Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

Pymmes Brook-Testimonies of schoolmates-Edward Holmes-Charles Cowden Clarke-New passion for reading-Left an orphan-Apprenticed to a surgeon-Relations with his master-Readings

ranting that the scenic and legendary romance of the Scottish border wilds were to be made live anew for the delight of the latter-day world, we seem to see in Walter Scott a man predestined for the task alike by origin, association, and opportunity. Had the indwelling spirit of the Cumbrian lakes and mountains, and their power upon the souls and lives of those living among them, to be newly revealed and interpreted to the general mind of man, where should we look for its spokesman but in one of Wordsworth's birth and training? What, then, it may be asked, of Byron and Shelley, the two great contrasted poets of revolution, or rather of revolt against the counter-revolution, in the younger generation,-the one worldly, mockin

the father's side and two on the mother's. His father, Thomas Keats, was a west-country lad who came young to London, and while still under twenty held the place of head ostler in a livery-stable kept by a Mr John Jennings in Finsbury. Seven or eight years later, about the beginning of 1795, he married his employer's daughter, Frances Jennings, then in her twentieth year. Mr Jennings, who had carried on a large business in north-eastern London and the neighbouring suburbs, and was a man of substance, retired about the same time to live in the country, at Ponder's End near Edmonton, leaving the management of the busin

ent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears. Some of their fri

in any. It may in some cases be a possessive form derived from the female Christian name Kate, on the analogy of Jeans from Jane, or Maggs from Margaret: but the source accepted as generally probable for it and its several variants is the Middle-English adjective 'kete

f the 'Superb', and from the same stock sprang in our own day the lady whose tales of tragic and comic west-country life, published under the pseudonym 'Zack', gave promise of a literary career which has been unhappily cut short. But with this Bideford stock the Keats brothers can have claimed no connexion, or as schoolboys they would assuredly have made the prowess of their namesake of the 'Superb' their pride and boast, whereas in fact their ideal naval hero was a much less famous person, their mother's brother Midgley John Jennings, a tall lieutenant of ma

and after 1770 of the marriage of a John Jennings to a Catherine Keate at Penryn; and it is a plausible conjecture (always remembering it to be a conjecture and no more) that the prosperous London stable-keeper Jonn Jennings was himself of Cornish origin, and that between him and the lad Thomas Keats, whom he took so young first as head stableman and then as son-in-law, there existed some previous family connexion or acquaintance. These, however, are matters purely conjectural, and all we really know about the poet's parents are the dates above mentioned, and the fact that they were certainly people somewhat out of the ordinary. Thomas Keats was noticed in his life-time as a man of sense, spirit, and conduct: 'of so remarkably fine a commonsense and native respectability,' writes Cowden Clarke, in whose father's school the poet and his brother were brought up, 'that I perfectly remember the warm terms in which his demeanour used to be canvassed by my parents after he had been

that she lived to the end under her mother's roof and was in no way cut off from her children. The eldest boy John in particular she is said to have held in passionate affection, by him passionately returned. Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be left quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. Haydon, an artist who loved to lay his colours thick, gives this anecdote of the sword a different turn:-'He was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. At five yea

he lower end of the town. When years afterwards the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand: but later it was taken down, and the central part of the fa?ade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum, and is still preserved there as a choice example of the style. It is evident that Mr Clarke was a kind and excellent schoolmaster, much above the standards of his time, and that lads with any bent for literature or s

sband in the management of her father's business. (It may be noted incidentally that Rawlings, like Jennings, is a name common in Cornwall, especially in and about the parish of Madron). This marriage must have turned out unhappily, for it was soon followed by a separation, under what circumstances or through whose fault we are not told. In the correspondence of the Keats brothers after they were grown up no mention is ever made of their stepfather, of whom the family seem soon to have lost all knowledge. Mrs Rawlings went with her children to live at

and pleasantness. He did not live to attain the years, or the success, of men who write their reminiscences; and almost the only recollections he has left of his own early days refer to holiday times in his grandmother's house at Edmonton. They

