Keats House, Keats Grove (formerly John Street), pictured prior to reopening in 2009 after restoration. Adjoining on the right is the Heath Branch Public Library
Keats House is a writer's house museum[2] in what was once the home of the Romantic poetJohn Keats. It is in Keats Grove, Hampstead, in innernorth London. Maps before about 1915[3] show the road with one of its earlier names, John Street; the road has also been known as Albion Grove. The building was originally a pair of semi-detached houses known as "Wentworth Place". John Keats lodged in one of them with his friend Charles Brown from December 1818 to May 1820, and then in the other half of the house with the Brawne family from August to September 1820. These were perhaps Keats's most productive years. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was written under a plum tree in the garden.
While living in the house, Keats fell in love with and became engaged to Fanny Brawne, who lived with her family in the adjacent house. Keats became increasingly ill with tuberculosis and was advised to move to a warmer climate. He left London in 1820 and died, unmarried, in Italy the following year.
Keats Grove, then known as John Street on part of the 1866 Ordnance Survey map for London with Wentworth Place (Keats House) shown in red; the field marked as 276 is now Heath Hurst Road housing and the pond 277 is filled in.
The house was built during 1814–15 and was probably completed between November 1815 and February 1816. The house was one of the first to be built in the area known as the Lower Heath Quarter.
By October 1816, Charles Wentworth Dilke and his friend Charles Brown had moved in. Other members of the Dilke family occupied two other adjacent houses. John Keats began visiting the house in 1817 after he had been introduced to Dilke by John Hamilton Reynolds, who was part of Leigh Hunt's circle of friends. In December 1818, after Keats's brother Tom died of tuberculosis, Brown invited Keats to "keep house" with him. Keats paid £5 per month (equivalent to £500in 2023 prices) and half the liquor bill.
Dilke and his family left on 3 April 1819 and let the house, probably furnished, to Mrs Brawne, a widow, and her family, who had briefly occupied Brown's half of the house when Keats and Brown were on their walking tour of Scotland.
Brown transferred his part of Wentworth Place to Dilke's father on 18 June 1822 and left for Italy in the same year.
After Keats's 1821 death, his sister Fanny became friends with Fanny Brawne. Fanny Keats and her husband Valentin Llanos occupied what had been Brown's half of the house from 1828 until 1831. Mrs Brawne died in December 1829 from an accident. By March 1830, the Brawnes had left their part.
There were several notable occupants of the house during the 19th century: the painter and illustrator Henry Courtney Selous (1835–1838); Eliza Chester (1838–1848), a retired actress, once a favourite of George IV, who converted the house into one dwelling and added a dining room and conservatory;[4] the piano manufacturer Charles Cadby (1858–1865); the physiologist Dr William Sharpey (1867–1875); and finally Reverend George Currey, Master of Charterhouse (1876). A Royal Society of Artsplaque was added in 1896 to commemorate Keats.[5]
The house was in nearly continuous occupation until the 20th century, when it was threatened with demolition. The house was saved by subscription and opened to the public as the Keats Memorial House on 9 May 1925.
In July and August 2009, the museum once again hosted Keats in Hampstead, a performance piece about Keats's life in Hampstead, his poetry, prose and his love for Fanny Brawne.[6]
Museum
The building next door, within the grounds of the house, occupies the space where the kitchen garden and outhouses were; it was also the site of a later coach house. It was opened on 16 July 1931 as the 'Keats Museum and Branch Library', housing both a public library and a room to display artifacts from the Keats House collection. Some of these artifacts were donated by Charles Armitage Brown's descendants in New Plymouth, New Zealand, the town to which Charles Brown emigrated in the last year of his life.[7] The Heath Branch Public Library closed in March 2012. The building, which is part of the Keats House Trust administered by the City of London Corporation, reopened in April 2012 as "Ten Keats Grove". A volunteer-run library currently occupies part of the space in the building.
