Keats’ House Lags Behind His Reputation

He’s a hit twice over in Britain’s poetry “Top Ten” and was celebrated around the world last year, the bicentennial of his birth.

But the London house where John Keats spent the most productive part of his tragically brief life is crumbling, undermined by damp, rot and subsidence.

All repair work is on hold while two local government authorities negotiate about the future ownership of the house.

“It is appalling, not the way to treat one of Britain’s literary giants at all,” said John Carey, Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University.

Largely unsung during his life, Keats has gained stature as a Romantic poet ever since.

“He was young. He was tragic. His love and his promise were unfulfilled,” said Christina Gee, curator at Keats House for 30 years. “Since the first biography came out in 1848, he has not been out of print.”

In October, Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn” placed sixth and ninth, respectively, in an informal poll of Britons’ favorite poems. Keats ranked sixth among the most favored poets.

While his reputation is untarnished, his old home isn’t.

Large patches of damp and fungus spread across the poet’s bedroom wall, discoloring the green and white ivy-leaf design of the reproduction Regency wallpaper. Water coming through the ceiling in another bedroom threatens part of the house’s 8,500-volume archive.

Gaping cracks mar walls, doors and ceilings sag and windows are cracked because the house has shifted on poorly constructed foundations in a bed of clay. The Chester Room, where Keats spent leisure hours, is parting company with the rest of the house.

Humidity monitors register 70%; ideal conditions for paper are 40% to 50%.

“It is ironic that after the house was saved from demolition in 1920, largely thanks to American donations, we have now come to this,” said John Barnard, a professor of English at Leeds University who has edited a volume of Keats’ poems.

Completed in 1816, the large, square building stands in its own leafy garden in the upscale north London suburb of Hampstead, which is still a neighborhood favored by writers.

In Keats’ time, Hampstead was very rural, inspiring the poet’s vivid vision of a pastoral paradise, Gee said. Keats loved to stroll on nearby Hampstead Heath.

During his two years there, Keats wrote his odes and the epic fragment “Hyperion,” and he wooed Fanny Brawne, whose family had rented half the house.

Manuscripts, paintings, letters and mementos displayed inside record the poet’s tenancy from 1818 until 1820, when--stricken with tuberculosis--he went to Italy. He died Feb. 23, 1821.

When the house was saved in the 1920s, it was given in trust to Hampstead Borough Council, now the London Borough of Camden.

The trust stipulates that the house be kept in good order, but Camden, which restored the building in 1974-75, has not been able to find money for repairs since the late 1980s.

The $204,000 Camden spent last year covered only operating costs, including utilities and six staff members--four of them part time--to open the house in the afternoons and on weekends. Since 1988, the Friends of Keats House, a group of Keats devotees, has raised money to open the house on summer mornings.

For the last year, Camden has been trying to transfer Keats House to the wealthy Corporation of London, which governs the City, London’s financial district. Keats, one of four children of a livery stable manager, was born near Moorgate within the square mile of the City.

The Corporation of London is “looking very favorably on the idea of taking on Keats House, partly because of his links with us and also because we are concerned that the building is preserved,” said corporation spokesman Charles Hinkley. “And we have the funds and the expertise to do it.”

The corporation, which earns handsome revenues from buildings it owns, looks after such landmarks as the 15th century Guildhall and Tower Bridge, a Victorian gothic structure spanning the River Thames.