Writing Keats's last days: Severn, Sharp, and Romantic biography.

Scott, Grant F.

OVER THE YEARS, THE DRAMATIC STORY OF KEATS'S FINAL MONTHS HAS been told and retold by biographers of the poet, who have dwelt at length on the voyage to Italy, the ten-day quarantine in the Bay of Naples, the progress from Naples to Rome, and the last days in the tiny room above the Piazza di Spagna. The narrative of the poet's "posthumous life," as Keats himself called it, has become one of the most moving and memorable in all of literary history. Although Keats suffered a long and wasting illness, the image of him that has prevailed in the modern mind is ironically one of imaginative health. Biographers have focused less on Keats's tuberculosis, on his sick and decaying body, than on his "adhesive empathy" and "sympathetic openness," (1) stressing the infectiousness of his concern for others rather than his disease. (2) The poet represented here confronts his death in a "calm and philosophical" frame of mind, his "doctrines of negative capability and soul-making [coming] to his rescue at the last" (Gittings 611, 621). In this estimate, it is his nobility--his behavior as an English gentleman rather than as a consumptive patient--that has garnered attention, as scholars have focused on his "manly reticence" (Bate 676), "wordless fortitude" (Ward 395), and "gallantry." (3) Thus have the last months come to assume the status of moral allegory, Keats suffering an exemplary death that instructs us about the virtues of masculine stoicism and selfless courage. In our time this has become a story about the etiquette of dying well. (4)

It is curious that a tale with such powerful currency depends on a single witness. Although they note it in passing, biographers have not made very much of the fact that there is only one first-hand source for the events of Keats's final five months. Except for a few brief letters by Dr. James Clark, Keats's attending physician in Rome, the only significant testimony derives from the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn, the artist who accompanied the poet to Italy, whose patient devotion to his dying friend has also become legendary. Others met Keats in Rome--including Lt. Isaac Elton, William Ewing, John Gibson, Seymour Kirkup, and the Spanish novelist Valentin Llanos, who later married Keats's sister Fanny--but none of these men has left an account of the meeting. (5) It is only Severn who kept a detailed record of Keats's decline and then returned to the subject in a series of memoirs written at various points over the course of his long life.

As it turns out, many of the most famous anecdotes from this time derive not from Severn's contemporary letters and journal-letters of 1820-21, which have been faithfully reproduced in Hyder Rollins' The Keats Circle, (6) but from his later reminiscences. These have come down to us through William Sharp, Severn's first and most influential biographer, whose Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892) has remained an invaluable sourcebook for Keats biographers and literary historians. (7) While modern biographers of Keats have consulted Rollins for Severn's letters of the time, they have always relied on Sharp's book for the later accounts, partly because it is so highly readable, but primarily because Sharp had access to what he termed "a great mass of letters, journals, reminiscences, and fragmentary records" (v) which were entrusted to him in the late 1880s by Joseph's eldest son Walter. Since much of this material was scattered and presumed lost shortly after Sharp finished his biography, his book became the only source for these records. (8)

The rediscovery of a large portion of the Severn papers in 1972 did nothing to alter this landscape, mostly because they surfaced with such little fanfare and because they arrived just after the great wave of Keats biographies had crested (Ward and Bate published their biographies in 1963, Gittings in 1968). Because these papers are still so little known--they are currently in an accessions file at the Houghton library and have not yet been officially catalogued--no one has actually compared Severn's manuscripts against Sharp's transcripts. (9) What such a comparison reveals is a high degree of textual inaccuracy in Sharp's book, ranging from basic copying errors to outright embellishment. Through the years a few scholars have given passing notice to inaccuracies in individual letters that Sharp prints, but no one has considered the full extent of his alterations to the Severn memoirs. (10) Certainly none of the major biographers of Keats has acknowledged the fact that Severn's original manuscripts are always mediated through rather than transcribed by Sharp, who has his own peculiarly late-Victorian agenda. Instead they have come to trust Sharp's record implicitly, quoting and paraphrasing from documents in his book that turn out to be extremely unreliable. (11) The result has been a portrait of Severn and a view of Keats's last months that owes more to the silent workings of Sharp's pen than to the representations of Severn's actual language.

This essay focuses on the complex layering of romantic biography and on acts of recovery and representation. I am concerned here with restoring the original language of Severn's memoirs, establishing a more precise sense of individual texts and disentangling--as far as possible--Severn's actual words from the romanticized narrative of Sharp's book. I am equally interested in the cultural context of the narrative Sharp produces (and the personal circumstances surrounding the construction of his text), as well as the way his biography negotiates late nineteenth-century debates about Keats's reputation. Sharp fashions his double-portrait of Keats and Severn at a historical moment when the poet's posthumous fame is once again jeopardized by questions about his moral character and this debate powerfully influences Sharp's selection and alteration of the Severn manuscripts. In the essay's final section, I explore the extent to which Sharp's depiction of Keats has influenced the poet's modern reception, especially in the most highly regarded critical essays and biographies.

William Sharp and the Writing of The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892)

Sharp composed his life of Severn under a number of specific personal and historical constraints that dramatically affected his shaping of the "great mass" of Severn material. According to evidence from Elizabeth Sharp's memoirs of her husband and from Sharp's own unpublished letters of the time to Horace Scudder and Fred Holland Day, the composition of the biography was beset by a number of late-stage problems. (12) Foremost among these was a last minute decision to reduce the size of the memoirs from two volumes to one. As Sharp confesses to Scudder, "this involved a complete reconstruction of the book, and, as I have found to my cost, a complete reconstruction of that reconstruction. In accomplishing this I not only removed over 500 MS. pages of unnecessary though often most entertaining matter, but have practically done away with the record of Severn's life during close on 20 years." (13) In other letters to Scudder, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Sharp says that due to his wife's "serious illness," their "frequent journeyings" (18 Sept. 1891), and additional publication delays involving illustrations and the inclusion of "some important early-period matter," a book scheduled for publication at the beginning of 1890 did not see print until February 1892. (14)

As if the revisions and production delays were not enough to encourage editorial shortcuts, this was also an inordinately hectic period in William Sharp's already bustling career. A prolific writer under normal circumstances, by the late 1880s and early 1890s William Sharp was turning out books and essays at an extraordinary clip. Between 1887 and 1890, he completed three other biographies (on Shelley, Heine, and Browning; the life of Rossetti had appeared previously in 1882), and published a number of other books, as well as dozens of essays, poems, art reviews, and biographical sketches. (15) To give a sense of Sharp's astonishing output, we might simply note that at least five other works appeared in the same year as the Severn biography (1892): a novel, a collection of poems, a biographical sketch, a lengthy critical essay, and the inaugural (and final) issue of the Pagan Review, a literary journal whose entire contents were written by Sharp under various pseudonyms. He was also traveling extensively during this time. "By the late summer of 1889," writes his biographer, Flavia Alaya, "Sharp's wanderlust was thoroughly aroused" (92). He toured the United States and Canada, returned to England briefly, visited Stuttgart to collaborate with another author on a novel, made a trip down the Rhine river, stayed for two months in Karlsruhe, and then in the late fall of 1890 traveled to Italy for the second time. He remained in Rome from December of 1890 until the spring of 1891, though he made several trips back to Germany during this period. "Before the year was out," says Alaya, "he was already back in London consolidating his literary gains, and by 1892 he was caught in a feverish new round of activities" (97). One suspects that such "vagrant gipsy-tramps," in Sharp's own words, were hardly conducive to the intense focus necessary to transcribe and edit the Severn manuscripts. (16)

This was, moreover, a transitional period in Sharp's career that witnessed his transformation from mainly an essayist into a full-fledged creative writer. Although he had written poetry and fiction in the past, his great ambition had always been to commit himself fully to a literary career. But Sharp was chronically short of money and had to rely on his journalism and criticism to finance his travels and allow him time for his imaginative projects. While intending to work on the Severn book at Rome in 1891, Sharp fell in love with Edith Rinder and spent most of his time exploring the Campagna and the environs of Rome. His contemporary diaries record a dizzying round of excursions to hill towns like Albano and Frascati, as well as his daily composition of the free-verse poems that would eventually make up Sospiri di Roma (1891). There is no mention of the Severn book until late in the summer. As Alaya argues, it was the winter sojourn in Italy, along with this collection of poems, that started Sharp down the road to his second, secret career as Fiona Macleod, the female writer of Celtic legends whose mythic imagination Yeats was to admire and praise. (17) From 1891 onward, in fact, Sharp engages in what Alaya characterizes as "a burst of pseudonymous writing" (103), becoming obsessed with masks and gender identity.