Artifacts on display in the house include the engagement ring Keats offered to Fanny Brawne and a copy of Keats's death mask. The museum runs regular poetry and literary events, and offers a range of educational facilities. In December 2006 it was announced that the house was to benefit from a restoration[8] programme partly financed by a £424,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant.[9] Keats House was closed on 1 November 2007 and reopened on Friday, 24 July 2009, some six months after the projected re-opening.[2]
To support the work of the house and to contribute to its upkeep, the Keats Foundation was established as a Trust in November 2010.[10]
Garden: the Mulberry tree
The tree is a Common or Black Mulberry[11][12] and believed to date from the 17th century. Mulberry trees have been cultivated in England since at least the early 16th century but are not native to Great Britain. As there were other fruit trees in the grounds of Keats House, the mulberry tree may have been part of an orchard. If the tree is as old as it is thought to be, then John Keats would have seen it, although he did not mention it in his writings. Keats did mention a white mulberry tree once in a July 1818 letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds.
Keats House guidebooks. 9 editions, issued between 1925 and 1990.
Page, Kenneth. "Wentworth Place: ‘A Small Cottage, Pleasantly Situate’". In: Turley, Richard Marggraf (Ed.) Keats's Places. Cham (Switzerland). Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. ISBN978-3-319-92242-3
Notes and references
Notes
↑ The house was named "Wentworth Place" in 1818 by William Dilke and Mrs. Maria Dilke during Charles Wentworth Dilke's absence. Dilke's half of the house was briefly known as "Wentworth Cottage" during 1838. The house was again known as "Wentworth Place" until 1842. It then had several changes of name: "Lawn Cottage" (1843–44); "Laurel Cottage" (1845–49); "Lawn Cottage" (1849–67) and "Lawn Bank" from 1868 until it was officially renamed "Wentworth Place" in 1924 so that, although known as Keats House, the house also retains the name that Keats and his friends would have been familiar with.
↑ The house is 6km NNW of the customary centre point of London, Charing Cross by Trafalgar Square
Joseph Severn was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 described his "Ode to a Nightingale" as "one of the final masterpieces".
James Henry Leigh Hunt, best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1819.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1818.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1816.
Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789–1864) was an English liberal critic and writer on literature.
Charles Brown was a New Zealand politician from the Taranaki area.
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art" is a love sonnet by John Keats.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Charles Armitage Brown was a close friend of the poet John Keats, as well as a friend of artist Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor and Edward John Trelawny. He was the father of Charles (Carlino) Brown, a pioneer and politician of New Plymouth, New Zealand.
Bright Star is a 2009 biographical romantic drama film, written and directed by Jane Campion. It is based on the last three years of the life of poet John Keats and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne. Campion's screenplay was inspired by a 1997 biography of Keats by Andrew Motion, who served as a script consultant.
The Keats–Shelley Memorial House is a writer's house museum in Rome, Italy, commemorating the Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The museum houses one of the world's most extensive collections of memorabilia, letters, manuscripts, and paintings relating to Keats and Shelley, as well as Byron, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, and others. It is located on the second floor of the building situated just to the south of the base of the Spanish Steps and east of the Piazza di Spagna.
Henry Buxton Forman was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
Frances "Fanny" Brawne Lindon is best known as the fiancée and muse to English Romantic poet John Keats. As Fanny Brawne, she met Keats, who was her neighbour in Hampstead, at the beginning of his brief period of intense creative activity in 1818. Although his first written impressions of Brawne were quite critical, his imagination seems to have turned her into the goddess-figure he needed to worship, as expressed in Endymion, and scholars have acknowledged her as his muse.
George Keats was an American businessman and civic leader in Louisville, Kentucky, as it emerged from a frontier entrepôt into a mercantile centre of the old northwest. He was also the younger brother of the Romantic poet John Keats.
The Upper Flask was a tavern near the top of Hampstead hill in the 18th century which sold flasks of water from the spa at Hampstead Wells. It was located in Heath Street. It was the summer meeting place of the great literary and political figures of the Kit-Kat Club such as Walpole. The tavern business ceased in the 1750s and the grand house subsequently became the private residence of ladies and gentlemen such as Lady Charlotte Rich, George Steevens and Thomas Sheppard.
Joanna Leah Richardson was an English writer, translator and journalist. She wrote 21 biographies of literary writers and poets and was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie in 1989. Richardson also contributed to various newspapers and magazines.
Dorothy Hewlett was an English scholar specialising in 19th century literature, a novelist and playwright. Known for her stewardship of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, she was a winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (1938) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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