page_title: Charles Armitage Brown
section_title: Friendship with John Keats
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Armitage Brown / Friendship with John Keats
caption_attribution_description: English: Sihouette of Keats by Charles A. Brown (1819)
context_page_description: Charles Armitage Brown was a close friend of the poet John Keats, as well as being a friend of artist Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor and Edward John Trelawny. He was the father of Charles Brown, a pioneer and politician of New Plymouth, New Zealand.
context_section_description: Brown is best known for his close friendship with the poet John Keats. When Charles Brown first met Keats in the late summer of 1817, Keats was twenty-one, and Brown thirty.
  Shortly after their meeting, Keats and Brown were planning to see Scotland together. Their famous tour was described in their letters and in “Walks in the North”. In 1818, after Keats's brother died of tuberculosis or consumption as it was called in his day, Keats moved into Brown’s half of Wentworth Place, taking the front parlour, where he lived for the next seventeen months. 
  During this time Brown collaborated with Keats on a play, Otho the Great, which was not staged until the 1950s.
  Around 1890 Brown's son, Charles (Carlino) Brown said that Brown married Abigail O'Donohue in a Roman Catholic ceremony in Ireland in August 1819, after Brown had left Keats at Winchester. Most biographers do not appear to believe that the marriage took place and feel that Carlino's story was motivated by a desire to cover up his illegitimacy, due to the social stigma it would cause Carlino as a leading citizen of New Plymouth. Also there is evidence that Brown was in Chichester while Keats was in Winchester.
  After a severe haemorrhage in February 1820, Keats developed tuberculosis and Brown took care of him. This included handling all his affairs, paying his bills, writing his letters, even lending him money and standing as surety for a loan to him. Although Keats appeared to recover from the initial attack and the medical advice was that his lungs were sound, Keats's health fluctuated from that time on, gradually deteriorating.
  On medical advice that he could not survive the cold of another English winter, Keats travelled to Rome, Italy on 17 September 1820. Although Keats had wanted Brown to accompany him, Brown had not returned from a holiday in Scotland by the date of Keats's departure and so, on just over three-day's notice, the artist Joseph Severn agreed to accompany Keats. Ironically (and unknown to them at the time), Brown's and Keats's ships were both moored at Gravesend on the same night as Brown returned to London and Keats departed to Italy.
  Brown remained at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, London during Keats's final illness, writing and receiving letters from both Keats and Severn. He shared some of the contents of those letters with Keats's fiancee Fanny Brawne, but did not disclose any information that he thought might upset her too much. Severn nursed Keats through his final illness until the poet's death in Rome on 23 February 1821.
caption: Silhouette of Keats by Charles Brown (1819), given to Keats's sister
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