Grant F. Scott, editor. Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs.

Rzepka, Charles J.

Grant F. Scott, editor. Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005. Pp. xxxv + 716. $99.95.

Sometimes the adventures of the archive outpace in excitement the adventures to be found in it. While compiling this superb edition of the selected letters of painter Joseph Severn, close friend, nurse, and comforter of John Keats during his last days in Rome, Grant Scott received a letter himself from Lady Juliet Townsend, daughter of Severn biographer Sheila Birkenhead. Lady Townsend reported that she had recently come into possession of "a considerable quantity" of Severn's correspondence from her recently deceased grandmother, Margaret, the countess of Birkenhead, who had been Severn's grand-daughter. Originally discovered only a few years after Sheila Birkenhead finished her biography, this cache of unpublished letters had been tied in bundles, sealed in metal containers, deposited in the stables of the countess' estate, and promptly forgotten. Upon examination, the bundles were found to contain some 700 letters, more than half addressed to Severn's wife Elizabeth, from whom the entire collection had been passed down to her grand-daughter, Margaret. It is difficult to conceive a more fortuitous--or exhilarating--discovery for any biographer or editor. The Townsend collection nearly doubled, in an instant, the volume of Severn's known correspondence, and the results have appreciably enriched Scott's epistolary portrait.

While that portrait reaffirms Severn's close association with the legend of Keats's tragic end and literary afterlife, an association permanently fore-grounded in the "picture of the mind" adorning the imaginations of all Romanticists and of Keatsians especially, Scott's full-length version immeasurably enhances both our depth of field and peripheral awareness, eliciting in detail the historical and biographical milieu in which Severn, an artist in his own fight and a minor British diplomat, built a life for himself. The edition contains a judicious, but copious, selection of 160 of Severn's letters and eighteen letters from other correspondents, more than seventy-five percent of the total never before published. They extend from July 1820, just two months before Severn agreed to accompany Keats to Italy, up to June 1879, not long before his death at the age of 85. Scott includes a lengthy Introduction, full of keen observations on the correspondence and correspondents to follow and how this newly recovered material enhances, revises, or overturns hand-me-down assumptions about his subject's motives, reputation, and activities. He also provides a detailed 28-page chronology; a list of Severn's undated sketchbooks, paintings, and compositions, with more than 30 reproductions; and extensive selections from the original MSS of Severn's "Memoirs." The latter he prefaces with a devastating defenestration of William Sharp's sloppy, bowdlerized The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892), our only published source for this material until now. Appendices offer a complete catalogue of the Townsend collection and the artist's ledger of patrons, paintings, and commissions for 18411847.

The man revealed here retains many of the virtues we've grown used to attributing to the friend who, alone among his small circle, agreed to accompany Keats to the supposedly healing (or at least ameliorating) climate of the Mediterranean during his last months on earth. Despite the reservations of several acquaintances, who doubted that Severn possessed the gravity, judgment, and fortitude to see his death-bed assignment through to its conclusion, the artist ended up impressing nearly all who knew him with his diligence (as correspondent as well as nurse) and devotion to their stricken friend. Among the exceptions was Isabella Jones. Attempting to present a balanced view in his Introduction, Scott gives more attention than she deserves, in my opinion, to Miss Jones, who found Severn's letters home full of "egotism and selfishness displayed under the mask of feeling and friendship" (10). Elaborating on this and similar judgments of Severn's unsuitability for his mission, Scott cites a passage in a letter that Keats posted to Mrs. Brawne upon his arrival in Naples, stating that Severn's "nerves are too strong to get hurt by other peoples illnesses" and adding, "I remember poor Rice wore me in the same way in the isle of wight [sic]." Scott seems to assume that Keats is comparing Rice to Severn: both are wearingly obtuse. However, the context reveals that Keats is likening the irritating effect of Rice, who was ill while visiting Keats at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight (cf. Keats's letter to Charles Dilke, 3 r July 1819), to that of a tubercular fellow-passenger aboard the Maria Crowther, a young lady whose "bad symptoms have preyed upon" the chameleon poet's imagination during the entire voyage. Keats is saying that Severn's "strong" nerves, in contrast to his own, are not susceptible to the debilitating impressions conveyed by invalids like Rice or Miss Cotterell--a soundness of mind, we might assume, that the highly impressionable consumptive learned to value by the time they reached Naples.

As for Isabella Jones, how anyone not in Severn's position--isolated geographically and linguistically, baffled, beset, and exhausted by lack of sleep--could react to his momentary lapses from stoicism and self-abnegation with anything other than sympathy I cannot understand. If, as his acquaintances opined, he often appeared a "little goose" and "'a provoking little cox-comb," full of "bravado" and "a tendency to exaggerate" (10-11), Severn proved himself, when it counted most, capable of a degree of care, attentiveness, and devotion that few of us could match in similar circumstances.

