Letters

Letter #104: To Fanny Keats, 30 November 1818

Today marks a sad day for the Keats family. On the morning of 1 December 1818, Tom Keats succumbed to the “family disease” (tuberculosis), which would also take John’s life a few years later, and George’s two decades after that. The only sibling to avoid the same fate was the recipient of today’s letter, Fanny Keats.

Tom’s illness had been progressively worsening since the summer, and Keats had been preparing his other siblings for the news. Back in October Keats wrote to George and Georgiana in America that “[Tom] is no better but much worse.” And his letters to Fanny during the autumn were likewise full of trepidation about their brother’s health. It’s unclear exactly when he wrote this last letter to Fanny before Tom’s death, but it seems clearly intended to prepare her for that eventual fate. He notes that “[Tom] is in a very dangerous state–I have scarce any hopes of him.”

The letter is postmarked at noon on 1 December 1818, which was a few hours after Tom’s death. Fanny Keats’s biographer, Marie Adami, makes the supposition that Keats wrote the letter at some point during the night or early hours of the morning, and then posted the letter on his way to inform Charles Brown of Tom’s passing. Brown took it upon himself to do the difficult work of informing Keats’s friends of the news. He wrote to Richard Woodhouse soon after Keats arrived at Wentworth Place, noting that “M^r Keats requests me to inform you his brother Thomas died this morning at 8 o’Clock quietly & without pain.”

While it may seem odd that after Tom’s death Keats would mail a letter to Fanny indicating that he had “scarce any hopes” of Tom’s recovery. But as Adami points out, the letter demonstrates that amidst his own grief, Keats was thinking of how he might mitigate Fanny’s by preparing her for the worst and planning to break the news to her soon after in person: “Perhaps nowhere so much as in the last words of this letter … are the tenderness of his care for her …. Waiting in the inaction which the last hours of unconsciousness bring to the watcher, he looked beyond them to Fanny, foreseeing her coming grief, bracing her against it. He gave her something to do, he gave her something to hold. Found and set down as they were, it would be hard to imagine words more moving.” One suspects that after dispatching his letter, Keats would have made the trip to Walthamstow to see Fanny, thereby reinforcing his wish that she would “repose entirely in / Your affectionate Brother / John.”

Keats’s life takes a significant turn from this point on. Soon he’ll be living in Wentworth Place with Brown, and soon after that he will begin his relationship with Fanny Brawne. And, of course, let’s not forget the poetry he will write over the next year: the majority of the poems which establish his literary fame as the century proceeds. But for now let’s recall the loss that preceded all those other things, and the moment of kindness Keats showed to his sister, hoping to do at least something to help make her grieving process less painful.

Text of the letter comes from Harry Buxton Forman’s 1895 edition (image below). Quick note on the dating of the letter: although Keats indicates “Tuesday morn,” which would have been 1 December, and although the postmark is also for that date, Rollins dates the letter as 30 November, following Adami’s suggestion that Keats wrote the letter the night before.

Letter #103: To Mrs. Burridge Davenport, November [?] 1818

This brief letter from Keats to the wife of Burridge Davenport (we’re unable to confirm her first name at this point) poses several tricky questions. First, as the question mark above suggests, there is the date. The letter appears to have been first published in the 1930s by Maurice Buxton Forman, but our access to some of those editions of Keats’s letters being now somewhat limited, we can’t say exactly when for sure. We take the date from Hyder Edward Rollins’s 1958 edition of the letters, where he makes an educated guess that the letter was written sometime in November 1818, given that Keats indicates Tom’s continuing ill health (“his Brother continues in the same state”). So we’ll go with that too.

Then there’s the question of who? That one’s a bit easier. Burridge Davenport (Rollins notes that he’s elsewhere referred to as “Benjamin” and “Burrage”) was a merchant who lived in Hampstead. In a letter from February 1820 to Fanny Keats, her brother mentions an invitation from “Mr. Davenport” and refers to him as “a gentleman of hampstead.” Keats clearly knew the Davenports by autumn 1818 when Mrs. Davenport had inquired about Tom’s health, thereby prompting Keats’s response with his letter.

