ABSTRACT
Henry Stephens, Keats’s flatmate while both were medical students, had featured in Monckton Milnes’s compilation biography. The surgeon Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson was primarily motivated to write an account of Keats by the publication of Buxton Forman’s edition of The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats in 1883. Suddenly, on reading Forman’s account, Richardson must have realised the importance of the man whom his old friend Stephens was always mentioning. The impact of Forman’s work is evident in Richardson’s substantial inclusion of Keats’s love life, and in the specific naming of Fanny Brawne. Stephens’s simultaneous apparent indifference and underlying obsession about Keats come through in Richardson’s rather curious account. On the one hand, Richardson argues perceptively that Keats’s fame as a poet was largely dependent upon his early death and that, without his death and the notorious reviews, he would have been read as a poet no different from many other poets.
