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ABSTRACT
Digital technologies offer a quick and convenient method of communicating across distance, but there are unique benefits to engaging in forms of delayed communication. Long-distance letter writing in the early nineteenth century was often a slow business, and one that Romantic poet, John Keats, capitalised on. In particular, the letter provided Keats with a means of managing the reality of his circumstances when he was faced with inexorable loss and tragedy. In the period of time leading up to the death of his brother, Tom, in 1818, Keats exploited the specific cultures and forms of letter writing to generate a unique consolation for himself and his family members; as he confronted the reality of his own death two years later, the letter played a similarly crucial role in managing his feelings of loss and grief. Letter writing, during these difficult periods, presented Keats with a unique dichotomy: the letter kept him grounded in the cruel reality of his situation while often functioning as a singularly effective means of managing it. How the specific cultures of letter writing and disease intersect, and how Keats’s imaginative epistolary narratives coalesce with the increasingly urgent facts of consumption and death, will be examined here.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, “Introduction,” in To Romanticism and the Letter, ed. Callaghan and Howe (London: Palgrave, 2020) pp. 1–14; (p. 5–6).
2. Callaghan and Howe, “Introduction,” to Romanticism and the Letter, pp. 1–14 (p. 14).
3. Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty, and Karen Harvey, “Introduction,” in Letters and the Body, 1700–1830, Writing and Embodiment, ed. Goldsmith, Haggerty, and Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2023), 1–13 (p. 3).
4. Joseph Severn to John Taylor, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) vol. 2, pp. 377–8 (All further quotations from Keats will be from this edition, with volume and page numbers following in parentheses).
5. Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life (Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2013), 392.
6. Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Hampshire: Macmillan, 2007), 44.
7. Lawlor, 1–2.
8. Ibid. 69.
9. Ibid. 36.
10. Severn to John Taylor, The Letters of John Keats 2, p. 378.
11. Ibid.
12. Lawlor, p. 39.
13. Severn seems to have had in mind the famous, if disputed, death bed scene of Joseph Addison, whose final wish was to demonstrate “‘in what peace a Christian can die’” (Joseph Addison quoted in Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009), 103–4). His record of Keats’s exclamations (‘O! I can feel the cold earth upon me’, ‘O for this quiet’) echoes the weeping and sighing of Richardson’s Clarissa as she lies on her deathbed: ‘Oh Death!’; ‘Oh dear, dear gentlemen’; ‘Oh come – blessed Lord’ (Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 2004), 1361–2). There are parallels between Keats’s last moments, as Severn portrays them, and Harley’s final speech from Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling: ‘To meet death as becomes a man, is a privilege bestowed on few.—I would endeavour to make it mine;— nor do I think that I can ever be better prepared for it than now’ (Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 96).
14. While nursing Keats, on 22 February 1821, Severn wrote to William Haslam: ‘O! how anxious I am to hear from you – none of yours has come – but in answer to mine from Naples – I have nothing to break this dreadful solitude – but Letters (LJK, 2, p. 375). Byron, too, nods towards the inadequacy of the postal service in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse: ‘I believe the best way is to write frequently and briefly – both on account of weight—& the chance of letters reaching their destination’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1980–94) vol. 5, p. 79).
15. Sections from these paragraphs are reprinted from Rosie Whitcombe, ‘Connection, Consolation, and the Power of Distance in the Letters of John Keats’, The Keats-Shelley Review, vol. 35 (2021) pp. 86-92 (p. 89). Copyright © The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.
16. Roe, 230.
17. According to the OED, a ‘damper’ is a generalised term that refers to ‘something that damps or depresses the spirits’. Keats’s ‘rather a damper’ is a colloquial turn of phrase used to offset the seriousness of Tom’s situation.
18. David Luke, “Keats’s Notes from Underground ‘To J. H. Reynolds’,” Studies in English Literature 19 (1979): 661–72 (p. 661).
19. George Keats to John Keats, The Letters of John Keats 1, p. 247.
20. Roe, 264.
21. Jennifer Davis Michael, “Pectoriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of Keats,” European Romantic Review 6 (1995): 38–56 (p. 43).
22. Jonathan Mulrooney, “Keats’s Avatar,” European Romantic Review 22 (2011): 313–21 (p. 313).
23. Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, The Letters of John Keats 1, p. 389.
24. Michael O’Neill, “Keats’s Poetry: ‘The Reading of an Ever-Changing Tale’,” in Keats: Bicentenary Readings, ed. Michael O’Neill (Edinburgh: EUP, 1997), 102–28 (pp. 104–5).
25. Keats was made to suffer inadvertently under the hands of Clark, whose treatments, including blood-letting and a ‘starvation diet of an anchovy with a morsel of bread a day’ (Roe, 392), were ‘useless and did far more harm than good’ (Roe, 389).
26. As Roe notes, Dr Clarke encouraged Keats to take mild exercise once he arrived at Rome, advising him ‘to hire a horse and ride whenever the weather was favourable’ (Roe, 389).
27. Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Penguin, 1968), 423.
28. J. R. Watson, “Keats and Silence,” in Keats: Bicentenary Readings, 71–87 (p. 86).
29. Jack Stillinger, “Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 (1997): 545–66 (p. 560).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rosie Whitcombe
Dr Rosie Whitcombe is a writer and academic. She is currently an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield where she is helping to prepare The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe for publication. She studied for her PhD at Birmingham City University and she is developing her thesis, ‘John Keats and the Literary Letter’, into her first monograph. Her essay, ‘Connection, Consolation, and the Power of Distance in the Letters of John Keats’, won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Essay Prize. She co-runs an educational YouTube channel, ‘Books ‘n’ Cats’, that seeks to disseminate academic literary content to a wider audience.