What about the history of the letter itself? We lied up above when we said Rollins dates the letter November 1818 because of the context alone. There is also an endorsement, in “an unidentified hand,” which reads, “Nov 1818 / Jno Keats.” The letter appears to have been sent by messenger, since it has no postage marks on it. But we do not know anything else about who owned the letter after its initial delivery. (We will update after digging around some of the Forman editions from the early-20th century for more info.) According to Rollins in 1958, the letter was at the British Museum. It then follows that it should now be part of the British Library (which was part of the BM until 1973). However, as far as we can tell from searching the online catalogue, that does not appear to be the case. Where is the letter, then? We don’t know! We’d love to tell you more, but at this point it remains a mystery that needs further investigation.

Below is the letter as printed in Rollins’s edition. If you or anyone you know has any information about the current whereabouts of the letter, please drop us a line

The text of Keats's letter runs as follows: "Mr Keats's compliments to Mrs Daventorp and is sorry to say that his Brother continues in the same state. He and his Brother are extremely sensible of Mrs Davenport's kindness--" — From *The Letters of John Keats*, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP, 1958).

Letter #102: To James Rice, 24 November 1818

In today’s letter to James Rice, we encounter a familiar topic of Keats’s correspondence: social awkwardness. The letter aims to clarify what Rice seems to have thought was a slight he aimed at Keats. We can gather from Keats’s response that the two had a bit of miscommunication. Keats dismisses its significance as such: “I am not at all sensible of any thing but that you were unfortunately engaged and I was unfortunately in a hurry.” The two likely had some sort of brief communication, and afterwards Rice reached out to Keats to apologize. Keats reassures his friend that it was nothing to worry about.

Also of interest here is that Keats takes the opportunity to reflect upon his own social failures with another friend (maybe two others?). Keats put the ol’ proverbial foot in his mouth by assuming in two different cases interested motives on the part of his interlocutor. In one case, Keats responded to a friend who noted plans to see the painter Joseph Severn, “‘Ah’ … ‘you want him to take your Portrait.'” In the other case, Keats responded to a question about when he’d next be in the city with the answer, “‘I will’ … ‘let you have the MSs next week.'” These “most unfortunate paralel slips” were, of course, minor matters, and Keats relays them to Rice in order to make his friend feel better about potentially having committed a similar slip with Keats. In short, Keats acknowledges his tendency to slip up now and then as a way to assure Rice that all is well. Pretty impressive–but not surprising–for Keats to think of Rice’s feelings amidst all that Keats himself was going through while caring for Tom.

The letter made its way from Rice to John Taylor (likely during the initial gathering of materials for a Keats biography soon after the poet’s death), and eventually to Harvard, via Amy Lowell, in the 1920s. Text of the letter can be accessed in Forman’s 1895 edition. Images below are courtesy of Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Page 1 of Keats’s 24 November 1818 letter to James Rice. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.40). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Keats’s 24 November 1818 letter to James Rice. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.40). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 3 of Keats’s 24 November 1818 letter to James Rice. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.40). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 4 of Keats’s 24 November 1818 letter to James Rice. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.40). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #101: To Fanny Keats, 5 November 1818

Like other letters to Fanny Keats from this period, today’s letter is a brief one explaining Keats’s ongoing dispute with Richard Abbey about visiting Fanny. (For other discussions of the topic, see these earlier posts.) Given what we know about Tom’s looming fate, it’s hard not to view Abbey in an even more villainous light than that in which he usually shines. As Tom’s health worsened throughout November 1818, the last month of his life, it became even harder for Keats to visit Fanny in Walthamstow. Not only was she kept from visiting her brothers at Well Walk; John could not come to her as well. At least we know that he kept his sister in mind and let her know of his solicitude via letter.

You can read today’s letter in Forman’s 1895 edition of the letters. Along with most of the other extant letters to Fanny Keats, today’s resides at the British Library.

Keats’s 5 November 1818 letter to Fanny Keats. Via Forman’s 1895 single-volume edition.