If the exigencies under which the life of Severn was composed did little to encourage editorial precision, the precarious climate for new biographies, especially concerning romantic writers, would have necessitated some degree of adjustment to the original manuscripts. Although he was writing at a historical moment when Victorian moral biography--and the reticence and discretion this genre required--was being challenged by a greater degree of frankness and realism, any inclination Sharp felt to reveal the whole truth about his subject would have been tempered by a series of widely publicized controversies over recent biographies. (18) In working on his own life of Shelley, Sharp would have followed with keen interest the fortunes of John Cordy Jeaffreson's The Real Shelley (1885), which debunked the romantic myth of the poet and exposed Shelley's callous mistreatment of his first wife, Harriet Westbrook. The book drew the wrath of the review establishment, both for its prosecutorial tone and its presumptuousness in questioning the received version of a famous writer's life. Neither could Sharp have ignored the ferment caused by James Anthony Froude's four-volume life of Carlyle (1882-84), a work that along with the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1883) shattered the image of the noble sage and painted a grim picture of Carlyle's domestic life. A close friend and disciple of Carlyle, Froude was condemned by reviewers for betraying the memory of his mentor. Thus, as Richard Altick has written, the "trend toward biographical realism" prompted by developments in the genre of the novel and embodied in the works of these two biographers provoked such a violent response that "the heavy plush curtain of Victorian reticence again was inexorably closed" (238).

It was the publication of Harry Buxton Forman's edition of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne, however, that had the most decisive impact on Sharp's portrayal of Keats and on his decision to alter the Severn manuscripts. The appearance of these letters in 1878 met with shock and outrage in the literary community and precipitated an immediate scandal. (19) Many commentators believed that Forman had violated Keats's privacy and breached the sacred trust between an editor and his subject. They were also dismayed by the volatile character of the poet that emerged from the letters. As a result, Keats's reputation, which had been enjoying a steady rise through the middle years of the century, suffered a dramatic setback. The image of the heroic and manly poet that Richard Monckton Milnes had represented in his Life, Letters and Literary Remains (1848) was abruptly replaced by that of a ranting and impetuous adolescent, a characterization that soon revived the earlier legend of Keats's effeminacy and puerility. Writing in 1880, Matthew Arnold regretted the publication of the Fanny Brawne letters, lamenting Keats's "sensuousness," crediting Haydon's anecdotes about Keats's drunkenness and lack of character, and recalling the snobbery of the earlier Cockney school attacks by describing the love letters as those "of a surgeon's apprentice." (20) For Arnold, the letters showed "complete enervation" and "the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity" (429). By the end of the essay, Keats is partially redeemed--his poetry "ranks with Shakespeare" in its "natural magic" (436)--but the Brawne letters had nevertheless taken their toll on his character and poetry: "Keats was not ripe," Arnold concludes, for the "faculty of moral interpretation" (436). As William Marquess has argued, "the dean of Victorian critics had spoken, and the image of a badly bred, self-indulgent, and morally dubious young poet was perpetuated." (21)

A few years later Algernon Swinburne and William Michael Rossetti helped popularize this view of Keats as unmanly, jejune, and morally suspect. In his entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1882, Swinburne called Keats "a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood" (211) and responded to the love letters by saying that "they ought never to have been written" and that "even a manly sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering, will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable fashion" (212). William Michael Rossetti, in his Life of John Keats (1887), concurred, though not so flamboyantly, questioning Keats's character and maintaining that throughout the love letters, Keats appears "unbalanced, wayward, and profuse ... he abandons all self-restraint, and lashes out right and left." (22) This assessment carries over into judgments about the poems themselves and by the last page of the biography, Rossetti states his reservation "that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance" (208).

Because he composed his biography of Severn in close correspondence with Severn's immediate family members over a period of at least eight years, Sharp could not afford to let this revived image of the unmanly Keats tarnish his portrait of the family patriarch. (23) So Sharp set out to recuperate and restore Milnes's mid-Victorian Keats--the heroic and emphatically masculine figure whose tragic early death cut short the work of poetic genius. (24) As he makes clear in his preface, Sharp models his book on Milnes's biography and like his predecessor acts as a compiler and editor of Severn's unpublished documents, which he presents to the reader in extensive and seemingly unmediated swaths. What emerges from these passages is a portrait of Keats and Severn designed to allay the furor over the Fanny Brawne letters and to resurrect the earlier, nobler Keats. Against the erratic, emotionally debilitating, and secretive romantic liaison between Keats and Fanny Brawne, Sharp offers an "immortal friendship" between men (xvi), a portrait of male camaraderie and devotion that gradually assumes the dimensions of a didactic moral tale. In this figuration, Keats is resolute and firm, suffering his fate with English stoicism and equanimity. By contrast, Severn is the trusted and loyal friend, nursing his dying companion to the bitter end and then championing his memory thereafter. Far from tainting or corrupting him, then, Sharp depicts Severn's friendship with Keats as inspirational and empowering, as "the golden gate whence issued the success and happiness of his life" (xvi).

Sharp's representation of Keats thus participates in a reclamation of the poet that had begun in 1887 with Sidney Colvin's biography. (25) Although in his preface, Colvin too had joined the chorus of voices regretting the publication of the Brawne letters, his response was simply to omit them from his portrait of Keats, a move he repeated a few years later by refusing to print them in his new edition of the poet's letters (1891). Sharp takes his cue from Colvin's biography, wherein the dying Keats exhibits an "invincible spirit of pleasantness" (198), acknowledges "the power of the Christian teaching and example" (203), and conceives the words of his own epitaph "gently and without bitterness" (204). This is an idealized and saintly Keats, who even as he contemplates suicide, does so through "no unmanly fear of pain," but because of "his acute sympathetic sense of the trials which the sequel would bring upon his friend" (203). So avid is Colvin to canonize Keats and exorcise all remnants of the sensuous boy that even the "Bright Star" sonnet is read as a study in transcendence, in which the poet's "passion is attuned to tranquillity." "Surely no death-song of lover or poet," Colvin writes, "came ever in a strain of more unfevered beauty and tenderness, or with images of such a refreshing and solemn purity" (199). This was a more appealing (and acceptable) image of the dying poet and would provide Sharp a useful palate from which to paint his own equally edifying portrait of manly friendship and heroic suffering.

