ABSTRACT
Members of the Keats circle and their descendents talked about Charles Brown’s memoir of Keats for over a century before it was finally published in 1937 with its original deletions and amendations. The flatness of Brown’s account could have been the product of grief. Repeatedly he mentions the difficulty or even the ‘pain’ of the task of writing. Sharing Keats’s thoughts upon his poetry and his love, it was, according to Brown, an ‘intimate and unreserved friendship’ and one which, when recalled, overwhelmed articulacy with intense feeling. Brown, who altered his name to the more elaborate Armitage Brown after Keats’s death, seems therefore to have been a controversial figure, polarising the Keats circle in their opinion of him. The vividness of Brown’s description of Keats studying his blood on the bedsheets by candlelight has captured the popular imagination, and is now commemorated at the Keats House museum in Hampstead, in their permanent recreated exhibition of Keats’s bed and bedroom.
