Keats, king of the ode Sara Wheeler
Two hundred years after Keats’s death, Sara Wheeler follows in his footsteps, from Hampstead to Rome
John Keats, apostle of truth and beauty, died 200 years ago, on 23rd February 1821, in Rome, aged 25. A new biography by Lucasta Miller marks the bicentenary. For two decades, I have looked down from my bedroom window into the garden of the white villa, now Keats House, where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree. Keats strode daily along the oak groves of Hampstead Heath, beside the ponds fed by the headwaters of the Fleet and through the ancient woods that look over to Highgate.
The villa I can see has, quite rightly, become a shrine. In Kentucky recently, I discovered that John’s brother George deserves a shrine of his own.
The surviving Keats siblings ings – three boys and a girl – lost their parents early during a rackety ety childhood. The boys moved d to Hampstead in March 1817; they thought the air of f the capital’s highest outpost t would benefit the youngest, , Tom, who had TB.
The trio rented rooms next to the Hampstead Wells, a lively, spring-fed spa adjacent to a pond, now w filled in; the Wells were demolished in 1882.
Early-19th-century maps s show Hampstead surrounded by fields and the heath, with unbroken vistas in all directions; there e would have been flocks of sheep in the streets.
John and George Keats, who were close, regularly took the coach ‘to London’ from the Bird in Hand inn, diagonally opposite what is now Hampstead tube station. Once there, they paid a shilling to visit Vauxhall Gardens, where they enjoyed potted pigeon and arrack punch after viewing the latest stunt: a cat arrived by parachute, poor thing, and a horse went up under a hot-air balloon, its hooves nailed to a wooden platform.
Before the move to Hampstead, John walked on the heath while visiting his early mentor Leigh Hunt in the Vale of Health, still the loveliest dell in NW3.
Keats had recently abandoned his training as an apothecary surgeon at Guy’s Hospital to pursue his calling as a poet. He met Shelley at Hunt’s in Decemb December 1816 and the pair took const constitutionals together.
T The Heath, managed in mo modern times by the City of London Corporation an and graced with an up upper-case H it never had in the Keats era, remains ag agreeably untamed but lac lacks the foraging potential th then familiar to the poets.
Keats described ‘a str stretch of wild natural cou country with marshes and bo bogs, animal life, wil wildflowers, wild cherries, pea pears, cabs and bullace plu plums in abundance’.
In the summer of 1818, Geo George, balding at the front alm almost to the crown, e emigrated to America to seek his fortune as the western frontier opened to the enterprising pioneer. Just over a month before his departure, he married 16-year-old Georgiana Augusta Wylie.
John adored his sister-in-law and told her so in a sonnet: ‘Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance,/ In what diviner moments of the day/ Art thou most lovely?’
The newly-weds sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia on the Telegraph and headed to Pittsburgh. They then floated down the clear blue waters of the Ohio on a flat-bottomed keelboat to Henderson, western Kentucky.
There they lodged with John James Audubon, not yet embarked on his titanic bird-painting endeavour. Audubon and George went into partnership ferrying merchandise up and down the Ohio by steamboat.
Fanny Trollope, mother of the novelist, arrived in nearby Cincinnati at about the same time, equally anxious to take advantage of the economic opportunities touted in the British press. She failed; success had to wait till she came home and wrote her bestseller, Domestic Manners of the Americans.
George failed too, at first; his commercial venture with Audubon effectively bankrupted him. It was a rough life. In the gambling rooms on the Louisville wharf, fighting men deployed the popular practice of ‘gouging’ – scraping out one’s opponent’s eyeball till it dangled on his cheek or pulling the eyeball off to take home and display on the mantelpiece.
Keats’s gravestone, in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. The epitaph reads, ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’
On 1st December 1818, Tom died of TB. He was 19. John stumbled down Well Walk, across the fields ‘on the cold hill’s side’ and along muddy John Street with its brick water conduit. There he let himself in to Charles Brown’s house and woke his friend, saying Tom had died at 8 o’clock.
‘Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?’ Keats wrote later in a letter.
He could not bear to tell George. He asked another friend, William Haslam, to write with the wrenching news.
The raffish Brown invited Keats to move in, asking £5 a month, including board. The house was actually half a house. In 1815, Brown and his schoolfriend Charles Dilke had taken up residence in the recently-built, Regency-style Wentworth Place, a handsome property divided down the middle with tall ground-floor windows that looked onto mulberry trees and a laurustinus hedge. This is the villa on which I daily gaze.
Brown and Keats cohabited for 17 months. They played cards, drank claret and shot at blue tits in the front garden.
Keats wrote some of his best verses as he watched his beloved heath rotate through its ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, the cold months when ‘sedge is wither’d from the lake’, and on to the ‘full-throated ease’ of the nightingale’s summer.
In the summer of 1818, John met 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, who was even shorter than his own five-foot height. Her mother, a well-off widow, had rented the Dilke side of Wentworth Place.
Fanny and John spent Christmas Day together in Hampstead, striding across the heath with widow Brawne’s yapping dog, Carlo.
‘You have absorb’d me,’ he wrote to her. ‘I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.’ Tender was the night indeed.
When Keats went to the heath without Fanny, he told her, ‘I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.’
George and Georgiana, meanwhile, had settled in Louisville, then a river town of 7,000 people in the final decade of its frontier period before it was incorporated as a city.
George bought shares in a sawmill on First Street and, in a remarkable reversal of fortune, prospered in lumber and other mercantile trades. He built a Greek Revival house on Walnut Street (with an extensive library), fathered eight children and rose to become a pillar of the community, occupying positions of responsibility in important civic institutions. In Louisville, I saw his name engraved on several plaques. This was quite an achievement in those tumultuous American years.
But George lost everything in the financial panic of 1837 and died four years later, aged 44. He lies in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, under a dignified stone memorial.
John had died two decades earlier, aged 25. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die,’ he had written while sitting under the plum tree. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’
He was so sure he’d be forgotten that he asked for the epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’
John’s presence resonates in Hampstead. John Street is now Keats Grove and Wentworth Place the Keats House museum. There used to be a Keats restaurant nearby; its successor, Byron’s, didn’t last long.
A triple-fronted wealth-management firm now occupies the site, a symbol of the trajectory of Hampstead from nest of Romantics to lair of the merely rich. As for John Keats, ‘I will clamber through the clouds and exist,’ he wrote in a letter. And he did.
Lucasta Miller’s Keats is out now