Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Annotated Transcripts of Keats’s Letters

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During the first half of the nineteenth century, Charles Brown, Richard Woodhouse, and John Jeffrey made invaluable transcripts of John Keats’s letters. Less well known is the fact that the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon too copied several of the letters which Keats had addressed to the painter himself and to the poet’s brother Tom. Haydon seems to have transcribed the letters sometime between 1845 and 1846; most of the copies written by him were reproduced in Richard Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats (1848). For unknown reasons, however, subsequent critics and scholars have neglected Haydon’s transcripts, consigning them virtually to oblivion; even Hyder Edward Rollins never mentioned the painter’s manuscript copies when he published his authoritative edition of Keats’s letters in 1958.

  Haydon’s transcripts are not in themselves critically important, and, in any case, he was never a fully reliable transcriber. Furthermore, Rollins’s 1958 edition successfully reproduced in full all the originals of those letters (some of them transcribed only piecemeal) that Haydon had copied. Nevertheless, the material remains significant, not least because it contains Haydon’s own annotations to several of Keats’s letters, by which we gain a better understanding of the friendship between the poet and the painter. Milnes’s 1848 book did not reproduce all of Haydon’s annotations. The painter’s material thereafter found its way into the archives of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, where it is still held. To the best of my knowledge, therefore, this will be the first time the ‘entire’ text of Haydon’s annotated transcripts has been published.

  The material reproduced here will be of interest and helpful in some ways to many Keatsians, especially those who would like to explore further the complexities of Keats’s reception in the mid-nineteenth century and afterwards, as well as the relationship between the poet and the painter.