15 April 1804: Keats’s Father Dies in a Riding Accident
City Road, near Bunhill Fields Cemetery, London


Where, at 1:00 am, Keats’s father, Thomas Keats, aged 31, is fatally injured in a riding accident, along City Road and close to Bunhill Fields, likely hitting the main gate to Bunhill Fields cemetery.* It appears the right side of his head is the main point of impact. He dies hours later. He had been visiting his sons at school. There is some suggestion that Thomas may have been drinking, but it appears the accident is result of his horse slipping on the pavement or stones. Keats is eight years old.
The death of Keats’s father greatly complicates his family life. His mother, Frances, remarries very quickly (in just over two months) and unsuccessfully (to a dubious but minor-league fortune hunter, it seems). The Keats children go to live with their maternal grandparents in Edmonton; their mother joins them in a few years. Frances may have experienced some personal problems during those few years.


Point of interest: Bunhill Fields is where William Blake, John Bunyan, and Daniel Defoe are buried. The cemetery was closed to further burials in 1860.
1804: Kant dies; Joseph Priestly dies; Benjamin Disraeli born; Nathaniel Hawthorne born; William Blake acquitted for sedition; William Wordsworth completes his Intimations Ode; Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell first performed under the direction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Napoleon proclaimed Emperor; Spain declares war on the UK; the famous Hammersmith Ghost murder case; The Lewis and Clark Expedition begins; William Congreve develops of solid-fuel rocket as an artillery weapon; German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolates morphine from opium.
