Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

Select Chronology: 1821

• Jan-Feb: in Rome; desperately ill; Severn reports, His stomach is ruined and the state of his mind the worst possible one in his condition; Severn: his suffering now is beyond description; Keats desires a bottle of opium to kill himself; Severn: Keats is desiring his death with dreadful earnestness
• Feb: in Rome; I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me—O for this quiet—it will be my first; Keats dies, 23 February, 11 pm; buried the morning of 26 February
• 1821: Percy Shelley publishes Adonais (July); De Quincey publishes Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (anonymously; then with his name, 1822); Hazlitt’s Table-Talk; born: Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Flaubert; death of: Napoleon, Queen Caroline, and Polidori (Byron’s physician); Guardian newspaper founded; gold standard restored by Bank of England; Missouri becomes 24th US state; a number of central American countries declare independence from Spain; Greek revolution begins; Russia claims sovereignty over present-day Alaska; first modern nature reserve established (by Charles Waterton, West Yorkshire); two-man rubber masticator (for recycling rubber) invented (London, by Thomas Handcock)