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Cock salmons and all the whole tribe of the Bushes and the Brooks.' Despite the changes which have overbuilt and squalidly or sprucely suburbanized all those parts of Middlesex, the Pymmes brook still holds its course across half the county, is still bridged by the main street of Edmonton, and runs countrywise, clear and open, for so

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re lay deep in his nature, even from the first, a strain of painful sensibility making him subject to moods of unreasonable suspicion and self-tormenting melancholy. These he was accustomed to conceal from all except his brothers, to whom he was attached by the very closest of fraternal ties. George, the second brother, had all John's spirit of manliness and hon

he death of his elder brother, and referring partly to their s

it, before we left school we quarrelled often and fought fiercely, and I can safely say and my schoolfellows

elieved him by continual sympathy, explanation, and inexhaustible spirits and good humour, from many a bitter fit of hypochondriasm. He a

n in the words of two of Keats's school friends; and first in those of his junior Edwar

personal beauty might easily fancy would become great-but rather in some military capacity than in literature. You will remark that this taste came out rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Some books of his I remember reading were Robinson Crusoe and something about Montezuma and the Incas of Peru. He must have read Shakespeare as he thought that 'no one would care to read Macbeth alone in a house at two o'clock in the morning.' This seems to me a boyish trait of the poet. His sensibility was as remarkable as his indifference to be thought well of by the master as a 'good boy' and to his tasks in general.... He was in every way the creature of passion.... The point to be chiefly insisted on is that he was not litera

orld most likely owes it that he first became aware of his own vocation for poetry. This was the aforementioned Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the head master,

brother Tom's ears, John rushed up, put himself into the received posture of offence, and, it was said, struck the usher-who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket. His passion at times was almost ungovernable; and his brother George, being considerably the taller and stronger, used frequently to hold him down by main force, laughing when John was 'in one of his moods,' and was endeavouring to beat him. It was all, however, a wisp-of-straw

n intellectual bent, though always orderly and methodical in what he did. But during his last few terms, that is in his fifteenth a

casion, he took the first prize by a considerable distance. He was at work before the first school-hour began, and that was at seven o'clock; almost all the intervening times of recreation were so devoted; and during the afternoon holidays, when all were at play, he would be in the school-a

ize in these days exists in confirmation of this account

travels of any note; Mavor's collection, also his Universal History; Robertson's histories of Scotland, America, and Charles the Fifth; all Miss Edgeworth's productions, together with many other books equally well calculated for youth. The books, however, that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke's Pantheon, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, which he

had our meals in the schoolroom), sitting back on the form, from the table, holding the folio volume of Burnet's History of his Own Time between himself and the table, eating his m

t the age of thirty-five in February 1810. We are told with what devotion her eldest boy attended her sick-bed,-'he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels

the strands of human heredity less inveterately entangled than they are, it would be tempting, when we consider the deep duality of Keats's nature, the trenchant contrast between the two selves that were in him, to trace to the mother the seeds of one of those selves, the feverishly over-sensitive and morbidly passionate one, and to his father the seeds of the other, the se

ief part of the property which she derived from her late husband under his will.5 The guardians were Mr Rowland Sandell, merchant, who presently renounced the trust, and the aforesaid Mr Richard Abbey, tea-dealer. Mrs Jennings survived the execution of this deed more than four years,6 but Mr Abbey seems at once to have taken up all the responsibilities of the trust. Under his a

e one advantage, to him inestimable, of proximity to his old school, which meant free access to the school library and continued encouragement and advice in reading from his affectionate senior, the head master's son. The fact that it was only two miles' walk from Edmonton to Enfield helped much, says Cowden Clarke, to reconcile him to his new way of life, and his duties at the surgery were not onerous.