The Joseph Severn Manuscripts (26)

Before I turn to the specific textual alterations in the Life and Letters, it might be useful to identify the Severn manuscripts on which Sharp based his account of Keats's last months, particularly since Sharp splices together a number of these documents and then renames them in a variety of idiosyncratic ways. Thus, for example, over the course of his biography, Sharp refers to Severn's "MS. confessions" (2), "Early Remembrances" (5n), "fragmentary chapter of autobiography" (27), "Recollections" (91), "MS. Recollections" (93n), and most consistently, "reminiscences" (x, xiii, 5, 24, 33, 48, 58, 102, 150, 153, 222, 237). On other occasions, he also mentions "Severn's three sets of reminiscences" and speaks of the existence of "several reminiscences" (58, 102). (27) More confusing still, Sharp refers in a number of places to manuscripts which actually bear specific titles: "My Tedious Life" (17), "The Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame" (66, 114n, 173, 213, 222), "Incidents of My Life" (104, 117, 169), "MS. selections from the 'Adonais'" (115), and "the 'Adonais' folio" (249, 250). Sharp never clarifies the exact relationship between these named manuscripts and the more generically labeled sets of reminiscences above. Even for the careful reader, it is impossible to determine whether these manuscripts form a part of the previous group, overlap this group, or constitute wholly different texts. By the end of Sharp's book, we are left with the impression that Severn wrote innumerable sets of memoirs, none of which he properly identified or dated.

Biographers have often noted Severn's lapses of memory and inconsistency with dates, but he was never so disorganized, or so careless as Sharp's book implies. Excluding his letters of 1820-21 to his family and friends and some letters of the late 1820s and early 30s to Charles Brown and John Taylor, Severn actually composed five distinct sets of reminiscences over a period of twenty-eight years, all but one of which are clearly titled and dated. In chronological order these consist of the "Biographical Notes" he sent to Richard Monckton Milnes in two letters of 1845 and one of 1848; "Incidents of My Life" (18 January 1857-5 September 1858); "On the Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame" (April 1863); "Adonais ... with Notes" (30 August 1873); and "My tedious Life" (September 1873) (28) The "Biographical Notes" were published for the first time by Rollins in The Keats Circle (1948) and "On the Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame" appeared during Severn's lifetime in the Atlantic Monthly (1863). (29) The remaining three memoirs have never been published in their entirety, though as I have pointed out, they appear wrongly titled, in various states of corruption, and often melded together throughout Sharp's book. (30)

Of these five memoirs, clearly the most important for Sharp's retailing of Keats's last months are "Incidents of My Life," "My tedious Life," and "On the Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame." Sharp makes use of the contemporary letters, which have since appeared in Rollins's edition and quotes occasionally from Severn's family letters, but these do not figure prominently in his main narrative. Toward the end of the biography, he cites salient passages from "Adonais ... with Notes," but does not make earlier use of this manuscript. As far as I can tell, he seldom quotes from the "Biographical Notes." When it comes to telling the story of the voyage to Italy, the sojourn in Naples, and the time at Rome--the pages that modern biographers of Keats have used as their primary source (45-101)--Sharp relies almost solely on "Incidents of My Life" and "My tedious Life," sources that he significantly misrepresents.

At about eighty-five manuscript pages, "Incidents of My Life" (1857-58) is the most extensive of Severn's surviving memoirs. It includes a general outline, "Plan for the various incidents of my life" (from which Sharp derived the title), that lists a total of 67 chapters, each separately tided. Severn has marked just over half of these chapters with a dagger notation ([dagger]), which occurs more frequently in the first half of the memoir (all except two of chapters 1-32 are so marked). It seems reasonable to assume that this notation indicates chapters that he had completed, and that he never managed to finish the entire memoir. There are daggers absent from a number of the chapters, the most significant of which is chapter 8 ("Introduced to Keats"). The only marked chapters ([dagger]) that appear to be missing are 3-6, 9-13, and 28. Of these, by far the most important is the quartet 10-13, which chronicles the passage to Italy, the journey from Naples to Rome, and the death of Keats. Sharp is the only biographer to have quoted at length directly from this manuscript. (31)

"My tedious Life" (1873) did not form part of the Severn papers that arrived at Harvard in 1972, but was given to the Houghton Library in 1954 by Arthur Houghton, Jr. (32) At forty-six manuscript pages, it is considerably shorter than "Incidents," though much more compact and complete. (33) Written six years before his death, this memoir traces the major events of Severn's long life, dwelling particularly on the relationship with Keats and the ensuing Roman years leading up to his marriage in 1828 with Elizabeth Montgomerie. Sharp draws the bulk of his material for his narrative of Keats's final months from this important, unpublished memoir.

The Varieties of Error: Sharp's Alterations to the Severn Manuscripts

From Severn's multiple manuscripts, Sharp weaves a master narrative of the life, in the process creating a uniform tapestry from a tangle of subtly different strands. In none of his fragmentary memoirs is Severn so consistent and complete as Sharp's story implies, and in none is his writing as full or detailed. Severn rarely uses figurative language in either his letters or memoirs, and his prose is often colloquial, animated and conversational rather than literary. In truth, there is a breathless quality to the writing, especially in the most important reminiscence, "My tedious Life" (1873), as if Severn had been rushing to get things down before he died. Like all the memoirs, this is essentially a sketch, and lends the impression that Severn meant to return to the draft and fill in specific details. We are even reminded at times of Keats's letters, if not always in substance certainly in style. The dashes, run-on sentences, idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling and fluid penmanship lend the prose an immediacy that is elided by the overarching sweep of Sharp's novelized redaction.

As I have argued, Sharp's interpolations of the Seven material follow the biographies of Milnes (1848) and Colvin (1887) in seeking to reestablish Keats's courage and nobility and in stressing the fundamentally moral character of his death, but they superadd to this portrait an extensive level of scenic detail, a number of vivid anecdotes, and a sustained interest in the camaraderie and affection between the two men. Taken together, these elements serve to idealize Keats's last months, lending them a much more spirited tone than is apparent from Severn's original manuscripts, and reinforcing the ennobling yet sanitized view of his death proffered in the two earlier biographies. Particularly in his treatment of the voyage to Italy and the Roman sojourn, Sharp spices his account with an exotic flavor of excitement and adventure. The two men seem more like delighted tourists than anxious companions on a harrowing journey to a foreign country under the most trying conditions.

In order to make the manuscripts conform to this narrative, Sharp typically euphemizes Severn's often pointed and direct language. The story of Severn's leave-taking from his father on the day of departure to Naples provides a good case in point. In his memoir, Severn depicts his father as a dangerous and irrational tyrant who objects violently to his son's leaving and is pitted against the rest of the family: "as I attempted to go & take leave of my youngest brother, my father stopped the doorway & on my attempting to pass, in his insane rage he struck me a blow which fell me to the ground--my brother amazed at this indignity to me at once held back my raving Father--We all passed a dreadful moment even the neighbors who had come to wish me goodbye" (TL 18). Sharp transforms this scene of trauma and terror into a carefully choreographed melodrama in which Severn's "raving Father" becomes "my poor father" (Sharp 51), his "insane rage" is rationalized as "an apparent passion of madness," and the raw violence of the encounter itself is diffused and reconstituted as a "most melancholy plight" and a "tragic scene" (51). Whereas Severn ends his account with the embarrassment of having the neighbors witness this "dreadful moment," Sharp removes them and substitutes the comforting presence of Severn's "dear mother," the Angel in the House, who "interposed ... to protect me" (51). Moreover, he lends Severn a degree of magnanimity that is nowhere apparent in the original manuscript, where Severn is not conciliatory hut resentful of his father's behavior and considers it an affront to his own dignity.

