1819/2019 at Keats House by Georgie Cowan-Turner
Today on the K-SAA Blog we welcome a new contributor. Georgie Cowan-Turner, graduate of UCL and currently working as a Cultural Heritage Trainee at Keats House, reviews what's been going on at the Hampstead museum in this exciting bicentenary period, and gives us a taste of what's to come...
In early March 1819 John Keats wrote to his brother George and his wife Georgiana: ‘I look back upon the last month and find nothing to write about, indeed I do not find one thing particular in it. It's all alike; we keep on breathing’. Fortunately, two hundred years later there is ample to look back on, and to look forward to! Our Keats200 programme is now in full swing. Just recently there have been some memorable events at the house including our launch of Keats200 in December, our special Eve of St. Agnes event and the ever-popular ‘Late Night Keats’ on Valentine’s Day.
On the 1 December 2018 we launched our Keats200 programme, celebrating the 200th anniversary of John Keats moving into Keats House, then known as Wentworth Place. Keats200 is a collaboration with the Keats-Shelley House, the Keats Foundation and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. We will also be liaising with the Keats-Shelley Association of America and other relevant partners.
The opening celebration marked the beginning of a three-year programme in which we will be telling the story of this highly significant and productive period of Keats’s life. On 1 December, we introduced the actor that we have commissioned to play Keats. Each Keats200 event is slightly different to reflect the anniversary of that which it marks. During our launch event the house was open for free, and a series of events took place inside the house and around Hampstead. Events included tracing the footsteps of Keats with staff, volunteers, members of the Keats Foundation, and the public walking with the actors (which also included individuals playing his guardian Richard Abbey and his close friend Charles Brown) from where Keats’s lodgings would have been in Well Walk, down through Hampstead Heath, and on to Wentworth Place. The day included talks from Professor Nicholas Roe, Dr Anna Mercer and Professor Richard Marggraf Turley. Then in 2019, on St. Agnes’ Eve (to escape the ‘bitter chill’!), visitors were again welcomed into the museum free of charge, and then in the afternoon, we held a special reading of the poem (performed by Julia Bird and Mike Sims).
Although there were no major anniversaries to celebrate in February, as not even Keats could find ‘one thing particular in it’ to write about, it was busy at the house and romance was in the air. On Valentine’s Day in 1819 Keats dismissively wrote to George: ‘There is a long fuzz today in the examiner about a young Man who delighted a young woman with a Valentine’. In 2019 there was a ‘fuzz’ - but on Twitter - about the Royal Mail’s romantic post-box which featured quotes from Keats’s love letters. As part of an initiative to encourage people to send letters to their loved ones, four poets were selected, and across the UK four post boxes in an area which they once lived were decorated with their words. If this was not romantic enough, our free afternoon of love poetry and the evening celebration ‘Valentine’s Late Night Keats’ certainly left audiences swooning. As Shakespeare wrote: ‘if music be the food of love, play on’, and so visitors at the special evening on 14 February requested an encore from musicians Neil Mercer and Heidi Carascon. Their performance melted even the coldest heart, especially when they set Mary Shelley’s Stanzas to music.
Keats wrote in February 1819: ‘I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little’. The spring of that year would be an intensely creative period for the poet, and now at Keats House we look forward to some more exciting Keats200 events. Our next bicentenary event will be in April, to mark Fanny Brawne moving into her side of the building, shortly followed by a walk through the Heath with 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge', celebrating Keats and Coleridge’s famous meeting in Hampstead 200 years ago. If April is too long to wait for you, and you are visiting London and Hampstead earlier, then we have a variety of events this March including our monthly Afternoon Poems (free!), our Family Day (also free), and some guided walks (click here for the booking page). We will release the details of our Keats200 events for the spring in the coming weeks but until then here is a taster of what is to come in the words of the man himself, written on the 1 May 1819:
‘O, there is nothing like fine weather, and health, and Books and a fine country and a contented Mind, and Diligent habit of reading and thinking, and an amulet against ennui – and, please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar deep…’
Visit the Keats House website here. You can also follow Keats House on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Get in touch via keatshouse@cityoflondon.gov.uk
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