ABSTRACT
Severn was to be forever associated with Keats’s last days and with his death. As Shelley remarked in his myth-making preface to Adonais, Severn’s ‘conduct’ during Keats’s lingering death turned out to be a ‘noble augury of the success of his future career’. Accounts of his first meeting with Keats vary. Severn himself referred to a first meeting in 1813, but thought that Keats was already working at Guy’s Hospital at the time. It seems therefore more likely that he first met Keats early in 1816, through William Haslam, one of Keats’s schoolfriends, and Keats’s brother George. Severn seems to have had a prescience about fame for both himself and Keats, something which has not endeared him to subsequent biographers. Severn’s interest in artistic fame is evident in an article. The article constitutes the first substantial engagement with the concept of what Sidney Colvin calls Keats’s ‘after-fame’.
