Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Sidney Colvin
Early in the autumn of 1815, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday, Keats left the service of Mr. Hammond, his indentures having apparently been cancelled by consent, and went to live in London as a student at the hospitals, then for teaching purposes united, of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s. What befell him during the eighteen months that followed, and how his career as a student came to an end, will be told in the next two chapters.8
1 Between the forms with and without the final ‘s’ there is no hard and fast line to be drawn, one getting changed into the other either regularly, by the normal addition of the possessive or patronymic suffix, or casually, through our mere English habit of phonetic carelessness and slipshod pronunciation. I learn from a correspondent belonging to the very numerous St. Teath stock, and signing and known only as Keat, that other members of his family call themselves Keats. And my friend Mr. F. B. Keate, working-man poet and politician of Bristol, whose forbears came from Tiverton and earlier probably from St. Teath, assures me that he is addressed Keates in speech and writing as often as not. There are several families in Bristol, most of them coming from Wilts or (as the famous flogging headmaster of Eton came) from Somerset, whose names are spelt and spoken Keat or Keats and Keate or Keates indifferently.
2 This document, a memorandum written for the information of Keats’s friend and publisher, John Taylor, was sold in London in 1907. I saw and took rough note of it before the sale, meaning to follow it up afterwards: but circumstances kept me otherwise fully occupied, and later I found that the buyer, a well known and friendly bookseller, had unfortunately mislaid it: neither has he since been able to recover it from among the chronic congestion of his shelves.
3 Houghton MSS.
4 Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollection of Writers, 1878.
5 Rawlings v. Jennings.
6 She was buried at St. Stephen’s, Colman Street, Decr. 19, 1814, aged 78.
7 Mistakes have crept into the received statements (my own included) as to the dates when Keats’s apprenticeship began and ended. The witnesses on whom we have chiefly to depend wrote from thirty to fifty years after the events they were trying to recall, and some of them, Cowden Clarke especially, had avowedly no memory for dates. The accepted date of Keats’s leaving school and going as apprentice to Mr. Hammond at Edmonton has hitherto been the autumn of 1810, the end of his fifteenth year. It should have been the late summer of 1811, well on in his sixteenth, as is proved by the discovery of a copy of Bonnycastle’s Astronomy given him as a prize at the end of the midsummer term that year (see Bulletin of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, Rome, 1913, p. 23). On the other hand we have material evidence of his having left by the following year, in the shape of an Ovid presented to him from the school and inscribed with a fine writing-master’s flourish, ‘John Keats, emer: 1812;’ emer, added in a fainter ink, is of course for emeritus, a boy who has left school. This book is in the Dilke collection of Keats relics at Hampstead, and the inscription has been supposed to be Keats’s own, which it manifestly is not. Another school-book of Keats’s, of five years’ earlier date, has lately been presented to the same collection: this is the French-English grammar of Duverger—inscribed in much the same calligraphy with his name and the date 1807. He must have studied it to some purpose, if we may judge by the good reading knowledge of French which he clearly possessed when he was grown up.
8 Surmise, partly founded on the vague recollections of former fellow-students, has hitherto dated this step a year earlier, in the autumn of 1814. But the publication of the documents relating to Keats from the books of the hospital show that this is an error. He was not entered as a student at Guy’s till October 1, 1815. If he had moved to London, as has been supposed, a year earlier, he would have had nothing to do there, nor is it the least likely that his guardian would have permitted such removal. That he came straight from Mr. Hammond’s to Guy’s, without any intermediate period of study elsewhere, is certain both from a note to that effect against the entry of his name in the hospital books, and from the explicit statement of his fellow-student and sometime housemate, Mr. Henry Stephens. It results that the period of his life as hospital student in a succession of London lodgings must be cut down from the supposed two years and a half, October 1814-April 1817, to one year and a half, Oct. 1815-April 1817. There is no difficulty about this, and I think that both as to his leaving school and his going to London the facts and dates set forth in the present chapter may be taken as well established.
CHAPTER II
OCTOBER 1815-MARCH 1817: HOSPITAL STUDIES: POETICAL AMBITIONS: LEIGH HUNT
Hospital days: summary—Aptitudes and ambitions—Teachers—Testimony of Henry Stephens—Pride and other characteristics—Evidences of a wandering mind—Services of Cowden Clarke—Introduction to Leigh Hunt—Summer walks at Hampstead—Holiday epistles from Margate—Return to London—First reading of Chapman’s Homer—Date of the Chapman sonnet—Intimacy with Leigh Hunt—The Examiner: Hunt’s imprisonment—His visitors in captivity—His occupations—The Feast of the poets—Hunt’s personality and charm—His ideas of poetical reform—The story of Rimini—Its popularity—Dante and namby-pamby—Hunt’s life at Hampstead—Hunt and Keats compared—Keats at Hunt’s cottage—Prints in the library—The intercoronation scene—Sonnets of Hunt to Keats—Sonnets of Keats to Hunt—Keats’s penitence.
The external and technical facts of Keats’s life as a medical student are these. His name, as we have said, was entered at Guy’s as a six months’ student (surgeon’s pupil) on October 1, 1815, a month before his twentieth birthday. Four weeks later he was appointed dresser to one of the hospital surgeons, Mr. Lucas. At the close of his first six months’ term, March 3, 1816, he entered for a further term of twelve months. On July 25, 1816, he presented himself for examination before the Court of Apothecaries and obtained their licence to practise. He continued to attend lectures and live the regular life of a student; but early in the spring of 1817, being now of age and on the eve of publishing his first volume of verse, he determined to abandon the pursuit of medicine for that of poetry, declared his intention to his guardian, and ceased attending the hospitals without seeking or receiving the usual certificate of proficiency. For the first two or three months of this period, from the beginning of October 1815 till about the new year of 1816, Keats lodged alone at 8 Dean Street, Borough, and then for half a year or more with several other students over the shop of a tallow chandler named Markham1 in St. Thomas’s Street. Thence, in the summer or early autumn of 1816, leaving the near neighbourhood of the hospitals, he went to join his brothers in rooms in The Poultry, over a passage leading to the Queen’s Head Tavern. Finally, early in 1817, they all three moved for a short time to 76 Cheapside. For filling up this skeleton record, we have some traditions of the hospital concerning Keats’s teachers, some recollections of fellow students—of one, Mr. Henry Stephens, in particular—together with further reminiscences by Cowden Clarke and impressions recorded in after years by one and another of a circle of acquaintances which fast expanded. Moreover Keats begins during this period to tell something of his own story, in the form of a few poems of a personal tenor and a very few letters written to and preserved by his friends.
As to his hospital work, it is clear that though his heart was not in it and his thoughts were prone to wander, and though he held and declared that poetry was the only thing worth living for, yet when he chose he could bend his mind and will to the tasks before him. The operations which as dresser he performed or assisted in are said to have proved him no fumbler.