1803-1811: Enfield, Clarke’s Academy, & the Headmaster’s Son: Setting Keats’s Progress
Enfield, Clarke’s Academy
With his younger brother George, Keats (aged 7) attends Reverend John Clarke’s excellent and progressive boarding school for boys (sometimes called Enfield School or Academy), which has a dissenting, nonconformist tradition. No doubt at least some republican (and therefore radical) sympathies filter through to its students, which would have been a touchy standpoint given Britain’s ongoing war with France, which is more or less continuous, 1792-1815. Keats’s youngest brother, Tom, will later attend. The Keats brothers likely ended up there because of a little family history: a couple of his uncles on his mother’s side also attended, including the somewhat impressive Midgley John Jennings, a seasoned military (naval) man, who apparently sometimes dined with the Reverend Clarke at the academy.
The school greatly encourages students to pursue all forms of knowledge and, at times,
to set
their own consequences for negative behaviors or indifferent commitment. The idea
is to
produce freethinkers and free-thinking—and toleration; the pedagogical style was to
reward
rather than to punish. That some of Keats’s poetry comes to challenge accepted tastes
(and in
particular conservative or neoclassical tastes) and that he develops an independent
voice is
not surprising. That Keats develops highly independent religious
views is also hardly surprising. The boys were fully encouraged to take responsibility
for what they learned, and this becomes extraordinarily significant in the narrative
of
Keats’s poetic progress, where he often makes it clear that he needs to deliberately
study
poetry in order to achieve genuinely lofty ambitions—to be, as he will later write
just before
his 23rd birthday, among the English Poets after my death
(letters, 14-25 Oct. 1818).
Physically, the school (on Nags Head Road, Enfield Town), with its large, airy rooms, was by no means gloomy. Outside there was a good-sized playground, as well as a large garden where some of the boys were could cultivate their own little plot of land—there were pears, strawberries, and cherries. And beyond the school grounds stretched some accessible meadows, though over time there may have been some commercial development in the form of potash and brick manufacturing in adjacent open areas. The school was also quite close to Keats’s grandparents’ residence at Ponders End, who retire there in 1802. Keats’s parents—Thomas and Frances—were also known to take their gig to visit their children at the academy during their first year there, given that Thomas, aged thirty, dies in a riding accident in April 1804; the headmaster later recalls Thomas’ energetic and lively manner.
Keats, then, receives a very good, if not exceptional, education at the academy. Moreover,
Keats, after a somewhat undirected beginning at the school, eventually becomes a prize-winning
student and is known for his stamina as a reader and for after-hours study. According
to the
recollections of the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden
Clarke, eight years Keats’s senior, it seems Keats reads most, if not all, of the
books in the library, and he often reads during meals—in fact, according to Clarke’s
recollections, Keats devoured rather than read.
He is especially taken with Greek
mythology. So, too, on occasion, is Keats known to be feisty, not easily physically
intimidated by bullies, and ready and willing to battle (which he does), despite his
very
small stature; at adulthood Keats stands a bit over five feet, but is otherwise very
physically sturdy.
In his final year at school, Keats is formally rewarded for his scholarship, some
of which
revolves around him translating Virgil’s epic,
The Aeneid, from Latin, and he continues working on it when
he is pulled out of school in 1811. With the project, Keats is introduced not just
to the
mechanics of translating of classical work, but in the process he evaluatively examines
what
he translates, thus developing his own critical tastes and ideas; Cowden Clarke recalls that Keats, barely a teenager, actually
finds flaws in Virgil’s narrative structure! Importantly, Keats’s ability and desire
to study
is set at Enfield; more than once, years later, when Keats is utterly determined to
become an
enduring poet, he mentions that his progress will require deliberate study, what he
will call
the drinking in of Knowledge,
which can only be gained through application study and
thought
(letters, 24 April 1818).
The school takes copies of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, an independent, progressive, and controversial newspaper formative in Keats’s career in ways that Keats, as a schoolboy, could hardly have imagined: his first published poem—O Solitude—will be in The Examiner (May 1816); and Hunt, as its editor, is central to Keats’s working out of his initial poetic direction—for better and then for worse—but, more importantly, in connecting Keats with a wide network of artists, poets, writers, publishers, and critics. This network is a crucial component of Keats’s poetic progress.
Clarke, encourages and directs Keats’s early poetic tastes (and seems to have encouraged and supervised Keats’s translation of The Aeneid), and they are close friends up until 1817. It is Clarke, in fact, who introduces Keats to Hunt in October 1816, thus, as mentioned, immediately connecting Keats with an important faction of London’s intellectual and artistic network. Clarke’s interest in Keats at his father’s school, along with Clarke later engineering Keats’s meeting with Hunt, are the two early key moments in setting Keats’s direction as a poet. And so the story of Keats’s poetic progress has its origin at Enfield School, which, via Clarke, leads him into a remarkable faction of London’s literary society—publishers, journalists, poets, artists, writers, and other professionals. [Here is a graph of Keats’s social network; you can see how important Clarke and Hunt are as a hubs.]
Keats’s September 1816 epistle to Clarke expresses Keats’s somewhat immature desires
to be an enduring poet, but it also thanks Clarke for first teaching him all the sweets of song
(53). At this point, these aspirations are both insecure and a little pretentious,
which, given Keats’s age and experience, is to be expected: that is, Keats is nowhere
close to finding anything like a relatively mature poetic voice—one that is less concerned
with fame and poetic affectation and more concerned with capturing something universally
deep, clear, and original.
Clarke’s Academy is also significant inasmuch as it may be the one continuous, predictable part of Keats’s life between 1803 and 1811, the period during which his father dies (1804), his mother quickly remarries badly (1804), he moves to live with maternal grandparents (1804), his maternal grandfather passes away (1805), he moves again and his mother dies (1810)—and his access to family finances (his inheritance money) becomes blurred, as does his future direction. There is family money to sponsor his medical training and to give him time to become a poetry. But how much money is there, where is the money, and when can Keats get it?
*My sincere thanks to Leonard Will and Dave Cockle of the Enfield Society for images
and
information about the school and its location. Something about the building: According
to the
Victoria & Albert Museum, the frontage of the school-house was based on designs by
Sir
Christopher Wren (1632-1723): The station was demolished in 1872; the façade however was
saved, and originally purchased for the Structural Collection of the Science Museum,
then
part of the South Kensington Museum […] The acquisition of the façade is recorded
in a
contemporary publication about Enfield by Edward Ford. He noted: …it was taken down
brick
by brick, with the greatest care, all being numbered and packed in boxes of sawdust
for
carriage. Nothing could exceed the beauty of the workmanship, the bricks having been
ground
down to a perfect face, and joined with bee-wax and rosin, nor mortar or lime being
used. In
this manner the whole front has been first built in a solid block, the circular-headed
niches, with their carved cherubs and festoons of fruit and foliage, being afterwards
cut
out with the chisel.
The building also came to be known as THE OLD HOUSE.
