The Life and Works of John Keats

Keats moved to Hampstead, then a village outside of London, in 1817 and lived at Wentworth Place (now Keats House) from December 1818 to September 1820. While living there he mixed with a circle of friends who nurtured him and his work, met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and wrote most of the work for which he is now famous.

After falling ill with consumption, he left England to go to Italy for his health but died there on 23 February 1821 at the age of just 25.

His gravestone in Rome bears the words ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, as he believed he had not achieved literary fame in his lifetime. Two hundred years later however, Keats is one of the best-known English Romantic poets and the works he wrote in the spring and summer of 1819 in particular, are still republished, studied, read and loved around the world. 
 
Whether you already love his work or are new to Keats and his writing, we hope you find his genius and legacy living on through this exhibition.

While the family weren’t wealthy, they could afford to send their sons to a good school. They chose John Clarke’s School in Enfield, which awarded prizes for good work instead of punishing children. This more liberal education encouraged Keats to change from a boy known for fighting to one who loved literature and poetry. 

When he was eight, his father died in a riding accident while returning from visiting him at school. Within months his mother remarried, leaving her children with their grandparents. She returned five years later suffering from consumption, a common and fatal illness. Keats nursed his mother and began to study hard, believing this could help her. She died soon after leaving them as orphans.

The Keats children were given legal guardians by their grandmother but they were unable to access their inheritance. At the age of 14, Keats left school to train in medicine.  

At the end of his apprenticeship, Keats returned to London to continue his medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Keats was a good student and was awarded the prestigious role of surgeon’s dresser, which involved assisting at amputations and dressing wounds. Witnessing operations performed before anaesthetics and antibiotics influenced his later writing on human suffering.

He passed his medical exams in 1816 at the age of 20, but was becoming increasingly drawn to a career as a poet. While studying at Guy’s he met the influential journalist Leigh Hunt, who was to become a great friend of Keats, and champion of his poetry. Keats’s first published  poem, ‘To Solitude’ appeared in Hunt’s journal The Examiner in May 1816, two months before passing his medical exams.      

By the end of 1816 Keats could no longer balance both his work at the hospital and his writing. He chose poetry. While his guardians were appalled, Keats began to find support in a new circle of writers, artists and journalists living in Hampstead.   

Despite being hampered by family tragedy, continued money worries and literary criticism, Keats began and revised his epic poem ‘Hyperion’, composed two long narrative poems, sonnets, a ballad, a play and six exceptional odes.

Inspired by the loss of his brother Tom and the beauty, friendship and love he found in Hampstead, his poems of that year are both sad and uplifting at the same time, beautifully demonstrating how sorrow and happiness exist together. He was skilled enough to write about different subjects in different types of verse, yet his poems all show his love of nature and his belief in how powerful the human imagination is. 

He seems to say that though everything in life fades, we still have beauty, an idea he represented in his poems through a malicious maiden or the melodic song of a nightingale.

Keats probably contracted the illness in 1818 while nursing his brother Tom, but the disease lay dormant throughout 1819 allowing time for his most creative and brilliant writing. However, from February 1820 his health deteriorated, destroying his hopes for literary success.

Keats was initially prescribed rest, a starvation diet and bloodletting, but this only made him weaker. He was also told to stop reading or writing poetry in case it over excited him. 

 As was common practice, Keats was advised to go abroad where a warmer climate could relieve his symptoms. On 17 September 1820, Keats sailed on the Maria Crowther to Italy where he intended to stay the winter. Joseph Severn, a friend and painter, accompanied Keats on his journey.

The ship made slow progress along the English Channel and the passengers had to endure being seasick as well as a violent storm. In the Mediterranean Keats suffered another haemorrhage, followed by a fever.

On 21 October they finally arrived in the Bay of Naples but were forced to quarantine on board for two weeks before they could disembark. More than six weeks after leaving London they finally set foot in Italy on 31 October 1820. It was Keats’s 25th birthday.