All things considered, however, Scott treats the question of Severn's self-aggrandizement, particularly his later participation in constructing the Keats legend at Rome that put himself in a feature role, with admirable tact and even-handedness. In fact, among the many advances that Scott's edition contributes to our understanding of its subject, not the least is the revelation that Severn was quite capable of making his own way as a painter for some twenty years after Keats's death without having to trade on his reputation as the poet's last, best friend. In 1826, he helped to found the British Academy of the Fine Arts in Rome and, surprisingly, went on to play a major role in shifting British taste away from vast, cumbersome historical paintings and toward humbler genre scenes, particularly scenes taken from lower-class life. From 1827 to 1834, writes Scott, he "exhibited eleven pictures at the Royal Academy, all but one of which were Italian genre scenes" (18). His patrons included such prominent figures as Thomas Erskine, Lady Compton, and William Gladstone.

Information about Severn's role at this important juncture in the history of British painting is not the only reason art historians as well as students of Romanticism will find much to interest them in this new edition of Severn's letters. Among Grant Scott's other sensational rediscoveries was a folio-sized scrapbook of sketches that had remained uncatalogued in Harvard University's Houghton collection since its acquisition in the early 1950s. Several of the scrapbook's 434 drawings are reproduced here, and Scott promises, tantalizingly, "a more detailed discussion" (xxviii) at a later time. (A progress report of sorts, "Severn Redivivus," appeared in the March 18, 2005 issue of TLS, page 13.)

Not only as a friend of Keats and as an artist with a career of his own is Severn's likeness considerably re-touched in this collection. Scott confirms the existence of an illegitimate son, whose birth was deliberately excised from Sharp's transcription of a letter Severn wrote to Charles Brown in September 1821. A great deal of material concerns Severn's long period of professional disappointment and debt, extending from roughly 1841 to 1860. During this time patronage fell off precipitously, while Severn invested everything he had, in materials and time, undertaking several monumental frescoes and religious canvases. None of these anachronisms found a home, but something of the self-pity and complaint that occasionally mar his correspondence from Keats's bedside emerges again in the letters from this period of his life. His years as British Consul at Rome, from 1861-1872, are amply represented as well in correspondence that may prove of use to political historians, whatever literary critics make of it.

And they may find much to make of it, after all. One of the signal accomplishments of this handsome edition is the peripheral, and often curious, detail to be found in Scott's selections that enrich our knowledge of life among the British expatriate community in Rome over six decades, including the crucial years that saw the birth of modern Italy. In a letter to his son, Walter, dated 8 January 1875, Severn describes the fledgling government's attempts to ban confetti made of "lime and vine seeds" during Carnival, in order to spare the "faces & the cloaths of Carnival visitors"--i.e., British tourists--from damage: "[T]he manufacture had already gone into great excess when the police pounced upon the makers, seized all that could be found & just now from my window I see 60 large baskets of this abomination, surrendered, the Govt making a small compensation to poor people the makers" (540).

No less an accomplishment is Scott's evocation of Severn as a complete character. The letters assembled here with such deliberate care and attention reveal a personality comfortable with itself and with its own weaknesses, somewhat given to chattiness, peevish when frustrated--in general, not ballasted to withstand a high wind. The earlier correspondence seems to contain the bulk of Severn's self-reflections. In a letter of 15 July 1827 to his son, Thomas, still living in Hoxton with the rest of the family, Severn responds to Thomas' description of the new housing developments encroaching on the suburban fields that he and his father used to frequent:

 So my dear Tom all the nice graasy Fields where <you> we used to
 fly our Kites are all covered with their nasty lath & plaister
 houses--well now I dont like this--I'd have liked to revel once
 more in my boyish scenes--to have traced my wayward character to
 its external causes, and many of these would have been found in
 these dear fields. (276-77)

Severn's suburban Wordsworthianism is the more remarkable for the fact that Wordsworth's Prelude--tracing "The Growth of a Poet's Mind"--was not to appear in print for another quarter of a century. Not the least of the charms of this passage is how the "wayward character" that Severn would trace to his boyhood is represented in the scene's central figure of boyish levity and instability--the kite.

Severn's appreciation for the motivic potency of the trivial extended, ironically, to his attitudes toward his own vanity, a failing for which he was often criticized behind his back. Writing to his fellow artist, Thomas Uwins, in May 1828, Severn chides him for his "great fault," namely, a "total want of vanity":

 I think it a most important defect in any one to be entirely
 without vanity, because there is nothing brings out and applies so
 well all the inner man--I mean all the grasping and achieving comes
 of this; for, you see, a man with this feels his own importance (he
 over-feels it, but what of that), and tries grand things and
 succeeds; when another may have the greatest talents, but nothing
 to bring 'em out. I know you will call this by some fine name, as
 laudable ambition, aspiring virtue, and so forth; but, as the
 Preacher says, "all is vanity" at bottom, so we will be honest and
 let it stand as vanity. (283-84)

There is a kind of sportive cynicism in statements like these that recalls Keats in his more facetious moods, when poetry itself seemed "a Jack a Lanthern" set up to entertain the passing multitudes. One can imagine Severn as a boon companion to the poet at such moments, whatever their real disparity in "talents," and one can also appreciate the doubts expressed by their friends at the idea of the painter's undertaking to accompany Keats to Rome. Did he prove as welcome a companion during those interminable weeks on board the pitching Maria Crowther and in that dark, horrid chamber overlooking the Piazza di Spagna? Nothing that Keats wrote from Italy suggests otherwise.

Charles J. Rzepka

Boston University