Family Background

Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842), playwright and essayist, was born on 14 April 1787 at Grey’s Walk, Lambeth, London. The family comprised seven children of which Charles was the second youngest. His father William Brown, was a Scottish stockbroker (died in 1816), who married Jane Armitage on 6 March 1777 at Lambeth. Little is known of Charles’ schooling.

Working in Russia

Details about Charles Brown’s early career are sketchy, but he was known to have joined his brother John at St Petersburg in Russia.

At the start the Russian business was successful, and their trade was profitable, until they concentrated on a single cleaning product and then the business failed. Brown left Russia nearly destitute, just before he turned twenty-two. By 1810 he was bankrupt and living in poverty.

A playwright with an inheritance

On his return to England he began his career as a playwright, writing a Russian based comic opera Narensky, produced at Drury Lane in January 1814. He earned £300 from the play and the various contacts amongst dramatists and actors would serve him well, in the future.

When his brother James, who had founded a successful company in India, died in October 1815, Charles inherited ten thousand pounds and an estate in Lambeth. Charles’s son known as Carlino (Italian for little Charles) is reported later to have said it was this inheritance that allowed his father to lead a ‘life of literary leisure’.

Charles Brown and John Keats living at Hampstead

With his inheritance, Brown together with the literary critic Charles Dilke, began building a pair of semi-detached houses in rural Hampstead. The buildings were completed in May 1816 and became known as Wentworth Place. While Brown was on a walking tour in Wales in 1817, he was introduced to Keats by his neighbour, John Hamilton Reynolds (1794-1852).

Keats and Brown went on a walking tour to Scotland in June 1818. On their return in August Brown persuaded Keats to share his house with him at Wentworth Place, each paying their own expenses. At this time, Brown was described as ‘a convivial, corpulent, bearded, balding gentleman of property and leisure, an epicure, and something of a ladies’ man’ (Letters of Charles Armitage Brown, 1966, editor Jack Stillinger, Letter1,).

During the trip to Scotland Brown let his house to Mrs Brawne, a widow with three children. Keats was introduced to the Brawne family upon his return. The eldest child was Fanny, aged eighteen, and Keats found her very attractive. Fanny comforted Keats over the loss of his younger brother Tom. Keats and Fanny fell in love, inspiring some of Keats’ sublime love poetry. By now the Brawne family were living next door in the Dilkes house. In October 1819 Keats proposed to Fanny and she accepted. The couple tried to keep their engagement secret but when Mrs Brawne found out she withheld her consent until Keats was financially stable.

Meanwhile, the two men shared the house for the next two years. Keats had a bedroom and a pleasant sitting room. Brown transcribed some of Keats’s poems; he may have rescued the Ode to a Nightingale and other works. In Brown’s biography a Life of John Keats, he claims that many of the manuscripts he saved were the only sources remaining. Keats said Brown was ‘always one’s friend in a disaster’ and praised his generosity. (Letters of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins, 1958, vol. 2, letter 159 p.78).

Keats had a major haemorrhage on 3 February 1820. Brown took care of him, until he recovered. He also subsidised him. Their only quarrel was over Fanny Brawne, with whom Keats suspected Brown of flirting. In May 1820, when Brown decided to go away for the summer, he arranged accommodation for Keats. Then he sailed to Scotland on holiday.

Death of Keats

While Brown was away Keats took his last journey to Italy. He died of tuberculosis in the company of his friend, the painter Joseph Severn (1793-1879) on 23 February 1821. It seems clear that Brown had underestimated the seriousness of Keats’ illness. Keats and Severn rented small rooms near the Spanish Steps in Rome, where he was treated by Dr James Clark. Dr Clark diagnosed Keats was suffering from consumption and put him on a starvation diet, combined with heavy bloodletting.

Starved of food, Keats’ began hallucinating. But most cruel of all was the refusal to allow him painkillers. Opium could have been provided in small doses; and Keats had bought a bottle for this purpose. But this was denied him. Keats died in agony while suffering remorse, believing he was a failure as a poet and that his relationship with Fanny Brawne would never be consummated.

Previously, Brown had married his Irish housekeeper Abigail Donohaugh, in August 1819. Although it was claimed their marriage might have been defective, because the law only permitted marriage by a Catholic priest if both parties were Catholic. Brown was not a Catholic. Their son Carlino was born in 1820.

Brown had sole custody of his son from 1822, when he sold his house at Wentworth Place and they moved to Italy, remaining there till 1835. Brown and Carlino travelled extensively socialising with other English expatriate literati. He arranged for a headstone to be placed on Keats’s grave in 1823, and fulfilled Keats’s request to omit the poet’s name, stating instead the phrase ‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’.

Brown began writing a biography in 1837 and when he heard Richard Monckton Milnes (1808-1885) was working on a book he gave him a copy of his memoir on Keats to use. Milnes’ Life and Letters of Keats came out in 1848.

Brown’s memoir only appeared in 1937, when The Life of John Keats, by Charles Armitage Brown, (edited by Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and W.D. Pope), was published by Oxford University Press. A copy of Brown’s manuscript is held at the Taranaki Public Library, Puke Ariki.

Brown decided to go to New Zealand and set Carlino up in business, shipping our sawmill equipment for this purpose. In 1841 Carlino sailed on the Amelia Thompson, landing at New Plymouth. Charles Brown senior followed on the Oriental. The sawmill company failed, and Brown suffered ill health and died in Taranaki after a stroke, aged fifty-five, on 5 June 1842.

He was buried on 7 June 1842 on the side of Marsland Hill behind the Anglican Church. Because he was a deist his burial was in unsanctified ground outside the churchyard, in accordance with his wishes. (Deism had become widespread with the Enlightenment as it rejected the mythical aspects of revealed religion. However, its adherents were often seen as a threat to the established church, resulting in discrimination.) Marsland Hill was used as a military camp during the Land Wars. When the army decided to level the hill to build a barracks, the spoil was shovelled over the side, completely burying Brown’s grave.

A century after Keats death and about 60 years after the loss of the grave, at the request of Brown’s relatives in Taranaki and Auckland, a search was made for the grave. It was found on 19 March 1921 by William Henry Skinner (1857-1946), a local surveyor and historian. The grave is now marked by a stone inscribed ‘Charles Armitage Brown. The Friend of Keats’.

Carlino Keats Brown, or Charles Brown Junior, found success in local and national politics. He was elected first Superintendent of the Taranaki Province, between 1853 and 1857 and third Superintendent between 1861 and 1865. He was elected MP in 1855 to 1856 and again in 1864 to 1865 and 1868 to 1870. When returning home after working as a Maori interpreter in a court case, he was struck by a train on the Devon Street, New Plymouth, railway crossing and died. Brown was married twice and had five daughters and two sons. He left his mother’s Catholicism and joined the Anglicans as did his family.

The grandchildren of Charles Armitage Brown, Mona Osborne, William Brown, Jessie Brown and Lucy Brown collected objects associated with Keats and returned them to Keats House in 1922. This included an original drawing by Brown of Keats, a photograph of the bust of Brown in the New Plymouth Museum, and some Hogarth prints.

On 2 April 2011, there was a family ceremony at Brown’s grave site. It was attended by 24 family members, and Harry Duynhoven the Mayor of New Plymouth, Patrick Reilly the deputy British High Commissioner, Professor Heidi Thomson from Victoria University and Professor Nicolas Roe, a Keats scholar from the University of St Andrew, who laid a wreath on the grave.