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Four Letters from George Keats

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Madeleine B. Stern
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Extract

The writer of the following letters was George Keats, the brother of the poet. He was born on February 28, 1797, the son of Thomas and Frances (Jennings) Keats. At an early age he had been left an orphan with his two brothers, Thomas and John, and had been placed at a private boarding school in Enfield. After leaving school George worked for a short while in the counting-room of his guardian, Richard Abbey. After a quarrel with Hodgkinson, the junior partner, he left and at the end of May, 1818, married Georgiana Augusta Wylie. At the age of twenty-one he journeyed with her to America, planning to reside in Morris Birkbeck's settlement. Keats travelled by horse and carriage from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and thence descended the Ohio in a keelboat. For several months the poet's brother resided at the home of Audubon, the naturalist, in Henderson, Kentucky, where he lost his money in a boat speculation. Keats finally became managing partner in a flour and saw-mill concern in which he accumulated a fortune, and settled as a merchant in Louisville. There, with the exception of a few journeys, he remained until his death on December 24, 1841.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1941 , pp. 207 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

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References

Note 1 in page 207 The principal facts of George Keats' life may be found in James Freeman Clarke, Memorial and Biographical Sketches (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), 221–229 and in Amy Lowell, John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 2 vols.

Note 2 in page 207 The principal facts of James Freeman Clarke's life may be found in James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, edited by Edward Everett Hale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891).

Note 3 in page 208 Clarke, Autobiography, p. 68.

Note 4 in page 208 Clarke, Memorial, pp. 221–222.

Note 5 in page 208 Clarke, Autobiography, p. 107.

Note 6 in page 208 Ibid., p. 121.

Note 7 in page 208 Clarke, Memorial, p. 228.

Note 8 in page 209 Clarke had made a journey to Meadville in August, 1839, and at that time married Anna Huidekoper of that town. He returned to Louisville a few weeks later with his wife. Clarke, Autobiography, p. 132.

Note 9 in page 209 Mrs. Anna Huidekoper Clarke.

Note 10 in page 209 “In 1840 the Whigs made another clean sweep, state and national and . . . municipal.” J. Stoddard Johnston, Memorial History of Louisville (Chicago: American Biographical Publishing Company, 1896) i, 130.

Note 11 in page 209 William J. Graves, the Whig Congressman from Henry, who, in February, 1838, had slain Jonathan Cilley, Hawthorne's classmate, in a political duel. Graves was Congressman from the Louisville district 1835–41.

Note 12 in page 209 James Guthrie, President of the Bank of Kentucky for one month in 1840, Democratic leader and member of the Legislature in 1827–8–9; elected Councilman in 1839.

Note 13 in page 209 Possibly an error. James Rudd was elected Councilman in 1839.

Note 14 in page 209 Rezin E. Butler was Councilman in 1840.

Note 15 in page 209 Mr. Henry Huidekoper of Meadville, Clarke's father-in-law. “Mr. Clarke . . . formed that acquaintance with the family of Mr. Huidekoper, of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which added so much to the happiness of his after-life.” J. Clarke, Autobiography, p. 95.

Note 16 in page 210 Clarke left Louisville on June 16, 1840. He had never been installed as minister of the Louisville church, but had simply accepted the invitation, renewed each year, to be its minister; he declined the invitation which had been proffered for the eighth time. Clarke, Autobiography, p. 98.

Note 17 in page 210 See Clarke's letter to A. H., February 3, 1839: “I am by no means a popular preacher in this place, nor ever shall be.” Ibid., p. 126. See also Clarke's letter to A.H., March 18, 1839, in which he states that the society has increased but slowly and that other men had excited a greater interest in the public. Ibid., p. 129.

Note 18 in page 210 The name, variously spelled as Heywood, Hayward, and Heyward, is that of Reverend John H. Heywood, for many years the minister in the Unitarian Church in Louisville, and a good friend of Mr. Clarke.

Note 19 in page 210 George Keats' daughter.

Note 20 in page 210 Reverberations of the Panic of 1837 and the Great Fire in Louisville in 1839.

Note 21 in page 210 Henry iv, Part 1, iii. 1. 54–56. George Keats' quotations of Shakespeare substantiate Clarke's remark about his friend: “He was well versed in English literature, especially in that of the Elizabethan period . . .” James F. Clarke, Memorial, p. 222.

Note 22 in page 210 Ellen Fuller, Margaret Fuller's younger sister, went out West where she met her future husband, Ellery Channing.

Note 23 in page 211 Orestes Brownson's article, “The Labouring Classes,” appeared in the Boston Quarterly Review, July, 1840. Huidekoper's review appeared in the Western Messenger, November, 1840.