This type of softening can be seen in a number of other places as well. On board the Maria Crowther, for instance, Keats composes what Severn mistakenly believes is his final sonnet, "Bright Star." According to Sharp, Severn writes: "this sublime sonnet inspired me with the hope that he might recover. Indeed this hope was never absent from my mind, and I never once realised the likelihood of our speedy separation by death" (55). In his manuscript, however, Severn is both more dire and more bitter, perhaps evoking the Cockney School attacks and the legend perpetuated by Byron and Shelley that Keats was killed by an article. He writes: "it never occurred" to him that "we were so soon to be separated for ever by his creel death" (TL 20, nay italics). A few lines later, in Sharp's version, "He seemed to feel more for me than for himself, for he had already given himself up for lost" (55), though in the manuscript Severn actually adds "he had already given himself up for lost to the cravings of death" (TL 20, my italics). Here, as elsewhere, Sharp suppresses those words or phrases that might bring to mind unpleasant memories of the Brawne letters and renew concerns about Keats's excessive appetites.

For similar reasons, Sharp also removes what he considers to be coarse or distasteful passages that might reflect poorly on his main characters. One such omission involves a brief exchange between Keats and Mr. Cotterell, the brother of the consumptive Miss Cotterell, during the ten-day quarantine in the Bay of Naples. As Severn writes, "Our cabin boy was ridiculed by a Neapolitan who said that 'he laughed like a beggar' & Keats said 'Tell him he laughs like a damned fool' but Mr. Cotterell explained that the word 'damn' was not in the Italian language 'No' said Keats 'they are not worth a damn'" (TL 22). (34) Sharp omits this bit of dialogue and Keats's bitter pun--both because of the language and because it spoils the mood of blithe camaraderie and entertainment that he attempts to convey aboard the ship (60-61). In another instance, taken from the period in Rome when Keats enjoyed a brief respite from his illness and was able to walk on the Pincio, Sharp politely ignores Severn's urological humor: "there was a pretty fountain in a corner of the Pincio & Keats remarked 'that it was a corner watering out of revenge for watering in a comer'" (TL 27). (35) And in yet another place, Sharp skips over a lengthy passage in which Severn delightedly narrates an encounter between his own party of English ladies and a defecating Italian gentleman ("crouched down and spoiling the Atmosphere <relieving himself>" ["Incidents" #15, 5-6]).

The famous defenestration incident in Rome (Sharp 67) provides a revealing instance of another of Sharp's editorial practices, his tendency to combine material from different sources and then improvise on it. The effect here is to exaggerate the good-natured fun of the episode and blunt the hard edge of Keats's growing bitterness and disaffection. As in other places, Sharp weaves into Severn's account a form of running annotation, explaining customs and providing Italian terms that are nowhere to be found in either of the two existing versions of this story. Sharp's retelling is consequently much more expansive, stretching to some three hundred words. By contrast, neither of Severn's two versions amounts even to half this length. Except for one or two small details, both of Severn's accounts tally in their presentation of the event. Here is the shorter version, the one that more nearly resembles Sharp's passage: 'Twas a joy to me to see Keats improve from day to day, the winter being very fine he walked every day & was even like himself but our drawback was in the very bad dinners, so that Keats said to me 'Severn I have found out a way of having good dinners' but he would not tell me how--When the porter came with the Basket Keats opened it & seeing that it was the same horrid mess as usual he opened the window & quietly & deliberately emptied out on the steps each plate. This done he closed the basket & pointed to the Porter to take it away--Sure enough this was a masterpiece more eloquent than words as in half an hour we got an excellent dinner, & so on every day. (TL 27-28)

Sharp dilates on this sketch at considerable length, inflating the diction and providing elaborate buttressing language and occasional asides. Whereas Severn tersely notes that they received "very bad dinners," Sharp writes that they "got very odd and bad dinners sent in, as the Roman custom is, from a Trattoria, or restaurant. This was the more intolerable as we paid a crown for each meal, and as each, for all their cunning disguises in sauces and spices, was more unpalatable than the other. We put up with this annoyance for more than a week, although we made daily complaints to the padrona di casa, but one day we both pronounced the dinner to be unfit to eat. Keats hit on an expedient by which we always got good dinners afterwards" (67).

Neither of Severn's existing accounts mentions anything about Roman customs, trattorias, the exact price of the meal, or the reactions of the porter and the padrona; in fact, no padrona appears in either manuscript. Nor does Keats "hit on an expedient," "smil[e] roguishly," or pronounce: "Now, you'll see, Severn, that we'll have a decent dinner." Severn's versions take no interest in the porter's reaction to Keats's pique, though Sharp has them respond with "amusement," remove the empty basket "without demur," and behave "discreet[ly] enough not to charge for the dinners thrown out of the window" (67). Most important, Severn never provides the specific menu offered by Sharp, who substitutes for his "horrid mess" a fare that actually sounds quite palatable: "fowl," "rice pudding," "cauliflower," and "a dish of macaroni." (36)

Although Sharp does not reveal it, these culinary details are adapted from an unpublished journal-letter to Maria that Severn wrote half a century earlier. In January of 1821, Severn reassures his sister that he has "every personal comfort possible": my dinner now I go out for--I have for 1st dish macarona--it is like a dish of large white earth worms--made of Flour with butter &c--very good--my 2nd dish is fish--and then comes Roast Beef or Mutton--a cutlet of Pork or wild boar--their vegetables here are beautiful--cabbage cauliflower--brocola spinach--every thing good--and very well cooked--then I have pudding every day--Ah! Still my Joe says my Mother--the puddings are beautiful--rice particularly--plum pudding delicious--they even call it by its English name-- (37)

With the exception of the earthworms, this list sounds much more appetizing than the "had dinners" Severn mentions in "My tedious Life." But the selection of food here is clearly determined by Severn's specific audience. He is writing at this point to a family who was deeply concerned about his rash decision to accompany a sick man to Italy on a few days' notice, and so he tries to cast his experience in the best possible light. Severn's family letters differ radically from his correspondence with his male friends and from his various memoirs, particularly in their exuberant and upbeat tone, and it is the texture of this difference that Sharp's redaction erases. Indeed, Sharp's narrative combines evidence from three different sources written for three different audiences over a period of fifty-two years (1821, 1845, 1873).

The Severn who emerges from this textual amalgam, then, is very much Sharp's own creation, a composite figure, genteel and garrulous but evacuated of psychological complexity and separated from the social contexts in which he composed his own memory-portraits of the poet. The figure of Keats is similarly altered; Sharp's recension amplifies the joviality of the incident, accentuating Keats's aplomb and magnifying the importance of his triumph. Whereas Severn's memoir communicates Keats's weary and ascerbic tone ("the same horrid mess as usual") and illustrates the rueful humor of a desperately ill man, Sharp's version manages to transform the incident into a light-hearted excursus on Italian dining and a lesson in restaurant management ("the padrona was discreet enough not to charge for the dinners thrown out of the window"). Here, as in other places, Sharp's revision departs from the original in its sense of glibness and good cheer, as if the two men are devil-may-care aristocrats making sport with the locals on their Grand Tour.

