month, plus a share of the outgoing expenses.
Brown was energetic and gregarious, loved good food and horticulture, and was a careful keeper of accounts, as can be seen from the way he reacted when funds from the estates of Keats’s grandparents were released from Chancery in 1826, and paid to the surviving members of the Keats family (ie, George and Fanny Keats). Brown promptly submitted an itemised bill to George Keats for £75 4s & 5d in relation to John Keats’s expenses for the period December 1819 to May 1820 at Wentworth Place, including rent, a half share in the drinks bill, four guineas for doctors, three shillings for coach hire, and six pounds sixpence for ‘sundries’. George settled the bill promptly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Brown’s punctiliousness caused some rancour with Keats’s other friends.
A silhouette of Keats by Charles Brown, 1819, given to Keats’s sister
Brown had a son Charles (known as Carlino) by Abigail Donaghue, who had been his housekeeper at Wentworth Place. He was co-executor of Keats’s estate and had intended to write a biography of Keats, but by 1836/37 he had all but given up. When he emigrated with his son to New Zealand in 1841 he passed all his Keats papers to Richard Monckton Milnes, who later published his Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) based largely on the Brown notes. Carlino Brown remained in New Zealand after his father’s death, became a member of the House of Representatives, and Civil Commissioner at Taranaki, North Island. He was run over by a locomotive in New Plymouth and died in 1901.
Joseph Severn (1793-1879)
Severn was a painter and, eventually, British Consul to Rome. He was born in Hoxton, London, into a deeply religious family. His father was a musician and from an early age Severn had an interest in drawing. He was later apprenticed as an engraver. He met Keats in 1816 but never quite made it into his inner circle of friends: according to Robert Gittings he ‘attached himself to Keats like a spaniel’. In 1819 he won a Gold Medal from the Royal Academy for his painting ‘Una and the Red Cross Knight in the Cave of Despair’. That same year he fathered an illegitimate child, Henry, who died in 1831.
When Keats decided to travel to Italy in 1820, William Haslam suggested Severn go with him. Some now believe Severn may have had reasons of his own for wishing to leave England – in other words, to evade his responsibilities in relation to his child, and to further his career as a painter. He accompanied Keats to Rome, and cared for him during his traumatic final illness. Dr James Clark, Keats’s physician in Rome, wrote to a friend ‘…between you and I [he] is not the best suited for his companion but I suppose the poor fellow had no choice.’ In the nineteenth century, Severn was always thought of as the ‘selfless and devoted friend of Keats’ but Keats’s friend Isabella Jones took a different view. Writing to John Taylor two months after Keats’s death, having read a batch of correspondence from Rome, she was incensed by what she saw as Severn’s own self-promotion and selfishness: ‘I never saw so much egotism and selfishness displaced in the mask of feeling and friendship’. In later years some considered Severn used his Keats connection for personal gain, and to promote his own standing in society, often embellishing and exaggerating Keats anecdotes.
Self-portrait by Joseph Severn, c1820, NPG London
Severn was appointed British Consul at Rome 1861, and in 1864, appointed by the King of Italy as Consul for all Italy. He is buried next to Keats in Rome Tomb no. 173, Gravestone S32, (Zone A, Plot 65) of the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners.
Frances ‘Fanny’ Brawne (1800-1865)
Fanny Brawne met Keats probably through Charles Wentworth Dilke. The Brawne family, consisting of the widow Mrs Frances Brawne and her three children, Fanny, Samuel and Margaret, first rented Charles Armitage Brown’s house in Wentworth Place in the summer of 1818, and then Dilke’s house a year later.
Legend has it that Fanny and Keats came to an ‘understanding’ sometime in 1818 or 1819. This would have to have been a secret engagement, because her mother would not have permitted an official betrothal due to Keats’s poor health, his lack of financial prospects, and Fanny’s relative youth, However, it should be noted that there is absolutely no evidence to support the engagement hypothesis. Fanny was reasonably well educated in literature and proficient in languages, particularly French. Brown and others of Keats’s friends considered her ‘superficial and vain’ and also flirtatious. Keats described her as being ‘elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange’, ‘monstrous’, ‘flying out in all directions’, a ‘minx’ with a ‘penchant…for acting stylishly’. Even when Keats was living next door to the Brawne’s in 1819, he often found it distressing, either to be with her, or to think of being away from her, though much of this may have been due to his worsening health.
Fanny Brawne, 1833, Keats House London
After he left for Italy in September 1820, he found himself unable to write to her, or even to read her letters to him. On board the Maria Crowther, destined for Italy, he writes to Brown: ‘The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me. I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.’
After Keats died in February 1821, Severn records that letters from Fanny, and from Keats’s sister Fanny were wrapped in his shroud and buried with him, unread. In 1833 Fanny Brawne married Louis Lindo (later Lindon), who came from a wealthy Spanish merchant banking family, and was twelve years her junior. They lived mainly in continental Europe, before returning to London in later life. They had three children. When the intimate letters between Keats and Fanny were published in 1878 there was an outcry, as many believed it was improper; she had been virtually unknown up until this time. Any damage to her posthumous reputation was offset, years later, when thirty-one letters between her and Fanny Keats were published, which presented an altogether different view of her character.
Fanny Brawne’s grave at Brompton cemetery
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.
Bibliography & 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)
Leonidas M. Jones, ‘Reynolds and Keats’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 1958, Vol 7 Winter, 1958
Derek Patmore, ‘A Literary Duel’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Autumn 1954, Vol 16, No 1 (Autumn 1954)
https://romantic-circles.org/editions/brownsevern/index.html
https://www.oxforddnb.com/
The post The Life of John Keats: Who Was Who? Part II appeared first on Wordsworth Grasmere.