It is not my part to account here for the verbal inconsistency between these two versions; but the inconsistency as regards fact, which has been charged against them, is surely not real. Both versions alike indicate that Keats was writing with the knowledge that his letter would not reach Mrs. George Keats till after the return of her husband from his sudden and short visit to England; and, assuming the genuineness of another document, this was certainly the case.
In The Philobiblion[11] for August, 1862, was printed a fragment purporting to be from a letter of Keats’s, which seems to me, on internal evidence alone, of indubitable authenticity; and, if it is Keats’s, it must belong to the particular letter now under consideration. It is headed Friday 27th, is written in higher spirits, if anything, than the rest of this brilliant letter, giving a ludicrous string of comparisons for Mrs. George Keats’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Henry Wylie, which, together with a final joke, were apparently deemed unripe for publication in 1848, being represented by asterisks in the Life, Letters, &c. (Vol. II, p. 49). The fragment closes with the promise of “a close written sheet on the first of next month,” varying in phrase, just as the World version of the whole letter varies, from Lord Houghton’s.[12]
Keats explains, under the inaccurate and unexplicit date Friday 27th, that he has been writing a letter for George to take back to his wife, has unfortunately forgotten to bring it to town, and will have to send it on to Liverpool, whither George has departed that morning “by the coach,” at six o’clock. The 27th of January, 1820, was a Thursday, not a Friday; and there can be hardly any doubt that George Keats left London on the 28th of January, 1820, because John, who professed to know nothing of the days of the month, seems generally to have known the days of the week; and this Friday cannot have been in any other month: it was after the 13th of January, and before the 16th of February, on which day Keats wrote to Rice, referring to his illness.[13] But whether the date at the head of the fragment should be Thursday 27th or Friday 28th is immaterial for our present purpose, because the Thursday after that date would be the same day in either case; and it was on the Thursday after George left London that Keats was taken ill. This appears from the following passage extracted by Sir Charles Dilke from a letter of George Keats’s to John, and communicated to The Athenæum of the 4th of August, 1877:
“Louisville, June 18th, 1820.
My dear John,
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....”