Note 24 in page 211 Huidekoper's review of “Brownson on the Laboring Classes,” Western Messenger, viii, no. 7 (November, 1840), 316.

Note 25 in page 211 The transcendental journal (1840–44) edited at first by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. The second number appeared in October, 1840.

Note 26 in page 211 From the article, “The Art of Life—The Scholar's Calling,” by F. H. Hedge, in the Dial, October, 1840.

Note 27 in page 211 Mrs. Anna Huidekoper Clarke.

Note 28 in page 211 Mr. Henry Huidekoper of Meadville, Pennsylvania.

Note 29 in page 211 Clarke's son Herman, who died in 1849.

Note 30 in page 212 Dr. Edward Jarvis of Louisvillc, a member of Clarke's congregation. J. Stoddard Johnston, Memorial History of Louisville, ii, 253.

Note 31 in page 212 “In 1840 there were fourteen schools, exclusive of Louisville College . . . The assistant teachers received $400.” J. Stoddard Johnston, Memorial History of Louisville, i, 236. In one of these schools Ellen might have taught. George Keats was one of the City Council which, on May 25, 1840, adopted an ordinance abolishing fees for tuition.

Note 32 in page 213 The reference maybe to “Glimmerings” in the Dial, January, 1841. The philosophy expressed in the passage is obviously transcendental.

Note 33 in page 213 The reference may be to “Margaret” (Fuller), i.e., the pearl.

Note 34 in page 213 Richard Henry Dana, Sr., of Cambridge.

Note 35 in page 214 Sarah Freeman Clarke, a friend of Margaret Fuller, and a painter of some note.

Note 36 in page 214 Mr. Henry Huidekoper.

Note 37 in page 214 Herman.

Note 38 in page 215 Although P. H. Conant was a member of Clarke's congregation in Louisville, this may be an error for Reverend A. H. Conant, who began life as a farmer in Illinois, and was moved to devote his life to the ministry after he had read a copy of the Western Messenger in Chicago. Clarke left Meadville on January 12, 1841, and arrived in Boston on January 18. Hence the letter had to be readdressed.

Note 39 in page 215 The reference is to Robert J. Breckenridge who started life as a lawyer and became a Presbyterian minister. He was accounted “the best stump-speaker in Kentucky,” and was an ardent anti-slavery reformer. He preached in Louisville in 1836. James Freeman Clarke, Memorial, pp. 233 ff.

Note 40 in page 215 The reference is to Dr. James Jackson of Boston, the first physician of the Massachusetts General Hospital, who has been termed a “scientific unitarian.” George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America, A History of Its Orgin and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902), p. 427.

Note 41 in page 216 The Western Messenger, a monthly magazine edited in Louisville by James Freeman Clarke from April, 1836 to October, 1839. After that date it was edited by Reverend William H. Channing. The journal was established in Cincinnati in 1835 “to set forth and defend Unitarian views of Christianity.” Clarence Gohdes, “The Western Messenger and the Dial,” Studies in Philology, xxvi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 67–84.

Note 42 in page 216 Adin Ballou, “Plan of the Fraternal Community,” Western Messenger, viii, no. 12 (April, 1841), 553–560.

Note 43 in page 216 Adin Ballou, op. cit., p. 560.

Note 44 in page 216 Cf. Clarke's remark concerning George Keats: “I seldom knew him to acquiesce in the thought of another.” James Freeman Clarke, Memorial, pp. 221–222.

Note 45 in page 217 Philip Speed.

Note 46 in page 217 Judge John Speed had a large farm, Farmington, about six miles out of town. He was associate judge in a district court, and was a slaveholder who did not believe in slavery. His son Joshua became Attorney General under Lincoln. Another son, Philip, became Emma Keats' husband.

Note 47 in page 217 The marriage of Emma Keats and Philip Speed.

Note 48 in page 217 Mrs. Margaret Crane Fuller, mother of Margaret Fuller.

Note 49 in page 217 Margaret Fuller (1810–50), Ellen's distinguished sister, and editor of the Dial.

Note 50 in page 217 George Keats had eight children, two sons and six daughters. The allusion is obviously to one of the latter.

Note 51 in page 217 George Keats' wife, Georgiana Augusta Wylie, the daughter of a British Colonel, who married Keats at the age of sixteen and came with him to America. James Freeman Clarke, Memorial, p. 224.

Note 52 in page 218 Possibly the First Series of Essays which appeared in 1841, or Nature (1836), the Transcendental Bible.