Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts — John Shaqi
Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscriptsKeats, John
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Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne: Written in the years MDCCCXIX and MDCCCXX and now given from the original manuscripts
Keats, John
Brawne, Fanny, 1800-1865 -- Correspondence; Keats, John, 1795-1821 -- Correspondence; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Correspondence
Where will our miseries end? So soon as the Thursday after I
left London you were attacked with a dangerous illness, an hour
after I left this for England my little girl became so ill as
to approach the grave, dragging our dear George after her.
You are recovered (thank [_sic_] I hear the bad and good news
together), they are recovered, and yet....”
Thus, it was on Thursday, the 3rd of February, 1820, that Keats, as
recounted by Lord Houghton (Vol. II, pp. 53-4), returned home at about
eleven o’clock, “in a state of strange physical excitement,” and told
Brown he had received a severe chill outside the stage-coach,—that he
coughed up some blood on getting into bed, and read in its colour his
death-warrant. Mr. Severn tells me that Keats left his bed-room within a
week of his being taken ill: within a fortnight, as we have seen, he was
so far better as to be writing (dismally enough, it is true) to Rice;
but, that he was confined to the house for some months, is evident. The
whole of the letters forming the second division of the series, Numbers X
to XXXII, seem to me to have been written during this confinement; and I
should doubt whether Keats did much better, if any, than realize his hope
of getting out for a walk on the 1st of May.
At that time he was not sufficiently recovered to accompany Brown on his
second tour in Scotland; and was yet well enough by the 7th to be at
Gravesend with his friend for the final parting. I understand from the
_Life, Letters, &c._ (Vol. II, p. 60), that Keats then went at once to
Kentish Town: Lord Houghton says “to lodge at Kentish Town, to be near
his friend Leigh Hunt”; but Hunt says in his _Autobiography_ (1850),
Vol. II, p. 207, “On Brown’s leaving home a second time, ... Keats, who
was too ill to accompany him, came to reside with me, when his last and
best volume of poems appeared....”[14] These accounts are not necessarily
contradictory; for Keats may have tried lodgings _near_ Hunt first,
and moved under the same roof with his friend when the lodgings became
intolerable, as those in College Street had done before. He was reading
the proofs of _Lamia, Isabella, &c._ on the 11th of June, as shown by a
letter to Taylor of that date;[15] and, on the 28th, appeared in _The
Indicator_, beside the Sonnet
“As Hermes once took to his feathers light....”
the paper entitled “A Now,” at the composition of which Keats is said to
have been not only present but assisting;[16] and, as Hunt wrote pretty
much “from hand to mouth” for _The Indicator_, we may safely assume that
Keats was with him, at all events till just the end of June. On a second
attack of spitting of blood, he returned to Wentworth Place to be nursed
by Mrs. and Miss Brawne; and he was writing from there to Taylor on the
14th of August.
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