By far the most significant alterations, however, occur in Sharp's elaborate descriptions of the voyage to Italy, the quarantine in the Bay of Naples and the journey to Rome. Severn has often been accused of painting a rosy picture of the Italian voyage in his later life, (38) but it is Sharp who appears to have furnished the most romanticized and colorful details. Whereas Severn's surviving accounts are straightforward and matter-of-fact, Sharp's is suffused with a spirit of excitement and adventure. The passengers are tossed about on the stormy ocean (whose "grandeur" and "sublime" aspect Sharp supplies); they sight "many large and strange fish," and encounter a Portuguese man-of-war that sprays a warning shot across their bow (57). This encounter, which occupies a mere six lines in Severn's 1820 journal-letter to William Haslam and only two brief paragraphs in "My tedious Life," swells to three times the size of the latter in Sharp's rendition, which creates a piratical air of suspense and features an "English sloop-of-war" that pursues the marauding Portuguese "in gallant style" (58). (39)

Sharp follows this incident with a long, bejeweled description of the approach to the Bay of Naples (58-59)--a passage that has been much coveted by Keats's modern biographers, several of whom have simply appropriated it for their own narrative purposes. (40) In fact, the passage bears little resemblance to anything in Severn's writings, which are much less rich and embroidered, much more economical in their descriptions. Severn rarely uses visual imagery of any kind in either his letters or memoirs, reserving color for his oil paintings instead. He says as much in responding to a request for information from Charles Brown for Brown's memoir of Keats: "I can only think of him and paint him--you must not ask me for communications for this work--except it be from my painting.--I am not master of words to show what I feel or think." (41) Two years later, writing from Venice, he confesses to Leigh Hunt: "O! that I could paint a letter--to have you enjoy with me this Paridise of Art.... I long to have [you] write a description of Venice--nobody else can do it." (42) It is precisely Severn's failure to "paint a letter," I would argue, that prompts Sharp's editorial improvements. Sharp must have felt a great disappointment with the adjectival poverty of Severn's account, especially in this instance, and been eager to conjure the bright Italian landscape that he himself had recently visited and admired so well (43) With its emphasis on colors and light, its painterly quality and aestheticizing impulse, this is the description of the Bay of Naples Severn should have written.

Sharp not only decorates his picture with precious gems ("topaz," "sapphire," "pearl[s]," "lapis lazuli") and floods it with "shimmering" and "golden" light, but he also alters the point of view so as to include Keats as a mesmerized observer of these visual effects. Severn's original manuscript, it should be noted, never mentions Keats's reactions to the scene, reactions that Sharp apparently invents: "Keats was deeply impressed" by the sunlight on the coast of Barbary; "Keats lay entranced, and with a look of serene abstraction upon his worn face" (58); "Keats was simply entranced with the unsurpassable beauty of the panorama"; "Keats ... looked longingly at the splendid city of Naples"; Keats "was taken out of himself" by the beauty of the bay (59). Throughout the passage, Sharp emphasizes the therapeutic and medicinal qualities of the Italian environment. The poet is rejuvenated by eating "the beautiful clusters of grapes," gaining strength from the "gorgeous heaps of autumnal fruits" piled "in such abundance" on the Neapolitan boats (59). Echoes of the Autumn ode with its fecund stanzas and ample store of ripe fruit are hardly accidental here. In fact, Sharp conjoins a romanticized picture of the Bay of Naples with the salubrious climate of Keats's final ode in order to heal the ailing poet. Transported to such a realm, Keats's imaginative powers soon revive and he begins to "talk of the classic scenes he seemed to know so well; he made it all live again, that old antique world when the Greek galleys and Tyrrhenian sloops brought northward strange tales of what was happening in Hellas and the mysterious East" (59). (44) It is as if Sharp imagines the rest cure that all Keats's friends had hoped the Italian climate would promote.

If the passage entertains a fantasy about the healing power of beautiful scenery, it also reveals an underlying moral agenda. Naples is likened to an "Enchanted Island" (59) and "the shore of Paradise" (60) where Keats the mythic hero is temporarily resurrected, his agitated senses soothed by "the endless array of picturesque skiffs and shallops, with sweet stirring music coming from many of them, the tinkling of the guitars mingling with happy laughter" (60). In this way, Sharp purifies Keats, transporting him to Elysian fields, to "the abode where the Eternal are," thus removing the stain of the Fanny Brawne letters from his character. In the otherworldly atmosphere of the bay, even the sailors who blunder aboard the little vessel and must remain for the duration of the quarantine have "a markedly beneficial effect upon poor Keats" (60), who "was very brilliant in the midst of this gay scene" (61).

Severn tells a different story in the one surviving manuscript that treats this episode. The only direct comment about Keats occurs when they finally go ashore: "Keats was but so so & scarcely strong enough to go about" (TL 12). The rest of this section is comprised of Severn's own impressions of the voyage. In contrast to Sharp's insistence on Keats's wit and charm, Severn's narrative typically counterpoints the beauty of the Italian scene with the bitter disaffection inherent in Keats's remarks. It is true that Severn finds hope where he can, but each of Keats's comments is marked by an undertone of ironic detachment and despair. Although Sharp claims that "he seemed to breathe an inspiration from the lovely environment" (59), in reality of course Keats balked at the prospect of describing his Italian surroundings: "O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples," he confides to Mrs. Brawne at the end of October 1820, "if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world" (Letters 2:350).

The long and arduous journey from Naples to Rome is similarly magnified and embellished in Sharp's retelling. Most biographers of Keats are delighted to remark that along the way, Severn "literally filled the little carriage with flowers" (Sharp 64). It is a richly suggestive image, conjuring the sumptuous vision of a redeemed Keats being pleasantly ferried to the Eternal city in a moving bower straight out of his own Endymion. The problem is that Severn never quite said this, observing only that he busied himself on the journey by "gathering the wild flowers" (TL 24). Once they arrive in Rome, Keats "rallied wonderfully," as Severn tells us (TL 27). In the fine weather, they are able to stroll about the Pincio, where they meet another consumptive, a handsome military officer named Lieutenant Elton. According to the only surviving account of this time left by Severn, Elton attracts the glances of the Princess Pauline Buonaparte, Napoleon's sister: "Keats was very severe in his satire on this famous Coquette but he thought she was only imitating the empresses of Rome as her illustrious brother was the Emperor, but she soon came to an end with her excesses" (TL 27). Sharp augments this encounter considerably, drawing out the descriptions of Elton and the princess and glossing Keats's "satire" as follows: "Canova had just done a nude statue from her, which we went to see, and thought it 'beautiful bad taste.' It was Keats gave this statue its lasting name, 'The Aeolian Harp'" (82). Although this story has been recounted time and again, there is no evidence in Severn's existing record that Keats ever made such comments.

In contrast to Sharp's lavish and romantic descriptions of the environs of Rome, Severn's letters of December through February describe a second, more dreadful quarantine, a period of intense isolation and psychological anguish. He often complains of the almost unbearable claustrophobia of his situation. "For Three weeks I have never left him," he writes to Mrs. Brawne on 11 January (KC 1: 189), and then two weeks later informs Taylor: "in 6 weeks I have not had 6 hours fresh air" (KC 1: 204). By February 11th, nothing has changed. He tells his sister Maria that Keats "has been confined to his bed two Months during which time I have scarce ever left him--except just for a run out--for a mouthful of fresh air" (21 Jan. 1821). These letters are relentless in their realism, providing first-hand testimony of the final stages of Keats's illness. Severn catalogues Keats's symptoms in excruciating detail, noting the quantity of blood vomited, the color of his expectorations, and his chronic diarrhea; he relates his own physical and mental exhaustion; and he agonizes over money problems. The day before Keats dies, Severn confesses to Haslam that "I have nothing to break this dreadful solitude--but Letters--day after day--night after night--here I am by our poor dying friend--my spirits--my intelects and my health are breaking down--I can get no one to change me--no one will relieve me they all run away" (KC 1: 220). It is worth noting that there is only one remark about the external environment of Rome in all of Severn's contemporary letters, both to his friends and family, and this is a single sentence to Taylor about the mild climate (KC 1: 204). It seems clear that by December Keats's state was far too serious to allow Severn to see much of anything beyond the narrow limit of their small rooms.