Letter #100: To George and Georgiana Keats, 14-31 October 1818

We’ve hit two milestones with our latest letter: number 100 (woo hoo!) and the first of the great journal letters sent to George and Georgiana in America. It wasn’t until early October that word from George and Georgiana had been received in London. As will be the case in most of the transatlantic letters, Keats comments in this one about the nature of that tenuous connection linking them by the post. We daresay it’s a remarkable feat that the letters ever arrived at their destinations!

Because of the great distance separating Keats from his brother and sister-in-law, he would typically write long letters over the space of weeks and months, as opposed to writing shorter letters every week or so. Reading these journal letters is thus a much different experience than reading the sort of letters we’re used to reading from Keats. Each letter spans more time, each letter covers more topical ground, and each letter allows for more extended ruminations. In the example from today, we cover just over two weeks, we learn of a variety of topics (current goings-on, Keats’s thoughts on American character, Tom’s ailing state), and we dive deeply into Keats’s attitudes toward women, matrimony and children. It’s on these last topics that our response for today focuses, from Ivana M. Krsmanović. Enjoy!

To read the letter, you can head over to H. B. Forman’s 1895 edition here. Or you can work your way through the many images below, courtesy of Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Page 1 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 3 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 4 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 5 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 6 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 7 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 8 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 9 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 10 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 11 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 12 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 13 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 14 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 15 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 16 of Keats’s 14-31 October 1818 letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.39). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #99: To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818

Today’s letter is a big one! Well, not any physically bigger than is typical, but you get the drift. This is one of those letters that has its own nickname: the “camelion Poet” letter. Or perhaps the “poetical character” letter. Save for the negative capability letter, today’s is probably the most significant letter in which Keats theorizes the nature of poetry.

We won’t say too much ourselves by way of intro, since we have a few responses coming for you in the next few days. We shall let our contributors do their thing! To read the text of the letter, head over to Forman’s 1895 edition. The manuscript is at Harvard. Images below courtesy of Houghton Library.

Page 1 of Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.38). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 2 of Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.38). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 3 of Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.38). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Page 4 of Keats’s 27 October 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse. Keats Collection, 1814-1891 (MS Keats 1.38). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Letter #98: To Fanny Keats, 26 October 1818

Today’s letter to Fanny Keats, the third one in three weeks, represents the culmination of the battle with Richard Abbey, which we’ve discussed before. But to recap: Abbey was displeased that during one of Fanny’s earlier visits to Well Walk to see John and Tom, she also visited (most likely) Wentworth Place. Apparently Abbey thought it inappropriate for the young Fanny to be in social situations which he did not know of or approve of prior to their occurrence. Well, Mr. Abbey, you probably still shouldn’t have been such a jerk about it! Fanny had not been to visit Tom since early October, and she would not see him again before his death on the first of December.

Keats doesn’t go into too much detail about Abbey and the ongoing negotiations about her potential visits. His primary focus is the question of Fanny having divulged to Abbey that she had been to visit other places than Well Walk. We witness some subtle and really thoughtful insight from the older brother to the younger sister about honesty, prudence, and the complicated situations one finds oneself in as a child, when one’s agency is not yet fully one’s own.

And with that we’ll leave things there, because we have a fabulous response to today’s letter which explores in great detail and with great insight precisely these issues. Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol’s piece analyzes Keats’s careful counsel to his sister while also gesturing toward a broader claim about Keats’s ideas about childhood. And particularly given that Keats has Wordsworth on the mind (as we’ll see tomorrow with the “camelion Poet” letter), that broader claim nicely dovetails with other strands of Keats’s current thinking about poetry, identity, truth, beauty—you know, Keats’s bread and butter. So please enjoy Tontiplaphol’s great essay!

For the text of the letter, we’ll direct you to our usual spot once again: Forman’s 1895 edition. Images below.

Letter #97: To Fanny Keats, 16 October 1818

Like last week’s letter to Fanny, today’s contains an apology for not securing Abbey’s permission for Fanny to come visit Tom. Keats claims that he couldn’t make his way to Walthamstow to deal with Abbey and his (we think) unreasonable insistence that Fanny be kept away from her brothers. As with last week, Keats has had to remain close to home because of Tom’s state of health. We’ve already passed the date of the last time Fanny would see Tom (sometime before 9 October, it seems), and, sadly, Tom’s condition will not improve from here on out.