to be taken literally, this happened in the second year of his apprenticeship. Probably it was but the affair of a moment: there is no evidence of any habitual disagreement or final breach between them, and Keats was able to put in the necessary testimonial from Mr Hammond when he presented himself in due course for examination before the Court of Apothecaries. A fellow-apprentice in after years remembered him as 'an idle loafing fellow, always writing poetry.' This, seeing that he did not begin to write till he was near eighteen, must refer to the last two years of his apprenticeship and probably represents an unlettered view of his way of employing his leisure, rather (judging by hi

and bring away or return borrowed books. Young Clarke was an ardent liberal and disciple of Leigh Hunt both in political opinions and literary taste. In summer weather he and Keats would sit in a shady arbour in the old school garden, the elder reading poetry to the younger, and enjoying his looks and exclamations of delight. From the nature of Keats's imitative first flights in verse, it is clear that though he hated the whole 'Augustan' and post-Augustan tribe of social and moral essayists in verse, and Pope, their illustrious master, most of all, yet his mind and ear had become familiar, in the

turer student, appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper, can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like the Faerie Queene, no pleasure equal to the plea

stanza, he attempted to imitate it, and succeeded. This account of the sudden development of his poetic powers I first received from his brothers and afterwards from himself. This, his earliest attempt, the Imitation of Spenser, is in his first volume of poems, and it is peculiarly interesting to those acquainted with his history.' Cowden Clarke places the attempt two years earlier, but his memory for dates was, as he owns, the vaguest. We may fairly take Brown to be on this point the better informed of the two, and may assume that it was some time in the second year after he left school that the Spenser fever took hold on Keats, and with it the

y successful series of his Eastern tales: and finally Wordsworth's Excursion, with which almost from the first Keats was profoundly impressed. But it was not, of course, only by reading poetry that he was learning to be a poet. Nature was quite as much his teacher as books; and the nature within easy reach of him, tame indeed and unimpressive in comparison with Wordsworth's lakes and mountains, had quite enough of vital English beauty to afford fair seed-time to his soul. Across the levels of the Lea valley, not then disfigured as they are now by factories and reservoir works and the squalor of sprawling suburbs, rose the softly shagged undulations of Epping forest, a region which no amount

y peopled it from his readings in Greek mythology, and to be enhanced into a strange supernatural thrill by the recurring magic of moonlight. It is only in adolescence that such delights can be drunk in, not with conscious study and observation but passively and half unaware through all the pores of being, and no yo

mpany him part of the way. 'At the last field-gate, when taking leave, he gave me the sonnet entitled Written on the day that Mr Leigh Hunt left prison. This I feel to be the first proof I had received of his having committed himself in verse; and how clearly do I remember the conscious look and hesitation with which he offered it! There are some momentary glances by beloved friends that fade only with life.' About a score of the pieces which Keats had written and kept secret during the preceding two years are preserved, and like the work of almost all beginners are quite imitative and conventional, failing to express anything original or personal to himself. They include the aforesaid Spenserian stanzas, whi

perous tradespeople named Mathew. Here too there were daughters, Caroline and Ann, who made themselves pleasant to the Keats brothers, and to whom were addressed the pair of complimentary jingles already mentioned. One of the sisters, asked in later life for her recollections of the time, replied in a weariful strain of evangelical penitence for the frivolities of those days, and found nothing more to the purpose to say of Keats than this:-'I cannot go further than say I always thought he had a very beautiful countenance and was very warm and enthusiastic in his character. He wrote a great deal of poetry at our house but I do not recollect whether I ever had any of it, I certainly ha

ays delighted in administering to the happiness of others: and being one of a large family, it pleased me much to see him and his brother George enjoy themselves so much at our little domestic concerts and dances.... He was of the sceptical and republican school. An advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time. A faultfinder with everything established. I, on the contrary, hated controversy and dispute-dreaded d

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l decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse. He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate description, but was less conscious of the sublime and the pathetic. He used to spend many evenin

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een cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy's and St Thomas's.

n. I learn from a correspondent belonging to the very numerous St Teath stock, and signing and known only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats. And my friend Mr F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from

te of it before the sale, meaning to follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well

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of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle's Astronomy given him as a prize at the end of the midsummer term that year (see Bulletin of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed with a fine writing-master's flourish, 'John Keats, emer: 1812;' emer, added in a fainter ink, is of course for emeritus, a boy who has left sc

d nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr Hammond's to Guy's, without any intermediate period of study elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr Henry Stephens. It resul