In the Company of Men: Keats and Twentieth-Century Biography

In the early nineteenth-century reception of Keats and his poetry, as Andrew Bennett writes, "the poet's name was, literally, a site of disturbance and conflict" (139). It was this conflict that Monckton Milnes's biography helped to allay and that the publication of the Fanny Brawne letters painfully reignited. In their biographies, however, Sidney Colvin and William Sharp set out to endorse Milnes's earlier portrait of the virile, gentlemanly Keats, and banish the "howling and sniveling" adolescent. For Sharp, Keats not only faces his death with masculine resolve ("there was no fear of death, no want of fortitude or manliness" [85]), but consistently places Severn's needs above his own, worrying about his companion's faltering health and his future prospects. Keats is "calm and resigned" (93), scripting the sequence of his death and quietly preparing Severn for the physical symptoms that will presage the end of his life. If Sharp's alterations to Severn's manuscripts work to restore Keats's dignity and poise, his peculiarly English stoicism, they also, as I have argued, replace the poet's feverish and enervating love for Fanny Brawne with an idealized and edifying portrait of male "intimacy" (42). But it is not just Severn who succeeds Fanny Brawne as Keats's "tender nurse" (92). Sharp's account amasses a series of testimonials of love from Keats's male friends to counteract the enfeebling charms of Fanny Brawne's affection. In this tale, of course, Severn's "self-sacrificing loyalty and love" (16), his "unflagging ministry to his dying friend" (92) stands uppermost, but it is also Dr. Clark who is "most ardent in his attention on Keats" (68); William Haslam, who reveals that "if I know what it is to love, I truly love John Keats" (73); Charles Brown, who concedes "much as I have loved him, I never knew how closely he was wound about my heart" (75), and Leigh Hunt, who promises that "we shall never cease to remember and love him" (87). In short, Sharp marshals his amended sources to fashion a tale about the enduring love of men and the power of this love to rescue and redeem "one of the manliest of English poets" (57). (45)

William Sharp's myriad revisions of the Severn manuscripts helped promote the moral restitution of Keats's character in the next century. So powerful was the influence of his restored image of the poet that as early as 1896, only four years after the publication of Sharp's biography, Robert Bridges concluded that Keats will be esteemed for "the nobility of his character." (46) In his Oxford lecture on the poet's letters nine years later, A. C. Bradley sensed "the presence of an intellectual nature, not merely sensitive and delicate, but open, daring, rich, and strong." (47) And T. S. Eliot, no doubt attuned to Sharp's reports of Keats's gentlemanly conduct, registered the "charming personality" that is revealed in the poet's letters. (48) It is Lionel Trilling and Walter Jackson Bate, however, who most eloquently enshrine the figure of the virtuous and manly Keats. (49) The title of Trilling's famous essay--"The Poet as Hero"--alone bespeaks the influence of Colvin and Sharp. Trilling, to be sure, acknowledges Keats's appetites, his "unquestioning faith in pleasure," (50) but the burden of the essay calls attention to Keats's "courage" and "heroic vision" (3) as well as his "moral energy" (17). Throughout, Trilling emphasizes Keats's "mature masculinity" (19), the "firmness" and "developed strength" of his character, even at one point suggesting that he was possessed of an "ideal military virtue" (20). The effort to assert Keats's "fortitude" (39) along with his "exquisite manners" (6) led Trilling, like his predecessors, to omit the more earthly and coarse letters from the selection of texts that he printed. (51)

A more scrupulous scholar, W. J. Bate is no less ardent in seeking to champion the manly Keats. As Susan Wolfson has shown, the phrases in which he commends the Chapman's Homer sonnet (hailing its "virile, penetrating idiom" and "masculine strength of ... language" [85]) record his indebtedness to Milnes's original recuperation of the poet as well as to Sharp's more subtly detailed later constructions. So great is the attraction of Sharp's account of Keats's final months, in fact, that Bate can underscore the poet's "English character" (664), "ready sympathy" (667), and "manly reticence" (676) while at the same time offering dramatic evidence from Severn's contemporary journal-letters that attests the steady erosion of these qualities. At a key moment toward the end of his biography--that is, after Keats has been put on a starvation diet, cursed Severn for refusing him the means of suicide, renounced religion and books--Bate turns away from this painful chronicle and instead relies on Sharp's re-creation of Severn's memoir: "However dreadful these weeks were, Severn (long after they were over) recalled that Keats had still 'never quite lost his cheerful and elastic mind.' These moments stood out in Severn's memory like 'the flickering rays of the sun in a smothering storm'" (692). This description, in which the mark of Sharp's hand is so clearly in evidence, leads directly to the last movement of the biography, in which Bate tells of Keats's returning serenity and his salvation through empathy.

As Keats's death draws near, Bate introduces the reader to the community of supportive men who attend the poet's dying (Elton, Ewing, Gibson, Gutierrez). Noteworthy here is the way that the women who are closest to Keats--Mrs. Brawne, Fanny Brawne, Fanny Keats--are written out of the narrative, and the work of mourning is reserved for "the rough, virile" Charles Brown (697), who divides up Keats's books and then fifteen years later "'crying like a child'" tries to find the appropriate words for his memoir of the poet. (52) Bate concludes by linking Brown to Keats's early friend Benjamin Bailey through the gift of Keats's engraved portrait of Shakespeare. "It had been Bailey," Bate writes, "who had ... introduced him, above all, to a more philosophic conception of what was to become his polar ideal of 'disinterestedness' and to the creative use of the selfless potentialities of the moral imagination" (698). Thus, Bate's biography ends with a series of cinematic fades as first Brown, then Bailey, then Keats himself dissolve into the "good Genius" of Shakespeare, who presides over Keats's fame like a benevolent patriarch. In this figuration, Keats's life and works merge as he is assumed into the English literary tradition, his marble bust securely housed "among the English Poets."

If the legacy of William Sharp's alterations to the Severn manuscripts is still powerfully present in our conception of Keats's character, it is no less palpable in our estimate of Joseph Severn, whose legendary existence as "the friend of Keats" has obscured any genuine assessment of his life and character. Through his association with Keats, Severn has entered literary history as the loyal and selfless friend, who sacrifices his own ambitions and risks his life to accompany an obscure poet to a foreign land. There is a modicum of truth to this allegory, of course, hut the man who emerges from the unpublished letters and memoirs is a much earthier and more pragmatic figure than this sentimentalized portrait allows. These manuscripts reveal a canny and calculating man, who is certainly loyal to Keats's memory, but who also capitalizes on his friend's steadily increasing fame with the clear knowledge of future gain. This Severn is often vain, egotistical, and self-promoting, consistently exaggerating his artistic achievements and boasting about his influence in Rome. He is fully aware that his friendship with the poet has brought him the attention and sympathy of the English nobility, and exploits this attachment to gain entry into their society and commissions for his pictures. If this is not a man literary biography has prepared us very well to accept, it is nevertheless one his original manuscripts force us to acknowledge.

(1.) Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1963) 659, 687.

(2.) See Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet, 1963, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986) 401-402; Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1968) 621; Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber, 1997) 565.

(3.) M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, seventh ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2000) 826.

(4.) The allegorical dimensions of the Keats story have not been lost on modern playwrights or critics, in David Shepard's recent play, "Keats," for example (performed in New York and Los Angeles in 1996), a forceful connection is drawn between Keats's death and the experience of AIDS patients. See also Jeffrey C. Robinson, Reception and Poetics in Keats: 'My Ended Poet' (London: Macmillan, 1998) 44.