Keats decides not to divulge too much about Tom’s health here. We can tell from his journal letter to George and Georgiana, which he began just two days before this letter to Fanny, that he probably knew Tom’s fate was secured. He writes to them that “you could have had no good news of Tom and I have been withheld on his account these many days; I could not bring myself to say the truth, that he is no better, but much worse—However it must be told, and you must my dear Brother and Sister take example frome me and bear up against any Calamity for my sake as I do for your’s.” One senses that Keats is preparing them for the inevitable news once it comes. In the letter to Fanny, however, Keats takes a much different tack, hoping to not upset her anymore than she already would have been by the sheer fact that her guardian was keeping her from seeing her brothers at a moment when one was already across and ocean, and another was quickly fading away.

Brother John does have some good news for Fanny on another front, however: news from George and Georgiana had finally arrived. Their ship, the Telegraph, had reached port in Philadelphia sometime late in August, and one presumes that they promptly sent word back across the Atlantic. It seems that this initial notice of their safe arrival was sent only to Mrs. Wylie (Georgiana’s mother), with more detailed correspondence to other friends and family to follow later, and more slowly, given that those letters needed to make their way east over land to an eastern port like New York or Philadelphia, or south via water down the Ohio, to the Mississippi, and leaving port from New Orleans. But we do digress! The point here is that Keats can at least share the happy news with Fanny that George and Georgiana have “landed safely … they are both in good health—their prospects are good—and they are by this time nighing to their journey’s end.”

Full text of the letter can be read in Harry Buxton Forman’s edition of the letters from 1895. Image below from that same text.

Keats’s 16 October 1818 letter to Fanny Keats. From Forman’s 1895 edition of the letters.

Letter #96: To Thomas Richards, 9 October 1818

I begin in the first person today (Brian Rejack, here—hiya), in order to offer an anecdote to contextualize today’s letter to Thomas Richards. There’s a famous moment in Rejack family lore from one of the many visits that, early in my youth, we made to Florida, where my maternal grandfather (I called him Pop) lived his final years. He was a fun-loving guy, and one for whom decorum and politesse were definitely NOT considerations. (Another famous bit of family lore—technically this is DeMartino family lore, since Pop was Salvatore “Frank” DeMartino—involves Pop attending an opera at the Met in New York, where he put up his feet on the seat in front of him, promptly fell asleep and began snoring.) So on one of these visits to Florida to see Pop, the family was talking about our neighbor back home, who was cat-sitting for us while we were away. Her name was Claudia. So a conversation about Claudia was going on for several minutes, and apparently Claudia’s name was uttered several times. Pop listened for a while, until all of a sudden, he burst out with, “Who the hell is Claudia??” He wasn’t angry—just genuinely confused that everyone was talking about someone named Claudia, and he had no idea what was going on. Anytime after that when the name Claudia came up—or comes up, still—we’d fondly recall the moment (and probably ask the question yet again).

(Ok, back to our customary editorial third person)—One approaches today’s letter perhaps wondering, “Who the hell is Thomas Richards??” His name does not come up much in the story of Keats, and this letter remains the only extant one Keats sent to him. The existence of the letter, despite Richards being about as marginal a figure in Keats’s correspondence as one could imagine, offers us an important reminder. What we have of Keats’s life, and even of that part of his life registered and retained in extant correspondence, is such a small fraction of an unknown and unknowable whole. Just think of how many other Claudias of the Keats story are out there, waiting to be named so that those who thought they knew all there is to know, can ask once again, “who the hell is that??”

Thomas Richards, it turns out, was the son of a livery stable-keeper, so he had that in common with Keats. The only other mention of him in the correspondence comes from way back in December 1816, when Keats wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke that he had been at “Richards’s” and that “it was so whoreson a Night that I stopped there all the next day.” Although one night think “so whoreson a Night” refers to jubilant reveling and the next day’s hangover that might have kept Keats from heading home immediately, it appears he was referring to bad weather that kept him from departing. (See the inaugural episode of “This Week in Keats” for speculations along these lines.)

