UNIV

OF

WICH

The register of the church reads as follows:

Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings

Both of this Parish, were married in this Church by Banns this Ninth day of October in the year 1794.

By me, J. Downes, Curate.

This marriage was [Thomas Keats. solemnized between us Frances Jennings.

In the presence of John Brough

Mary Sut

Who John Brough and Mary Sut were, no one knows. They appear and disappear with their signatures. Their presence, and the absence of Mr. and Mrs. Jennings, gives some colour to the disapproval theory, but subsequent occurrences do not seem to bear it out. At any rate, the young couple returned to the Swan and Hoop, and there, one year later, their first son, John Keats, was born.

There is some doubt as to whether October twenty-ninth or October thirty-first was his birthday. Everyone connected with Keats seems to have believed that he was born on October twenty-ninth, but in the baptismal register at St. Botolph's Church, Bishopsgate, where he was christened on December eighteenth, 1795, is a marginal note, said to be in the handwriting of the rector, Dr. Conybeare, stating that he was born on October thirty-first. This appears to me the flimsiest evidence, as the rector could know nothing of the matter except what he was told and may very possibly have mistaken what was said.

Keats is supposed to have been a seven months child, but he seems to have suffered from none of the disabilities which usually hamper such children. For sixteen months, John remained the only child; but on February twentyeighth, 1797, another son, George, was born; and on November eighteenth, 1799, still another, who was named Thomas after his father. Since these two brothers play a very large part in Keats's life, it is important to remember

their relative ages. A fourth son, Edward, born in 1801, died in infancy, and the only girl, Frances Mary, did not arrive upon the scene until June, 1803.

Of Keats's ancestry, we know next to nothing. The name is a fairly common one in England under various spellings, but all attempts hitherto made through baptismal registers, etc., to trace the origin of Thomas Keats, John's father, have failed. Sir Sidney Colvin says that, according to his information, Thomas Keats was born in 1768, but as he does not reveal the source from which he obtains this fact, we are almost as much in the dark as ever. The most plausible suggestion is that communicated by Mr. Thomas Hardy to Sir Sidney Colvin, and again mentioned in a letter to me from Mrs. Hardy. Mrs. Hardy's letter is a little fuller in detail than Sir Sidney's account, and the detail gives the matter a more likely possibility. Mrs. Hardy says that in her husband's youth "there was a family named Keats living two or three miles from here [Dorchester], who, Mr. Hardy was told by his father, was a branch of the family of the name living in the direction of Lulworth, where John Keats is assumed to have landed on his way to Rome (it being the only spot on this coast answering to the description). They kept horses, being what is called 'hauliers,' and did also a little farming. They were in feature singularly like the poet, and were quick-tempered as he is said to have been, one of them being nicknamed 'light-a-fire' on that account. All this is very vague, and may mean nothing, the only arresting point in it considering that they were of the same name, being the facial likeness, which my husband says was very strong. He knew two or three of these Keatses." An additional weight given to this suggestion is Severn's remark that, when he and Keats visited the spot identified as Lulworth in one of the many irritating delays to which winddriven vessels were so often subjected and which tormented the passengers on the "Maria Crowther" for two

weeks after sailing from Gravesend, Keats "was in a part that he already knew." We are not aware that Keats was ever in the neighbourhood, for Sir Sidney's idea that he may have broken the homeward journey from Teignmouth at Dorchester, and visited Lulworth Cove then, breaks down in face of an unpublished letter from Tom Keats that I shall quote in due course, in which he says that after leaving Bridport "we travelled a hundred miles in the last two days." This certainly leaves no time for sight-seeing, so that, if Severn be correct in thinking that Keats was familiar with the Lulworth "caves and grottoes," his familiarity must date from a boyhood visit of which we have no record, made perhaps while staying with relations. This is all mere guess-work, of course, but it is the nearest we can approach to a genealogy of the Keats family. Against this, is the statement of Señora Llanos (Fanny Keats) that she remembered hearing as a child that her father came from Cornwall, near Land's End. Again Sir Sidney is my authority, but again he neglects to mention his; so whether Señora Llanos's recollection is down in black and white somewhere, or is merely the product of hearsay remembrance on some one's part, we cannot tell.

The origin of Keats's maternal grandfather is equally to seek. There is an entry of a marriage between a John Jennings and a Catherine Keate at Penryn, Cornwall, in 1770, and Sir Sidney Colvin conjectures that this entry may point to the fact of Jennings and his head man, Thomas Keats, being relatives; but Jennings is a usual patronymic enough in that part of Great Britain, and John is a name of no use at all for purposes of identification wherever English is spoken. What explodes Sir Sidney's conjecture into thin air, however, is the recently discovered knowledge that Mrs. Jennings was a Yorkshire woman.1 The present Keats family believe that Mr. Jennings was more than an ordinary livery-stable keeper. One of the granddaughters 1 Abbey Memoir in Author's Collection.