What is it about Keats?

Sue Brown is an independent scholar based in London and Malta, and is the author of Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship. Joseph Severn (1793-1879) was the best known but most controversial of poet John Keats’s friends. In the nineteenth century Severn’s friendship with Keats was seen as a model of devoted masculine companionship and he was reburied by popular acclaim next to Keats in 1882. In the original post below, Sue Brown reflects on her recent party at Keats House, and wonders what is was about the poet that brought out the best in people.

It absolutely bucketed down in London last Tuesday evening and never stopped all evening. Tube stations were closed, railways disrupted, the traffic ground to a halt and I and a friend struggled to get the drink and glasses up to Keats House for the party I was giving to celebrate the publication of my new biography of Joseph Severn. Gloomily, I wondered whether anyone would come. Mick Scott, the manager at Keats House, did a wonderful job carrying heavy cartons of wine and champagne into the House and getting soaked to the skin. Downstairs in the kitchen, where Charles Brown must often have visited Abigail O’Donaghue eyeing her up as she laboured, my caterers were already busy turning out delicious canapés.

And as we opened a few bottles, we saw through the windows odd figures crouched under umbrellas, or, bareheaded, braving their way through the garden to knock on the front door. On this most inhospitable of evenings, Keats House was the most hospitable of places. A few turned back or got lost in the downpour: but eighty persisted. Among them were direct descendants of Charles Brown, from New Zealand and France; a descendant of Severn’s oldest child, the gentle Claudia Gale, from Minnesota, as well as descendants of Severn’s eldest son, Walter, and his youngest daughter, Eleanor, including Lady Juliet Townsend who was so generous to me when I worked in the family attic, truffling out some amazing treasures. And Fernando Paradinas, who is directly descended from Fanny Keats came with his wife, Patricia.

It struck me that this was probably the most extended gathering of descendants of Keats and his circle since the originals got together at Wentworth Place nearly two hundred years ago. Nobody has yet told me that I’m wrong about that.

The House is now looking splendid having recently been refurbished. If that makes it look a bit too spick and span Mick and Ken Page are quick to remind visitors that it was still very new in Charles Brown’s day and I guess that Charles Brown, Keats’s landlord and an active domestic manager, made sure that carpets and curtains stayed clean – and umbrellas were left at the door. It’s not difficult to imagine Keats and Severn together there, making a “concert” with Charles Wells for six hours in the New Years in 1818 (but what on earth could it have sounded like?) Or Severn flirting with Fanny Brawne the first time he met her at a party as Keats morosely compared his own dwarfish stature with Severn’s matinee idol good looks. He was always miserably conscious of being only five feet tall. Keats House has cleverly set a bust of him at his exact height. With everyone milling around it on Tuesday evening, it was easy to imagine why parties could be an ordeal for Keats. But Keats forgave Severn and described the spare bed at Wentworth Place as “your little crib” inviting him to come and sleep for nine hours and spend the day gossiping as he painted in the backgrounds to his miniatures. It is not difficult to imagine them chatting away in “Keats Parlour” neither of them guessing the tragic turn of events which would take them both to Italy in September 1820.

When Keats last left Wentworth Place on Wednesday morning, 13 September, it must have seemed more likely than not that he would have to sail to Italy and then make the journey from Naples to Rome entirely alone, desperately ill though he was. The same morning William Haslam went to see Joseph Severn to persuade him to drop everything (including an illegitimate son) and go with Keats on the Maria Crowther which was then due to sail on the 15th. Severn – to both his credit and, as it turned out, his profit – said Yes.

What is it about Keats that brings out the best in people? A curator at the Houghton Library where the main Severn collection is once told me how much more agreeable, warm and congenial, conferences on Keats were, compared with those on Byron or Shelley where participants were more disputatious. And would anyone but Keats have brought 80 people up to an obscure corner of Hampstead on a truly miserable night to celebrate his friendship with Joseph Severn?