John Keats - Life and Letters (1795-1821)

This is the father and the almost universal source, whether acknowledged or not, of all subsequent biographies of that heroic personality so inaptly referred to as 'poor Keats.' Richard Monckton Milnes, who afterwards became Lord Houghton, was only a boy of eleven when Keats died and did not frequent the same circles as the poet, but when he was on a visit to Walter Savage Landor, Houghton met with Charles Browne, who had been an intimate friend of Keats in his Hampstead days. Mr Browne had, himself, planned a biography of Keats but abandoned it when he determined to emigrate to New Zealand. His accumulated material he handed over to Houghton, but the latter spent eight years collecting further material, documentary and by the way of personal recollections and eye-witnesses, and the book, as it finally appeared, is substantially a portrait of Keats as he appeared to his contemporaries, authenticated by a large collection of the poet's original letters and literary notes,. The present edition has a note on the letters by Lewis Gibbs.