Luisana Martinez

Diana Reinoso

Early Years, 1795-1814

Chapter 1

John Keats was the first-born son of Thomas and Frances Keats. It is said that where and when John Keats was born is uncertain. According to the baptism register at St Botolph’s Keats was born on “Saturday, 31 October 1795”  (Roe 10). However others say it was on “the full moon on the 29^th” (Roe 10). Keats began to gain an interest in poetry at a very young age. Mrs. Grafty, who was the Keats’s next door neighbor and knew the family pretty well said that instead of John answering questions directly when asked, he would fool around and say a word that rhymed with the last word of that question, “a six-year old’s delight at dodging a question suddenly seemed like a promise of great things to come.” (Roe 12). Keats childhood was a very interesting one. Although he was gaining experience and learning many interesting things, he was also experiencing many tragedies/ At the age of 3 Keats was exposed to something not all 3 year olds experience. His family dealt with bankruptcy. “In the events of these critical months of 1798 and afterwards, perhaps we can find further reasons why the luxurious feasts in Lamia, The Fall of Hyperio and The Eve of St Agnes were reminders of a formative loss of childhood security” (Roe 14).

Chapter 2

At the age of 8 years old Keats attended the Clarkes Academy. Through the first years at school Keats showed no interest in his studies. He would fight in the school yard, played cricket, swam in the pond, and would venture off to the mysterious ‘Moat’ (Roe 23). During his 7 years at the school, he became very familiar with the school. Clarkes Academy helped Keats “form the landscape of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘To Autumn’ “ (Roe 20). In 1804 Thomas Keats, John’s father, visited him at school. This day was memorable to Keats because he felt as though maybe if his father had not visited he would’ve been alive. It is said that the farewell’s in his later poems and letters touch upon the last time him and his father saw each other (Roe 24) in September of 1804 John and George started school again, this time they looked out for one another. These were the years where his beauty, passion, and unpredictability matched his mothers, but his dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and muscular build matched his fathers. Keats’s grandfather, John Jennings was an important person in his life as he provided for him when his mother remarried William Rawlings. His grandfather disapproved of him as he was this violent and ungovernable child who because of past experiences left him with insecurities. Being abandoned by his mom made him this person. But John Jennings didn’t approve of him because from being a wealthy prosperous man he quickly became a penniless man. Therefore, Jennings was afraid Rawlings might have wanted to take advantage of his prosperity. At seventy-four John Jennings was ailing. Thus, feeling his strength was fading away in February of 1805 he decided to draw his will. His intentions where clear. His aim was to benefit his immediate family; Alice Jennings, Midgley John Jennings and Charles Danvers, his executors. Ensuring his estate would not be squandered at the Swan and Hoop, or even pass to any family Frances and Rawlings might have (Roe 25).

Chapter 3

Midgley John Jennings had vexations. In the ten years since Camperdown he had served dutifully on the home front (Roe 36). Nevertheless, he fell ill in the late 1807 and went home for a four-month leave. But although it did him well his physician noted that his cough had blood stains in them, which reduced him. Yet he didn’t stop being successful, in July he was promoted captain and in August he received his capital from Chancery.  Being the last thing he achieved. In November of 1808 he died with only thirty-one years without reconciling with his sister, and leaving a widowed and four children with his Chancery legacy. Not including that the capital had been given to him for four months, and his sister Frances realizing this already attempted to claim upon it. But it was rejected to her as it was given to the Keats children, their Jennings cousins and their mother. Keats’s uncles’ death in November devastated him as he had lost the hero he might have followed into a military career (Roe 37). However, after Keats mother was absence for five-years she returned, reconciling with her sister Alice and moving into her house, ailing with a rheumatism who she was dosing it off with brandy and opium. To which now Keats mother return, encouraged him to rise to a challenge unlike anything he had ever faced in the playground. From there on he was an orderly scholar. He read steadily along the library shelves as if pacing himself to go the distance, where he discovered and gained his passion for all these different sorts of books that helped him loved and find his own type of style, and voice when he wrote. Keats’s friend Joseph Severn lived long enough to understand how the modern arcadian world Keats’s had created from Lempriere’s dictionary formed the groundwork of English poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, the remarkable representations of antiquity came from Keats. In 1809, he won one school’s half-yearly prizes where he devoted every hour to study, and where it was the start of all the achievements he had coming. Frankly his mother’s health did not improve, he stayed besides her caring for her. But on January of 1810, Keats’s had to return to school leaving his mother on the care of her mother Alice Jennings and Hammond where a month later at thirty-five she died. When Keats heard his mother died he withdrew into a nook under the master’s desk. For Keats’s this was harsh as between the ages of seven and fourteen he had lost six people (Roe 40). After his mother death Cowden Clarke suggested that he translated some of “The Aeneid” as a distraction from grief, which definitely occupy him. However, as Clarke acknowledged the importance of this translation for him the manuscript has disappeared. They say there is good reason to consider it Keats’s first major literacy achievement (Roe 42). Moreover, in August 1810 Hammond charged Keats’s two hundred for his five-year apprenticeship. As he wanted to have an opportunity to find the cure for the disease that killed his mother. Without adding the idea that it will lead him to a respectable job with a good income. But this got ugly for Keats’s dream of becoming a doctor as he was treated as servant by Hammond. To him an apprentice was expected to do his master’s bidding and, while Thomas Bayly regarded Crosse almost an equal Keats’s was not. Furthermore, he had great people that looked after him who did cared for him one of them being Cowden Clarke he was the one that got him out. He hinted Richard Monckon Milnes that all was not right with Keats’s apprenticeship, so Clarke took him out of that situation and registered him at a Guy’s organization in October 1815 where they were opportunities for informal medical training that might explained   Keats’s remarkable rapid progress. Later on, Hammond became ill and died in 1817. Where Keats’s by then was conscientious up to a point, his mind and energies were principally devoted to his passion for reading, and his Aeneid translation, which was what he overall became, a full-time writer/poet, as he was open to many things.