Other than that, we don’t know a whole lot about Richards. He was someone Keats knew. And according to the letter, Keats had promised to visit Richards, but Tom’s health had kept him from so doing. We also know that Charles Brown knew Richards, for he too wrote letters to him that survive. Brown’s letters help solve a mystery in Keats’s, which ends by asking that Richards remember him “to M^rs R—and to Vincent.” One might assume that the latter name refers to Vincent Novello, but regular readers of Keats’s letters will know he almost never uses first names, except to refer to family. In two of Brown’s letters to Richards, he sends his regards to a “Mr. Vincent” and a “Mrs. Vincent.” It thus seems likely that Keats is referring to the same person. Now, who the hell is Mr. Vincent?? We do not know. (Rollins details these questions and how they came to be resolved in the notes to this letter in his edition.)

The provenance of the manuscript is also fraught through with uncertainty. It now resides at the University of Virginia library (the only Keats letter there–poor lonely MS!). It was presumably part of the collection of books and manuscripts donated to the library in 1938 by Tracy McGregor, a philanthropist whose giving included money (and items) for university libraries. How he came to own this letter is unclear. It is possible that the letter was passed down in the family to Richards’s grandson, John F. Richards, whose archives included one of the “Amena” letters written to Tom by Charles Wells (in an elaborate hoax to trick Tom into thinking he had a secret admirer–Keats mentions the scheme in anger when he finds some of the correspondence in spring 1819, about which he writes to George and Georgiana). So perhaps the letter to Thomas Richards was also at some point in possession of John F. Richards, before it was sold to someone else (maybe McGregor, but more likely multiple owners before McGregor got his hands on it). It was first published in the 1930s by Maurice Buxton Forman, but (we think) after it had already been acquired by McGregor. And that’s about all we know!

Since the letter was first published post-1923, we don’t have any out-of-copyright editions in which it appears to link for you here. But here’s a screenshot of it from Rollins’s edition (via Google Books preview).

Letter #95: To Fanny Keats, 9 October 1818

Today’s letter is a short one to Fanny, and like several other letters during this period in autumn 1818, it concerns Tom’s health and Keats’s difficulties securing permission for Fanny to visit (or for Keats to visit her). Yes, it’s that dastardly Richard Abbey once again: the Keats family guardian after the death of their grandmother Alice Jennings. Since Fanny had not yet come of age, she remained in Abbey’s care. And he sure didn’t like the Keatses! After Fanny had been allowed to visit with John and Tom several times at the end of summer/beginning of fall, Abbey had around this time forbidden any further visits. His reasoning–likely a pretext to keep Fanny away from her brothers–was that Fanny should not have been allowed to visit other places and with other people on such occasions. Abbey learned sometime in early October, from Fanny herself, that she had done so (most likely she had been to Wentworth Place, home of Charles Brown and the Dilkes, where Keats himself would soon live–Keats House, today). We’ll hear all about how Keats consoles and gently advises Fanny about the matter in a letter later this month. Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol has an excellent response to that 26 October letter–so be on the lookout!

Today, though, the controversy with Abbey is not really the reason for Fanny’s separation from her brothers. Instead, it’s simply that Keats could not make the journey to Walthamstow, as he had planned to do, because of Tom’s ever-worsening health. He apologizes to Fanny and promises that he “shall be punctual in enqu[i]ring about next Thursday.” In another bit of whimsy, typical of the playful letters to Fanny, Keats notes that he “got to the Stage half an hour before it set out and counted the buns and tarts in a Pastrycooks window and was just beginning with the Jellies. There was no one in the Coach who had a Mind to eat me like Mr Sham-deaf.” We can always count on Keats to do his best to soothe the cares of those he loves when they have plenty of reason to be full of anxiety.

In case you’re wondering what exactly Keats is intending to say here, you’re not alone! According to a note from Harry Buxton Forman’s 1901 edition, the “half an hour before it set out” means “half an hour before it would have set out [if there had been enough passengers].” That clarifies the bit about “no one in the Coach.” Now, we remain agnostic on the issue of “who had a Mind to eat me like Mr Sham-deaf.” Sorry, folks!