ABSTRACT
Joseph Severn was obliged to reinvent himself more than once in his long life. His principal calling as an artist ended in relative failure as did his subsequent career as British Consul in Rome. As “The Friend of Keats,” however, he found increasing success, attracting in his later years a steady stream of visitors in Rome, anxious to hear at first hand the truth about Keats’s last days. In response to the expectations of his admirers, Severn re-imagined his past, recreating himself not as the friend he had been but as the friend his public liked to think he would have been. In a sense, Severn’s autobiography was written by others, with Severn as an increasingly willing accomplice. Artificial and misleading though the construct was, its foundation remained secure. It lay in the most uncharacteristic but also the most revealing letters he ever wrote from Rome in the winter of 1820–1821 to Keats’s circle of friends in London.
