Mapping Keats’s Progress: 8 March 1805: Death of Keats’s Grandfather

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Select Chronology: 1794-1815

1794: Keats’s parents marry, October; arrest of radical in England; Robespierre executed; France invades Holland; Godwin publishes Caleb Williams; Coleridge meets Southey; Erasmus Darwin,Zoonomia
1795: Keats born, Finsbury, 31 October, Swan and Hoop Livery Stables, 24 Moorfields Pavement Row, London; France abolishes slavery; famine issues in England; laws against assemblies in England; Wordsworth regularly meets with Godwin; Hannah More publishes her Cheap Repository tracks; Coleridge marries Sara Fricker; death of James Boswell; Southey publishes Joan of Arc
1797: brother George born, 28 February; death of Edmund Burke; birth of Mary Godwin and death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft; Coleridge’s second edition of Poems; Ann Radcliff’s The Italian; discovery: diamonds are made of carbon
1799: brother Tom born, 18 Nov; family moves to Craven Street, London; Wordsworth and sister, Dorothy, move to Dove Cottage, Grasmere; British government bans unions and political societies; Napoleon invades Syria, becomes First Consul; Rosetta Stone found
1801: brother Edward born, 28 April (likely dies Dec 1802); first census of England/Wales; General Enclosure Act; Battle of Copenhagen; ultra violent radiation discovered; first use of the pie chart; patent on first continuous paper-making machine; Lord Elgin begins to bring back to England parts of the Greek Parthenon
1802: maternal grandparents retire and Keats’s father takes over their business; truce (Peace of Amiens) with France (ends 1803); Letitia Landon born; first electrochemical cell
1803: sister Fanny born, 3 June; with George, Keats boards at school in Enfield, run by Rev. John Clarke; eventually does well at school, winning some prizes (he leaves Clarke’s academy 1811 for medical training); truce with France ends; Hazlitt paints Wordsworth and Coleridge; uprising in Ireland
1804: Keats’s father (age 30) dies in midnight riding accident, 16 April; mother hastily remarries a young bank clerk, William Rawlings, 27 June; children live with maternal grandparents at Ponders End; William Blake tried/acquitted for sedition; Corn Laws enacted for protectionism; Napoleon plans to invade England; Napoleon proclaims himself emperor; war declared on Spain; deaths: Joseph Priestly, Immanuel Kant; first steam locomotive built
1805: maternal grandfather John Jennings dies, leaving considerable funds; children move to Edmonton with maternal grandmother Alice Jennings; Napoleon declared King of Italy; Battle of Trafalgar, major victory for the British Royal Navy; Napoleon defeats Russian/Austrian armies; Hazlitt’s first book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action
1806: Keats’s mother leaves Rawlings; born: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Stuart Mill; Napoleon defeats Prussians, wants to blockade Britain; carbon paper patented
1809: Keats’s mother ill and returns to her mother’s home; Keats devoted to her care; Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; Napoleon arrests the Pope; born: Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe
1810: Keats’s mother dies of tuberculosis, March; guardians Abbey and Sandall appointed for the Keats children, July (Sandall passes away 1816); Walter Scott publishes The Lady of the Lake; born: Frédéric François Chopin, Robert Schumann, Elizabeth Gaskell
1811: Keats leaves Clarke’s Enfield school; works on prose translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid; takes up apothecary apprenticeship, Edmonton, with Thomas Hammond, initially for five years, but cut short, perhaps out of difficulties with Hammond; Shelley expelled from Oxford; controversy with Lord Elgin wanting to sell the Elgin Marbles to the British Government; established: the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales; Prince of Wales declared Regent after George III declared incompetent; Luddite uprisings; Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets; Mary Tighe, Psyche; the Great Comet discovered; Mexican wars of independence
1814-1816: Keats trains at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals, and though association and some training extends into 1817
1814: Keats’s maternal grandmother, Alice Jennings, dies; first evidence of Keats writing poetry, perhaps spurred by reading Spenser with Charles Cowden Clarke (son of Rev. John Clarke); notable poems: Imitation of Spenser and On Peace; poem: Keats writes poem expressing his feeling, As from the darkening gloom a silver dove; poem: To Lord Byron; death of maternal grandmother, December; Napoleon exiled to Elba; Byron publishes instant hit, The Corsair; Cary’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy; Wordsworth publishes The Excursion; Percy Shelley elopes to Europe with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
1815: Leigh Hunt released from jail; Keats begins to write more poetry; poem: Written on the Day That Mr. Hunt Left Prison.; February; poem: Ode to Apollo; buys Wordsworth’s 2-volume collection of poems; registers to become student at Guy’s Hospital, October; as medical student, lives St. Thomas’s Street, London, October, with other medical students; begins to write poetry about wanting to write enduring poetry; Apothecaries Act prohibits unlicensed medical practice in the United Kingdom; Napoleon escapes from Elba; Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

8 March 1805: Death of Keats’s Grandfather

St. Stephen’s Church,* Coleman Street, London

true — Click the map to see a larger version.

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.

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As from the darkening gloom a silver dove

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light,
On pinions that nought moves but pure delight;
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;
Where happy spirits, crown’d with circlets bright
Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight,
Taste the high joy none but the blest can prove.
There thou or joinest the immortal quire
In melodies that even heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire
Of the omnipotent Father, cleavest the air,
On holy message sent. — What pleasures higher?
Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?

