Joseph Severn, A Life

The Rewards of Friendship

Sue Brown

432 pages | Numerous black-and-white in-text illustrations and plates | 234x156mm

978-0-19-956502-3 | Hardback | 08 October 2009

Price: £36.00 £18.00

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Fills a longstanding and important gap in the knowledge of Keats and his circle
Provides new information about Keats's death - one of the iconic events in English literary history
Gives the first full assessment of Severn's artistic and diplomatic career
Includes a rare description, with new information, of the nineteenth-century British community in Rome
Supplemented with 30 illustrations - 12 of previously unpublished material, including an unknown sketch of Keats and the earliest portrait of Gladstone

This biography of Joseph Severn (1793-1879), the best known but most controversial of Keats's friends, is based on a mass of newly discovered information, much of it still in private hands. Severn accompanied the dying Keats to Italy, nursed him in Rome and reported on his last weeks there in a famous series of moving letters. After Keats's death in relative obscurity, Severn pressed hard for an early biography and a more fitting memorial in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

In the nineteenth century Severn's friendship with Keats was seen as a model of devoted masculine companionship and he was reburied by popular acclaim next to Keats in 1882. In the twentieth century, by contrast, he was denigrated as an unreliable, self-promoting witness. Sue Brown's book fills a major gap in studies of Keats and his circle. It reassesses Severn's character, friendship with Keats, and influence on the posthumous development of the poet's fame and provides new information on Keats's death.

The significance of Severn's artistic career has previously been downplayed. This book offers the first full assessment of his work and of his turbulent spell as British Consul in Rome from 1860 to 1871. Keats was not Severn's only famous friend. For most of his adult life Severn was at the heart of the large, lively British community in Rome welcoming amongst others Gladstone, who became his most important patron, Ruskin, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Turner, Samuel Palmer, David Wilkie, and many more. He maintained long friendships with Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Charles Eastlake, Richard Monckton Milnes, amongst others, and enjoyed a rich family life.

Readership: Readers with an interest in Keats; art historians; Italophiles; students and scholars of the Romantic period as well as the interested general reader.

Joseph Severn, A Life

The Rewards of Friendship

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