(5.) For some brief anecdotes about their experience in Naples, however, see Charles MacFarlane, Reminiscences of a Literary Life (London: J. Murray, 1917).

(6.) Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1878, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965). Cited hereafter as KC.

(7.) The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892). Cited hereafter by page number. Two biographies by Sheila Birkenhead, who married a Severn descendant, have appeared since--Against Oblivion: The Life of Joseph Severn (New York: Macmillan, 1944) and Illustrious Friends: The Story of Joseph Severn and his Son Arthur (New York: Reynal, 1965)--but these are marred by fictional conversations and loose editing, and in any case lean heavily on Sharp for narrative detail. The dust jacket of Against Oblivion claims that Birkenhead had "access to a mass of new material covering Severn's entire life," but in fact the bulk of this material concerned Mary, and Eleanor, Severn's daughters, along with a number of brief notes that Severn sent to his future wife Elizabeth Montgomerie during the late 1820s. Birkenhead never had access to many of the manuscripts that Sharp used.

(8.) For reasons that will become apparent below, Rollins does not print any of Severn's later reminiscences in The Keats Circle--with the exception of a few pages of biographical notes Severn sent to Richard Monckton Milnes in 1845.

(9.) Upon their arrival at Harvard, the Severn Papers attracted very little notice. No mention of them appeared in the "News and Notes" section of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and though they were listed as a new acquisition by the Houghton Library, no sense of the depth or scope of the material was given in the brief entry (see Harvard Library Bulletin 21 [October 1973]: 449). They are noted in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1983) 115 (MS 83-981), and by Barbara Rosenbaum in the Index of English Literary Manuscripts. Vol. 4, 1800-1900, part 2 (London and New York: Mansell, 1990) 340-41. But over all, they have been ignored. Perhaps because of this lack of publicity, few if any scholars have made use of the papers since they came to Harvard.

(10.) Fred Holland Day, a photographer and avid collector of Keatsiana, was the first person to recognize the problem. In 1896, just four years after the publication of Sharp's book, he exchanged a number of letters with the magazine writer F. Louise Howland in which he questioned Sharp's reliability. Twenty-seven years later, in corresponding with Amy Lowell while she was at work on her massive biography of Keats, Day again noted the book's shortcomings, remarking its "plentiful supply of lack of document!--and yes, and a plentiful supply of questionable statements as well" (20 April 1923; see Hyder E. Rollins and Stephen Maxfield Parrish, Keats and the Bostonians [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1951] 161). For other passing remarks about Sharp's inaccuracy, see Sir Rennell Rodd and H. Nelson Gay, ed. Bulletin of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Rome 1 (1910): 35-36n; B. Ifor Evans, "Keats and Joseph Severn: A Re-Estimate with Unpublished Letters," London Mercury 30 (August 1934): 338; Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and Willard Bissell Pope, ed. Life of John Keats by Charles Armitage Brown (London: Oxford UP, 1937) 118-21; H. W. Garrod, "Writ in Water," TLS (27 May 1949): 353; Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, a vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958) 2: 367, n. 1, 375, n. 1, 377, n. 1, etc.; Sudie Nostrand, The Keats Circle: Further Letters, diss., New York U, 1973 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1973, 7401942) 3; and E. H. McCormick, The Friend of Keats: A Life of Charles Armitage Brown (Wellington, NZ: Victoria UP, 1989) 143. The novelist Cecil Roberts is perhaps the most outspoken critic, calling Sharp's book "a slapdash production full of errors" (The Remarkable Young Man [New York: Macmillan, 1954] 260).

(11.) Robert Gittings is the only biographer to have consulted some of Severn's original manuscripts, though he cites them infrequently and continues to rely on Sharp (see 596, n. 2). When he used them in the mid-1960s they were, as he says, in "private hands." The owner turns out to have been John Wild, grandson of Walter Severn and then Dean of Durham Cathedral. Sometime between 1968 and 1971, however, Dean Wild sold all his Severn papers to Winifred A. Myers, a bookseller in London. From there the papers were sold to Arthur Houghton, Jr., who in March 1972 gave them to the Houghton Library at Harvard. They are currently located in an accessions file (71M-85) waiting to be officially catalogued. Until just recently they did not appear in the library's main card catalogue, its online database, or its web site.

(12.) For a useful discussion of how the project was initiated and a more detailed description of Sharp's final agonies of composition, see Elizabeth A. Sharp, William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir (New York: Duffield, 1910) 168-69, 186.

(13.) To Horace Scudder, 19 Sept. 1891, ms. Am 801.4, Houghton Library, Harvard. All further citations to these letters are referred to by date and bear the same access number.

(14.) To Scudder, Dec. 1891. In an earlier letter to Scudder of 15-17 Nov. 1890, Sharp also blames John Ruskin for the delays: "[he] promised to collaborate to the extent of writing a chapter of Reminiscences of Severn," but his "mental health" rendered this contribution impossible.

(15.) See the Selected Bibliography of Sharp's works in Flavia Alaya, William Sharp- "Fiona Macleod" 1855-1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970) 217-20.

(16.) To Bliss Carman, 3 Sept. 1891, ms. hm 2947, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

(17.) See Elizabeth Sharp 334-36.

(18.) For useful discussions of the history and progress of nineteenth-century biography, see A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth To Life: The Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Harcourt, 1974) 11-40; Francis R. Hart, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1971) 2-43, and especially Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1965) 181-232.

(19.) For a discussion of this scandal and a sampling of responses to the publication of the Brawne letters, see George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame 1821-1895 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1944) 67-73 and J. R. MacGillivray, Keats: A Bibliography and Reference Guide with an Essay on Keats' Reputation (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1949) lxv-lxviii. For a good introduction to the early reception of Keats's poetry, see G. M. Matthews, ed. Keats: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970 1-37. For a more detailed examination of the early reception of Keats's death, the influence of Shelley's Adonais on his posthumous reputation, and the issue of Keats's manhood, see Susan J. Wolfson's two essays, "Feminizing Keats," Critical Essays on John Keats, ed. Hermione de Almeida (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990) 317-56 and "Keats enters history: autopsy, Adonais, and the fame of Keats," Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 17-45.

(20.) Matthew Arnold, "John Keats," The English Poets: Selections, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (London and New York: Macmillan, 1880) 4: 428, 429.

(21.) William Henry Marquess, Lives of the Poet: The First Century of Keats Biography (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1985) 72.

(22.) William Michael Rossetti, Life of John Keats (London: Walter Scott, 1887) 45-46.

(23.) The adulatory dedication of the book reads: "To Walter Severn and Arthur Severn, the distinguished sons of a distinguished father: Inheritors of a name immortally associated with that of one of the greatest of English poets, these memoirs are inscribed." Although in her memoir Elizabeth Sharp mentions the years 1889 or 1890 as the onset of writing, the project was initiated as many as five years before, in the summer of 1884. In a letter of 23 July 1884, Walter Severn responds to a number of Sharp's queries and mentions Ruskin's agreement to contribute to the biography. In a subsequent letter to Sharp, dated 19 November 1887, he also refers to the "coming Life of my Father" (Ms. Harvard, 71M-85 [472, 474]).

(24.) For recent analyses of Milnes's biography and discussions of its influence on Keats's reputation, see Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 141-44 and Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 145-50. Bennett argues that "Milnes institutes a rhetoric of posthumous life for Keats, his 'walking among posterity,' which saturates later criticism and biography of the poet" (143). By contrast, Siegel maintains that Milnes seeks to place Keats within the "timeless contiguous existence" (147) of great artists and within the respectable halls of the museum and the library.

