ABSTRACT
Since its publication, William Sharp’s The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892) has been the standard sourcebook for Severn’s writings and for crucial information about Keats’s last months. In both of her biographies, Sheila Birkenhead used Sharp’s transcriptions of Severn’s manuscripts as the basis for her account of his life and supplemented this material with passages from Mary and Eleanor Severn’s diaries of the 1850s. Similarly, all of Keats’s modern biographers have relied on Sharp for crucial information, particularly anecdotes, in fashioning their narratives of the voyage to Italy and the months in Rome. The dependence on Sharp would probably not have been so pronounced had the Severn papers remained available after he completed his book. But they disappeared soon after its publication and were long believed lost. It was not until 1972 that they finally re-surfaced, by which time Aileen Ward (1963), Walter Jackson Bate (1963) and Robert Gittings (1968) had completed their important biographies of Keats, and Birkenhead’s second installment of Severn’s life, Illustrious Friends (1965), had also been published.
