Charles Armitage Brown

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Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) was born in Lambeth (London) on April 14, 1787.

1 Friendship with John Keats
2 Keats's Death and Travels to Italy
3 Edward John Trelawny
4 Illness and Death
5 References
6 External Links

[edit] Friendship with John Keats

Brown is best known for his close friendship with the poet John Keats. When Charles Brown first met Keats in the summer of 1817, he was thirty years old. Before that meeting, Brown had a career as a merchant, starting as a clerk at the age of fourteen, earning £40 per year. At eighteen he joined his brother in Russia where they were to accumulate the sum of £20,000, only to lose most of it in an unwise speculation. They returned to England almost penniless, but wiser.

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, shortly after his brother died, Keats moved into Brown’s home, taking the front parlor, where he lived for the next seventeen months.

If not for Brown, many of Keats's poems would have been lost (Brown saved them from the trash-bin). After Keats’s severe hemorrhage early in 1820, Brown nursed him night and day. 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.

[edit] Keats's Death and Travels to Italy

When in Italy, Keats invited Brown to join him. Brown was shocked to learn that Keats had died before he could leave London for the continent. Brown waited until July of 1822 before traveling to Italy.

In Italy he moved in with Joseph Severn. His friend Leigh Hunt was there as well, and through him Brown was introduced to Lord Byron, John Taaffe, Jr. (friend of Byron and Shelley), Seymour Kirkup, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Walter Savage Landor, and many others.

[edit] Edward John Trelawny

In 1829 Edward John Trelawny, whom Brown had met in 1823 (just before Byron had sailed to Greece) came to live with him in Florence. For half the profits from its publication, Brown rewrote Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son. Brown provided Trelawny with passages from Keats’s unpublished poems to be used (with others from Shelley and Byron) as chapter headings. Unfortunately this resulted in Trelawny being linked to Keats when he had actually never met him in person.

[edit] Illness and Death

Early in 1834 Brown became ill and with his son he relocated to Plymouth, England. Before leaving for New Zealand, in 1841, he turned over copies of the unpublished poems of Keats to Richard Monckton Milnes.

When he arrived in New Plymouth, his disappointment was profound. Unlike its namesake in England, this Plymouth was wilderness, with a treacherous coast instead of a harbor. He planned an early return to England, but suffering from a stroke, he died, aged fifty-five, on June 5, 1842.

His last letters from New Plymouth, New Zealand dated January 22, and 23, were addressed to Severn and Trelawny.

[edit] References

Brown, Charles Armitage (1838). Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. Being his sonnets clearly developed, with his character drawn chiefly from his works. London: J. Bohn.