The natural inference from all we know of the matter in hand is that after his brother Tom’s death, Keats’s passion had more time and more temptation to feed upon itself; and that, as an unoccupied man living in the same village with the object of that passion, an avowal followed pretty speedily. It is not surprising that there are no letters to shew for the first half of the year 1819, during which Keats and Miss Brawne probably saw each other constantly, and to judge from the expressions in [Letter XI], were in the habit of walking out together.
The tone of [Letter I] is unsuggestive of more than a few weeks’ engagement; but it is impossible, on this alone, to found safely any conclusion whatever. From the date of that letter, the 3rd of July, 1819, we have plainer sailing for awhile: Keats appears to have remained in the Isle of Wight till the 11th or 12th of August, when he and Brown crossed from Cowes to Southampton and proceeded to Winchester. At [page 19] we read under the date “9 August,” “This day week we shall move to Winchester”; but in the letter bearing the postmark of the 16th (though dated the 17th) Keats says he has been in Winchester four days; so that the patience of the friends with Shanklin did not hold out for anything like a week.
At Winchester the poet remained till the 11th of September, when bad news from George Keats hurried him up to Town for a few days: he meant to have returned on the 15th, and was certainly there again by the 22nd, remaining until some day between the 1st and 10th of October, by which date he seems to have taken up his abode at lodgings in College Street, Westminster. Here he cannot have remained long; for on the 19th he was already proposing to return to Hampstead; and it must have been very soon after this that he accepted the invitation of Brown to “domesticate with” him again at Wentworth Place; and on the 19th of the next month he was writing from that place to his friend and publisher, Taylor.[10]
This brings us to the fatal winter of 1819-20, during which, until the date of Keats’s first bad illness, we should not expect any more letters to Miss Brawne, because, in the natural course of things, he would be seeing her daily.
The absence of any current record as to the exact date whereon he was struck down with that particular phase of his malady which he himself felt from the first to be fatal, must have seemed peculiarly regretworthy to Keats’s lovers; but it is not impossible to deduce from the various materials at command the day to which Lord Houghton’s account refers. This well-known passage leaves us in no doubt as to the place wherein the beginning of the end came upon the poet,—the house of Charles Brown; but the day we must seek for ourselves.
Passing over such premonitions of disease as that recorded in the letter to George Keats and his wife dated the 14th of February, 1819, and printed at page 257 of the first volume of the Life, namely that he had “kept in doors lately, resolved, if possible, to rid” himself of “sore throat,”—the first date important to bear in mind is Thursday, the 13th of January, 1820, which is given at the head of a somewhat remarkable version of a well-known letter addressed to Mrs. George Keats. This letter first appeared without date in the Life; but, on the 25th of June, 1877, it was printed in the New York World, with many striking variations from the previous text, and with several additions, including the date already quoted, the genuineness of which I can see no reason for doubting. The letter begins thus in the Life, Letters, &c.—
“My dear Sister,
By the time you receive this your troubles will be over, and George have returned to you.”
In The World it opens thus—
“My dear Sis.: By the time that you receive this your troubles will be over. I wish you knew that they were half over; I mean that George is safe in England, and in good health.”