8 March 1805: Death of Keats’s Grandfather
St. Stephen’s Church,* Coleman Street, London


Keats’s maternal grandfather, John Jennings, dies, 8 March, and is buried at St. Stephen’s Church, Coleman Street, 14 March. Keats’s grandmother—Alice Jennings—moves the four Keats children from Ponders End, Enfield, to live with her at Church Street, Edmonton. Keats is nine years old.
John Jennings leaves a considerable amount of money in his will, but due to the will’s lack of clarity, combined with other eventual claims to the money, legal proceedings make full disclosure and disbursement a problem that keeps Keats at the mercy of the estate manager’s sometimes murky management style; this would be Richard Abbey, the primary guardian of the children after 1810.

As an adult, Keats eventually has to deal with these continuing legal squabbles as he, too, struggles with acquiring and managing his share of the estate—he does so randomly and piecemeal, mainly because he attempts (unsuccessfully) to live on credit based on his share. Jennings leaves something upwards of about 13,000 pounds in his will, which is a huge amount of money in 1805. Keats’s mother dies in 1810. And then the death of his grandmother, Alice Jennings, in 1814, only further complicates matters. Keats is never aware that part of the legacy from the grandfather’s estate is available to him via the courts, which is unfortunate, since there will come a moment when Keats is more or less broke. It appears that Abbey, too, is also not aware of this other portion of the estate from John Jennings. Abbey and Keats never come to trust each other.
Keats secretly commemorates the death of his much-loved grandmother in one of his
earliest
surviving poems, As from the darkening gloom a silver
dove. Unfortunately, the genuine depth of his feeling, which attempts to find
joy in grief, is compromised by the poem’s crowded emotional and imagistic confusions.
The
poem thus expresses Keats’s belief that his grandmother’s honorable and loving nature
will be
rewarded by heaven’s immortal quire.
The poem’s indifferent quality and overreaching
style is to be expected given Keats’s immaturity as a poet.
*St. Stephen’s is demolished in 1940 in a German bombing raid. See 23 April 1804 for a note on the fate of the church and the relocation of the Keats family graves.