The Life and Death of John Keats

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in central London to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the oldest of their four surviving children, George, Thomas, Frances Mary and a son was also lost in infancy.  Keats developed an interest in classics and history early in life which would stay with him. The instability of Keats's childhood made him  a volatile character "always in extremes” because of the fighting. However at 13 he began focusing his energy towards reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809. In April 1804, when Keats was eight, his father was killed, fracturing his skull after falling from his horse on a return visit to his school. Thomas died interstate. Frances remarried two months later, but left her new husband soon afterwards, her four children going to live with the children's grandmother, Alice Jennings, in the village of Edmonton.  In March 1810, when Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis leaving the children in the custody of their grandmother who then appointed two guardians to take care of them. That fall, Keats was removed from Clarke's school to apprentice with Thomas Hammond, a surgeon and apothecary, lodging in the attic above the surgery until 1813. Cowden Clarke, who was a close friend of Keats, described this as “the most placid time in Keats's life." Having finished his apprenticeship with Hammond, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy's Hospital and began there in October 1815. Within a month of starting, he was accepted for a dressership position within the hospital, the equivalent of a junior house surgeon. It was a significant promotion marking his distinct talent for medicine, the role coming with increased responsibility and workload. His long and expensive medical training with Hammond and at Guys made his assume this would be his lifelong career, assuring financial security. Strongly drawn by ambition and inspired by fellow poets such as Leigh Hunt and Byron, and begrudged by family financial crises that continued to the end of his life, he suffered chronic periods of depression.

During 1820, Keats displayed serious symptoms of tuberculosis, to the extent that he suffered two lung hemorrhages in the first few days of February. He died on February 23^rd 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be placed under an unnamed tombstone which contained only the words (in pentameter), "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."