‘From his Fellow-countryman’: Keats's Letters Transcribed and Annotated by Benjamin Robert Haydon

Abstract

This essay examines Benjamin Robert Haydon's neglected transcripts of John Keats's letters (1845–46). Haydon copied these letters to aid the writing of Richard Monckton Milnes's first biography of the poet, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848). For reasons unknown, however, subsequent critics and scholars have consigned the transcript copies to oblivion without making available their full text (some of which is omitted in Milnes's Life). In addition to the transcripts themselves, Haydon's annotations offer a new insight into his close relationship with Keats. The material will be of interest to many Keats scholars, especially those who wish to explore the complexities of his reception in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, as well as the friendship between the poet and the painter.