In his 1819 poem ‘Lines to Fanny’, John Keats wrote:
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free in
My old liberty?
Visiting Keats’ House in Hampstead a few days ago, I imagined the poet lying on his couch watching Fanny in the garden out of the long window; too sick to move but remembering when they touched. Less than two years later, Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 of tuberculosis (or consumption as it was known at the time). His friend, the artist Joseph Severn had travelled from London with him in October 1820, in search of a warmer and better climate for Keats’ illness. There was little illusion that Keats would get better – his brother and mother had already died of the same disease. Severn nursed him through the journey and his last weeks in Rome.
Severn remained in Rome long after his friend’s death and oversaw the construction, a few years later, of the gravestone that marks Keats’ grave in the protestant cemetery. On the stone is a lyre that was also the inspiration for a broach. Severn wrote to their mutual friend Charles Brown on 1 January 1822 that:
I have some hair of our poor Keats and have been waiting for a friend to bring it to London. I have thought of a little conceit - as a present to poor Miss Brawn - To make a Broach in [the] form of my Greek Lyre - and make the strings of poor Keats's hair - but I cannot find any workman to do it.*
Fanny Brawne was Keats’ secret fiancé and neighbour at Wentworth Place in Hampstead – now Keats House – and the dedicatee of the poem. She never received the broach.
I sat in a conservation studio at the London Archives examining this glinting lyre made with eight strings plucked from Keats’ hair, not because of the friendship between Keats and Severn. Famous though that friendship became, particularly in the Victorian period when it entered the annuals of poetic brotherly friendship. I am looking at it because Joseph Severn gave it to his daughter the artist Ann Mary Severn when she married Charles Thomas Newton on 2 May 1861. What was intended for Keats’ fiancé went to Joseph Severn’s daughter when she became a wife.
Mary was enthused by all things Romantic and loved Keats’ poetry. She recorded the few times her sitters for her portraits did too. For example, when she is drawing Lady Harriet Cowper at Sandringham in 1854, they discuss poetry. She writes to her mother that Lady Harriet is one of the ‘most interesting & must have been one of the most beautiful women I have ever drawn’. Knowing her ‘melancholy history’, Mary admires ‘her now more than ever’ and exclaims:
They even know and admire Keats !!!!**
The exclamation marks are Mary’s – she was very fond of them in her letters. N.B. The ‘melancholy history’ of Lady Harriet was that she had been married at 15 to Count Alfred D’Orsay when D’Orsay was the lover of her stepmother, Marguerite, Countess Blessington. The marriage appears to have been a cover for their illicit relationship. After Orsay's death in 1852, she married Charles Spencer Cowper. Keats’ reputation had been growing – perhaps even discovered – since Edward Monckton Milnes’ biography Life of Keats in 1848, much of which was based on Joseph Severn’s recollections and documents. Even so, it was not usual for people to know Keats’ work well until later in the nineteenth century.
Back to the broach. I stare at the lyre that is centred on white iridescent material framed by a darker gold scrolling around the edge and realise there are pinkish gleaming darts. I peer more closely, then move the broach around in the light. The friendly conservator sees me and walks over from his work on a huge sheet of paper to pull a light over the studio table so that I can see more clearly, or rather differently. It looks like a hologram of a sun with rays poking out. Helios from Keats’ unfinished epic poem Hyperion? Thinking I’m being too fanciful I ask the conservator to look too. He agrees there is something there. I wondered aloud what the material might be as had assumed it was ivory. Talking to my friend Amara later, she suggested it could be opal – hence the gleam. It’s something a photo can’t quite capture, which is why – as with seeing the beads at the Petrie Museum last week – looking at an original object can be so rich.
Mary was a wife for less than 5 years as she died on 2 January 1866. Her husband Charles asked her younger sister Eleanor to give the broach to her best friend Mary Palliser, Eleanor writes:
Dearest Mary, I send the little parcel and also a little broach which Charles Newton sends you. It belonged to dear Mary & was given her by Papa when she married. It is an idea of his - a lyre with the strings of Keats' hair. I am sorry to say I cannot find Mr Burton's letter but I have not done unpacking.
Mary Palliser had been Mary’s friend since she moved to London from Rome in 1841, when they had been neighbours in Belgravia. Also an artist, Mary Palliser worked alongside Mary and there are occasional glimpses of her in Mary’s letters as they were inseparable when they were in London. They also travelled to Ireland together in 1852 and then to Scotland in 1855. She makes frequent appearances as M.P. in Mary’s sketches while Mary herself is M.S. The pair are often shown working together (below) or bent over laughing. The Mr Burton mentioned in Eleanor’s letter is possibly the artist Frederic William Burton, who later became a Director of the National Gallery as well as engaged to Mary Palliser. The two never married as Mary Palliser had a pulmonary disease and died in 1879.
On her death, the broach went to two of her nieces in Ireland. In 1932 the family sold the broach to Dr T. Wilson Parry (a doctor and expert in prehistoric trepanning), who presented it to Keats’ House.*** Eleanor (Severn) Furneaux’s daughter and so Mary’s niece Lady Birkenhead came to visit Wilson Parry and see the broach at Hampstead and brought a watercolour of Mary Palliser by Mary with her. It could be this watercolour of her (below), which Mary did a version of in pencil too (above left). The lyre broach containing Keats’ hair is testament to the friendship between the two women artists as well as that of the more famous male poet and artist. It may have been worn or kept in a precious box and used by Mary in admiration of Keats and by Mary Palliser to remember her best friend. An object, like touch, contains memories for those who touch and look at them, then years later can act as a catalyst for people researching and imagining the past.
With thanks to the London Archives and the Birkenhead Archive (private collection).
References:
*Letter Mary Severn to Elizabeth Severn, 26 October 1854, Birkenhead Archive (Severn)
**Grant Scott ed. (2005), Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs, London: Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 188-189.
*** T. W. Parry, ‘A Relic of Keats’, The Times, 16 November 1932
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