(25.) Sidney Colvin, Keats, English Men of Letters, ed. John Morley (New York: Harper, 1887).

(26.) It would certainly be fair to characterize the Severn papers now at Harvard as "a great mass"--the index itself runs to some thirty pages. The collection includes hundreds of letters to and from Severn, his wife, and his eldest son, the memoir "Incidents of My Life," as well as a number of Severn's miscellaneous essays, short stories, poems, translations, lectures, notes, reports, and drawings.

(27.) Another recent biography perpetuates this error: "The treatment of the Italian period is based on three lengthy unpublished manuscripts by Severn" (John Evangelist Walsh, Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats [New York: St. Martin's, 1999]: 199)

(28.) A draft of "Vicissitudes," entitled "On the Adversities of Keats's fame" (December 1861) also survives at Harvard, but Sharp never quotes from it in his biography. (See John Keats 1795-1995: With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection [Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, 1995] III; Ms. 4.16.2). Sharp also mentions "many volumes of scrupulously explicit journals" (x) and later cites a long passage from one of these "journals" dated sometime in 1821 (114). I have not been able to locate these journals. Severn composed a number of "journal-letters" to his friends and family, noted above, but the passage Sharp quotes appears nowhere in any of these.

(29.) "On the Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame," Atlantic Monthly II (April 1 863): 401-407.

(30.) All three unpublished memoirs are at Harvard. "Incidents of My Life" (71M-85 [493]) is hereafter referred to in the text as "Incidents" and "My tedious Life" (Ms. Keats 4.16.4) is cited as TL. It bears noting here that Severn's letters home to his family--fascinating as they are--remain unpublished, though they have occasionally been excerpted, I include a large selection of these as well as forty newly discovered letters in my forthcoming Letters and Memoirs of Joseph Severn.

(31.) It may be objected that broad suspicion of Sharp's account is unwarranted given that key documents in the Severn record, most notably chapters 10-13 of "Incidents of My Life," are missing. Perhaps, but I would offer some reservations here. First, Severn's prose style bears little resemblance to the extended passages that Sharp claims belong to him. Second, as 1 will show, Sharp's transcriptions of surviving Severn manuscripts are consistently corrupt. Third, Sharp does include extended excerpts from existing chapters in "Incidents" both before and after the missing numbers 10-13, and none of these passages has much to do with Keats. In fact, Sharp devotes two substantial appendices to later numbers from "Incidents" that dwell at great length on extraneous material from Severn's later fife. If Sharp believed these numbers were important enough to deserve precious space in their own appendices even after the total revamping the book was forced to undergo, why then didn't he allot similar space to the missing Keats numbers, which would have had much greater appeal? And lastly, although Sidney Colvin had access to the same material as Sharp in writing his 1887 biography of Keats, "particularly," as he says in his Preface, "concerning Keats's voyage to Italy and life at Rome" (vii), his account of the poet's final months bears no resemblance to Sharp's.

(32.) See Keats Catalogue 4.16.4. The catalogue reference mistakenly reads: "A.MS.s.; Tossa, September 1863." It should read "Tolfa, September 1873."

(33.) Page 44 of the manuscript is missing and appears to have been torn out. The surrounding context, however, indicates that this section of the memoir does not concern Keats.

(34.) This anecdote also appears in Severn's Biographical Notes to Milnes, albeit in a slightly different form. See KC 2: 136.

(35.) Gittings includes both of these short anecdotes in his biography, Motion following suit. Sharp also omits another of Severn's less pleasant recollections of quarantine concerning the behavior of the sailors who had stumbled aboard: "I soon found that Keats had painfully understood they were sin[g]ing abominable songs when they knew the Ladies below in the cabin were listening" (KC 2: 135).

(36.) Bate (679-80), Gittings (613-14), and Ward (387) all rely on Sharp's version of this anecdote, Bate actually quoting it verbatim from Sharp's book.

(37.) To Maria Severn, 21 Jan. 1821, Ms. Keats House, Hampstead, London.

(38.) See Gittings 604, n. 16 and Ward 445, n. 3.

(39.) In his journal letter to William Haslam of 1820 describing the voyage, Severn actually mentions two "Ships of War" (Letters 2: 355), though he provides no name for either of them. These two are trimmed to one in "My tedious Life," though the ship remains unnamed.

(40.) See especially Dorothy Hewlitt, Adonais: A Life of John Keats (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938) 364, Ward 380-81, and to a lesser extent Bate 665-66 and Gittings 603.

(41.) To Charles Brown, 19 Sept. 1821, S'ana 58, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library.

(42.) Jack Stillinger, ed. The Letters of Charles Armitage Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966) 139.

(43.) In fact, William Sharp fell in love with what he called "the beautiful living pulsing South" and on his two extended sojourns in Italy (1883 and 1890-91) filled his journals with detailed and colorful descriptions of the Italian landscape (E. Sharp 193). Many of his nature poems in Sospiri di Roma (1891) are also characterized by sumptuous visual imagery and language that frequently likens its subjects to precious gems (see, for example, "Clouds," "The White Peacock," and "Spuma dal Mare," where topaz and amethyst figure prominently [collected in Flowers O' the Vine (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1892)]). Interestingly, this volume's lush romantic floralism, with its profusion of roses and ruins, is echoed in Severn/ Sharp's descriptions of the carriage ride from Naples to Rome (63-64) and the Coliseum (64; 82-83), and in a number of other anecdotes from the Roman period.

(44.) As do the other major biographers, Andrew Motion seasons his account of this time with "Greek galleys and Tyrrhenian traders" (547), but then takes it a step farther: Keats "also talked about the immediate past, relying on information he had gleaned from the Examiner" (547). There is no supporting evidence for this assertion, even in Sharp. Much of Motion's final chapters are in fact beset by transcription errors, mis-attributions, and problems of basic chronology.

(45.) After his death Keats is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where another symbol of masculine strength presides over his posthumous existence: "He had the noble pyramid of Caius Cestius over him" (96). He is soon companioned, as Sharp tells us, by "the ashes of Shelley" and some sixty-five years later by the remains of Joseph Severn himself. For some tantalizingly brief "memos" about Keats's homoeroticism, see Robinson 135-37.

(46.) Robert Bridges, intro, The Poems of John Keats, 2 vols., ed. G. Thorn Drury (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896) cv.

(47.) A. C. Bradley, "The Letters of Keats," Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1950) 212-13.

(48.) T. S. Eliot, "Shelley and Keats," The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 101.

(49.) For a fuller treatment of the discourse of gender in the history of Keats's reception, see Wolfson's "Feminizing Keats," especially 346-49.

(50.) Lionel Trilling, intro, The Selected Letters of John Keats (New York: Farrar, 1951) 18.

(51.) For example, he chose not to print the important journal-letter of September 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats because it contains a troubling (and deeply misogynist) list of female anatomy copied from Burton. A December 1819 letter to James Rice is similarly excluded because of a disturbing story about the voracity of a pregnant woman.

(52.) See Ward and Walsh, however, who offer a counter-narrative to Bate's reading, placing Fanny Brawne at the center of their accounts of Keats's final months. Ward nevertheless relies heavily on Sharp's account, extolling Severn and insisting on Keats's nobility and sympathy: "His mind still stood over and above the ruin that was overtaking his body, and in two of his last conversations with Severn he was thinking only of his friend" (401).

GRANT F. SCOTT is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts (UP of New England, 1994) and editor of Selected Letters of John Keats (Harvard UP, 2002). He is currently working on a new edition of the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn.