John Keats' short and painful life began at the Hoop and Swan by Moorgate where he was the eldest of three boys and a girl.  His father Thomas was a barman who came to manage or even own the pub (now Keats and the Globe for some reason, being nowhere near The Globe).  When Keats was seven he was sent to a school in Enfield, North London. Nine months after he started at the school, John's father came to visit him and on the way home was thrown from his horse.  Thomas Keats's skull was fractured and he died.  John's mother, Frances, remarried almost instantly but it wasn't a success and she was forced to move in with her mother in north London.  She died in March 1810, leaving her fourteen year old son in the charge of Thomas Hammond, an apothecary.  He shared Hammond's lodgings, giving him a sense of continuity and an interest in medicine that would lead John to become a student at Guy's Hospital when he was 18.  He would study there for 5 years, as a dresser (attending in theatre and dressing the patients' wounds after surgery). In 1816 Keats took his apothecary exams, and passed.  He was an avid letter writer (although his handwriting was often more 'doctor' than 'poet'), rapidly developing a friendship with Leigh Hunt, Ben Haydon and others.  He frequently left off 'spouting Shakespeare' to go and attend a surgery.  In that year, Hunt helped him achieve publication with his first poem, and the following year, a collection of his poems were put before the public, to little success. 

During a Scottish summer holiday in 1818 with his friend Charles Brown, Keats developed a cold so severe he could not continue and for the first time began to drop weight.  When he came home, it was to the reality of his brother Tom's full-blown tuberculosis.  Keats nursed Tom, but was probably succumbing to the early stages of TB himself.  Their other brother George had left for America (although he would later return to borrow money from John, who was broke anyway and complained that 'He ought not to have asked,').  Tom died late in 1818 and by that time Keats had started his own slow decline.  He had also started to take laudanum, claiming it eased the tightness in his chest, but it soon became a habit, and one he and Brown fell out over more than once.  The two friends moved to Hampstead, where he met the elusive Miss Fanny Brawne, who would inspire so much of his work.  Keats knew himself to be extreme in nature, and it is almost amusing he chose someone so practical and down-to-earth as Fanny to fall in love with.  She was an incorrigible flirt and not just with John, which tore him up.  He wrote her cruel and often spiteful notes, then others full of contrition.  She seems to have taken them all in her stride and they developed a close relationship which would lead to an engagement.  The convention of the day insisted John raise enough money to provide her with at least somewhere to live before they married, but he wished to devote himself to poetry, and so had to make some money out of writing.  These hopes were almost dashed in 1819 with the publication of Endymion.  It was savaged by the critics and Keats was heartbroken.  Byron sniped at Keats as a 'Cockney' and a 'dirty little blackguard', but he was genuinely sorry for his fellow poet's mauling at the hands of the critics.

Keats' odd appearance was perhaps one of the factors that drove his unbalanced character.  He was of short stature, perhaps no more than five feet tall, and delicately built.  He was painfully aware of a mismatch between his mind and his body.  He perceived himself as unattractive to women and regarded them with suspicion, perhaps always imagining them to be laughing behind their hands at him.  Severn's appalling duck-faced, fuzzy-headed portrait remains one of the most popular images of John.  Much better are the various sketches featured in the gallery, by various artists.  His life mask shows a fine sensitive face with remarkable eyelashes and a beautiful, if slightly top-heavy mouth (emphasised in the silhouette).  The touching image of him asleep as he was dying, also by Severn, conveys both the heartbreak of a friend, and the character of the patient.

Joseph Severn was to become Keats' greatest friend, and also his nursemaid, but through an odd series of events.  Towards the end of winter in 1820, Keats returned from the City to Brown's house, thoroughly chilled.  He was sent to bed by Brown, who brought him up a glass of spirits.  Keats coughed once, but blood hit the sheet.  He ordered Brown to bring him the candle in order to see the colour of the blood.  His surgical training allowed him to recognize it as arterial blood, meaning his lungs were compromised.  'That drop of blood is my death warrant,' he told his friend.  Later that night, he had his first serious lung haemorrhage, his mouth filling with blood.  Brown later remembered the calm with which Keats wiped his chin and remarked, 'This is unfortunate.' 

This period was one of his most productive, and with Leigh Hunt's support he began to think that it may be possible to support himself, and a wife through writing.  John had run through three doctors, who seemed to have no idea what to do with him.  He was bled, starved, fattened and opiated.  He fretted for Fanny's company and began to suffer palpitations.  Finally, the doctors recommended a warm climate.  Joseph Severn, a promising young artist with an award for travel from the Royal Academy was singled out as a good friend for John, and he became a regular visitor, along with Coleridge.  John was living with the Hunts, but found the noise and the children distressing.  An odd incident drove all matters to a head: a letter from Fanny was opened by mistake.  Keats had a tantrum then began to cry, walking the streets in a distracted state.  He passed the house where his brother had died, then made his way to the Brawne house, where he collapsed.  Mrs Brawne took him in and she and her daughter nursed John for a month.  His lungs became more congested and he began to produce blood on a regular basis.  Rome was settled upon as the place for him to convalesce, and Jospeh Severn as the companion.  Fanny gave John paper that he might write to her and a large marble she used to cool her fingers when sewing.  It would rarely leave his reach for the rest of his life.

John and Joseph Severn left England on the 17th of September 1820.  As the distance from Fanny grew, John's spirits sank.  Severn did not know how to help him, but listened when the poet talked.  They employed an English doctor, who encouraged a robust diet and walking.  When Keats continued to decline, the doctor confirmed what John already knew: that he was dying.  Keats became set upon suicide by laudanum, determined not to suffer the loss of dignity his brother Tom had undergone.  Severn confiscated Keats' supply of the drug and John punished him with descriptions of the incontinence, vomiting and raving that was to come.  Severn was a stoic and ignored his friend, nursing him as his health plummeted early in 1821.  Their friendship was a rare one.  Keats became frightened of the dark, so Severn rigged up a system whereby one faltering candle would light the wick of the next, an invention Keats named 'the fairy lamplighter'.  The sketch at the head of the gallery was drawn on 28th of January 1821 in the light of one of those candles.

Keats became resigned to his fate and encouraged Severn in his nursing: 'Now you must be firm for it will not last long.'  A letter arrived from Fanny, but he would not open it, only asking for it to be placed in his coffin with his lock of her hair.  On the 23rd of February, his lungs began 'to boil'.  He asked Severn to lift him up and hold him, resolving to die easily, and soon.  So he and Severn sat, hand in hand for the next seven hours, until John Keats died.  The Police visited the house the following day (as was the law in Italy for consumptive deaths) and ordered all destroyed.  Severn saved some things for himself, but Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery as they had agreed.  Severn wrote to Brown to tell him the news:

The news took a month to reach London, where it was published in The Times on March 23rd, 1821.