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Imitation of Spenser

Now Morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touch’d a verdant hill;
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silv’ring the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distill,
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.

There the king-fisher saw his plumage bright
Vieing with fish of brilliant dye below;
Whose silken fins, and golden scales light
Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow:
There saw the swan his neck of arched snow,
And oar’d himself along with majesty;
Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show
Beneath the waves like Afric’s ebony,
And on his back a fay reclined voluptuously.

Ah! could I tell the wonders of an isle
That in that fairest lake had placed been,
I could e’en Dido of her grief beguile;
Or rob from aged Lear his bitter teen:
For sure so fair a place was never seen,
Of all that ever charm’d romantic eye:
It seem’d an emerald in the silver sheen
Of the bright waters; or as when on high,
Through clouds of fleecy white, laughs the coerulean sky.

And all around it dipp’d luxuriously
Slopings of verdure through the glassy tide,
Which, as it were in gentle amity,
Rippled delighted up the flowery side;
As if to glean the ruddy tears, it tried,
Which fell profusely from the rose-tree stem!
Haply it was the workings of its pride,
In strife to throw upon the shore a gem
Outvieing all the buds in Flora’s diadem.

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On Peace

O Peace! and dost thou with thy presence bless
The dwellings of this war-surrounded isle;
Soothing with placid brow our late distress,
Making the triple kingdom brightly smile?
Joyful I hail thy presence; and I hail
The sweet companions that await on thee;
Complete my joy — let not my first wish fail,
Let the sweet mountain nymph thy favourite be,
With England’s happiness proclaim Europa’s liberty.
O Europe! let not sceptred tyrants see
That thou must shelter in thy former state;
Keep thy chains burst, and boldly say thou art free;
Give thy kings law — leave not uncurbed the great;
So with the horrors past thou’lt win thy happier fate!

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To Lord Byron

Byron, how sweetly sad thy melody!
Attuning still the soul to tenderness,
As if soft Pity, with unusual stress
Had touch’d her plaintive lute; and thou, being by,
Hadst caught the tones, nor suffer’d them to die.
O’ershading sorrow doth not make thee less
Delightful: thou thy griefs dost dress
With a bright halo, shining beamily;
As when a cloud the golden moon doth veil,
Its sides are ting’d with a resplendent glow,
Through the dark robe oft amber rays prevail,
And like fair veins in sable marble flow.
Still warble, dying swan, —still tell the tale,
The enchanting tale —the tale of pleasing woe.

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Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison

What though, for showing truth to flatter’d state,
Kind Hunt was shut in prison, yet has he,
In his immortal spirit, been as free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.
Minion of grandeur! think you he did wait?
Think you he nought but prison walls did see,
Till, so unwilling, thou unturn’dst the key?
Ah, no! far happier, nobler was his fate!
In Spenser’s halls he strayed, and bowers fair,
Culling enchanted flowers; and he flew
With daring Milton through the fields of air:
To regions of his own his genius true
Took happy flights. Who shall his fame impair
When thou art dead, and all thy wretched crew?

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Ode to Apollo

In thy western halls of gold
When thou sittest in thy state,
Bards, that erst sublimely told
Heroic deeds, and sang of fate,
With fervour seize their adamantine lyres,
Whose chords are solid rays, and twinkle radiant fires.

There Homer with his nervous arms
Strikes the twanging harp of war,
And even the western splendour warms,
While the trumpets sound afar;
But, what creates the most intense surprise,
His soul looks out through renovated eyes.

Then, through thy temple wide, melodious swells
The sweet majestic tone of Maro’s lyre;
The soul delighted on each accent dwells, —
Enraptured dwells, — not daring to respire,
The while he tells of grief around a funeral pyre.

’Tis awful silence then again:
Expectant stand the spheres;
Breathless the laurell’d peers,
Nor move, till ends the lofty strain,
Nor move till Milton’s tuneful thunders cease,
And leave once more the ravish’d heavens in peace.

Thou biddest Shakspeare wave his hand,
And quickly forward spring
The Passions — a terrific band —
And each vibrates the string
That with its tyrant temper best accords,
While from their master’s lips pour forth the inspiring words.

A silver trumpet Spenser blows,
And, as its martial notes to silence flee,
From a virgin chorus flows
A hymn in praise of spotless chastity.
’Tis still! wild warblings from the Aeolian lyre
Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire.

Next thy Tasso’s ardent numbers
Float along the pleased air,
Calling youth from idle slumbers,
Rousing them from pleasure’s lair: —
Then o’er the strings his fingers gently move,
And melt the soul to pity and to love.

But when thou joinest with the Nine,
And all the powers of song combine,
We listen here on earth:
The dying tones that fill the air,
And charm the ear of evening fair,
From thee, great God of Bards, receive their heavenly birth.

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Select Chronology: 1794-1815

8 March 1805: Death of Keats’s Grandfather

St. Stephen’s Church,* Coleman Street, London

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove

Imitation of Spenser

On Peace

To Lord Byron

Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison

Ode to Apollo

MLA Style: Works Cited

Chicago Style: Note

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Mapping Keats’s ProgressA Critical Chronology

Select Chronology: 1794-1815

8 March 1805: Death of Keats’s Grandfather

St. Stephen’s Church,* Coleman Street, London

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove

Imitation of Spenser

On Peace

To Lord Byron

Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison

Ode to Apollo

MLA Style: Works Cited

Chicago Style: Note

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology