These material details are not without a psychological significance: the total absence of interest in the progress of time (the sordid current time) tallies with the profound worship of things so remote as perfect beauty; and the addressing of four of the letters to Mrs. Brawne instead of Miss Brawne indicates, to my mind, not mere accident, but a sensitiveness to observation from any unaccustomed quarter: three of the letters so addressed were certainly written at Kentish Town, and would not be likely to be sent by the same hand usually employed to take those written while the poet was next door to his betrothed; the other one was, I have no doubt, sent only from one house to the other; but perhaps the usual messenger may have chanced to be out of the way.
The letters fall naturally into three groups, namely (1) those written during Keats’s sojourn with Charles Armitage Brown in the Isle of Wight, and his brief stay in lodgings in Westminster in the Summer and Autumn of 1819, (2) those written from Brown’s house in Wentworth Place during Keats’s illness in the early part of 1820 and sent by hand to Mrs. Brawne’s house, next door, and (3) those written after he was able to leave Wentworth Place to stay with Leigh Hunt at Kentish Town, and before his departure for Italy in September, 1820. Of the order of the first and last groups there is no reasonable doubt; and, although there can be no absolute certainty in regard to the whole series of the central group, I do not think any important error will have been made in the arrangement here adopted.
The slight service to be done beside this of arranging the letters, involving a great deal of minute investigation, was simply to elucidate as far as possible by brief foot-notes references that were not self-explanatory, to give such attainable particulars of the principal persons and places concerned as are desirable by way of illustration, and to fix as nearly as may be the chronology of that part of Keats’s life at the time represented by these letters,—especially the two important dates involved. The first date is that of the passion which Keats conceived for Miss Brawne,—the second that of the rupture of a blood-vessel, marking distinctly the poet’s graveward tendency,—two events probably connected with some intimacy, and concerning which it is not unnoteworthy that we should have to be making guesses at all. If these and other conjectural conclusions turn out to be inaccurate (which I do not think will be the case), they can only be proved so by the production of more documents; and if documents be produced confuting my conclusions, my aim will have been attained by two steps instead of one.
The lady to whom these letters were addressed was born on the 9th of August in the year 1800, and baptized Frances, though, as usual with bearers of that name, she was habitually called Fanny. Her father, Mr. Samuel Brawne, a gentleman of independent means, died while she was still a child; and Mrs. Brawne then went to reside at Hampstead, with her three children, Fanny, Samuel, and Margaret. Samuel, being next in age to Fanny, was a youth going to school in 1819; and Margaret was many years younger than her sister, being in fact a child at the time of the engagement to Keats, which event took place certainly between the Autumn of 1818 and the Summer of 1819, and probably, as I find good reason to suppose, quite early in the year 1819. In the Summer of 1818 Mrs. Brawne and her children occupied the house of Charles Armitage Brown next to that of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wentworth Dilke, in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which is not now known by that name. On Brown’s return from Scotland, the Brawne’s moved to another house in the neighbourhood; but they afterwards returned to Wentworth Place, occupying the house of Mr. Dilke. Mr. Severn remembered that when he visited Keats during the residence of the poet with Brown, Keats used to take his visitor “next door” to call upon the Brawne family. “The house was double,” wrote Mr. Severn, “and had side entrances.”
It is said to have been at the house of Mr. Dilke, who was the grandfather of the present Baronet of that name, that Keats first met Miss Brawne. Mr. Dilke eventually gave up possession of his residence in Wentworth Place, and took quarters in Great Smith Street, Westminster, where he and Mrs. Dilke went to live in order that their only child, bearing his father’s name, and afterwards the first Baronet, might be educated at Westminster School.
Keats’s well known weakness in regard to the statement of dates leaves us without such assistance as might be expected from his general correspondence in fixing the date of this first meeting with Miss Brawne. I learn from members of her family that it was certainly in 1818; and, as far as I can judge, it must have been in the last quarter of that year; for it seems pretty evident that he had not conceived the passion, which was his “pleasure and torment,” up to the end of October, and had conceived it before Tom’s death “early in December”; and, as he says in [Letter III] of the present series, “the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal,” we must perforce regard the date of first meeting as between the end of October and the beginning of December, 1818.
In conducting the reader to this conclusion it will be necessary to remove a misapprehension which has been current for nearly thirty years in regard to a passage in the letter that yields us our starting-point. This is the long letter to George Keats, dated the 29th of October, 1818, given in Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, &c.,[2] and commencing at page 227 of Vol. I, wherein is the following passage:
“The Misses —— are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me much, and in this way:—now I am coming the Richardson!—On my return, the first day I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her grandpapa in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. —— to take asylum in her house. She is an East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather’s heir. At the time I called, Mrs. —— was in conference with her up stairs, and the young ladies were warm in her praise down stairs, calling her genteel, interesting, and a thousand other pretty things, to which I gave no heed, not being partial to nine days’ wonders. Now all is completely changed: they hate her, and, from what I hear, she is not without faults of a real kind; but she has others, which are more apt to make women of inferior claims hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian: she has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes, and fine manners. When she comes into the room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who may address her: from habit she thinks that nothing particular. I always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am, at such times, too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because I live in her. You will, by this time, think I am in love with her, so, before I go any further, I will tell you I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart’s might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose life is to me a banquet. I don’t cry to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like, because one has no sensations: what we both are is taken for granted. You will suppose I have, by this, had much talk with her—no such thing; there are the Misses —— on the look out. They think I don’t admire her because I don’t stare at her; they call her a flirt to me—what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things—the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child’s cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.
‘I am free from men of pleasure’s cares,
By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs.’