John Keats said in his last extant letter, “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence,” and he repeated the haunting phrase on his deathbed. In some ways it could more aptly be applied to those among his friends who lived on.

It is symbolically appropriate that Joseph Severn will lie forever beside John Keats in the old Protestant Cemetery in Rome, even though the circumstances of his initial burial and eventual reinterment were undignified. At the age of twenty-three he had accompanied the dying Keats on his last voyage and had provided posterity with an unforgettably moving account of the final days of the young poet in early 1821. The sequence of events, and Severn's courage in facing them, defined his life. However, he went on to live another fifty-eight years, and few have ever wondered what went into those years. The same fate befell Charles Armitage Brown, who had shared a house in Hampstead with Keats and accompanied him on his walking tours. He was destined to live another twenty-one years, and his grave in New Zealand was crowned with the headstone reading “The Friend of Keats.” Fanny Brawne, only eighteen when she apparently became Keats's fiancée, lived until she was sixty-five. Benjamin Robert Hayden lived in increasing mental illness until his suicide in 1846. In each case, the sole cause for a “posthumous” life was that they had shared Keats as a loyal friend. One can look at such vicarious immortality as either good luck or bad luck for them since without it they would have sunk virtually without trace. Having gained immortality through their attachment to a famous man who died young, the rest of their crowded lives and their individual accomplishments were for long regarded as insignificant. It was as though, like Keats himself, their “real” lives, their claims to fame, ended in their twenties. The respective half centuries of their strangely “posthumous” living have, however, been recorded in their letters, and they have certainly been lucky in editors who undertook the laborious task of editing them. This edition of Severn's letters and memoirs allows Grant F. Scott in turn to take his place beside a different breed of immortals, those including H. Buxton Forman and Hyder E. Rollins, as editors of letters by Keats and his circle.

Unlike Brown, Severn might have found at least a niche in the Dictionary of National Biography even if he had never met Keats, since his life was indeed eventful and colorful. Like others in Keats's circle, he was a painter, mainly of the historical subjects then fashionable, although judging from the reproductions in this book, he was a modestly talented one. He is inevitably best remembered for “Keats at Hampstead, when he first imagined his Ode to the Nightingale” (1851), the charcoal drawing of Keats (1817), and the pen and ink sketch of “Keats on his Deathbed” (1821). He planned for many years to design a monument to Keats, vowing to plant laurels and cypresses and tend them to his old age because, as he ingenuously wrote to Brown, “I feel that I owe much to the name of Keats being often linked with mine, it has given the Public an impression, which has ensured me a good career” (338). Living mainly in Italy with periods in England, Severn was an opportunistic arriviste; for example, dining with three English lords “and 3 other superior persons” after they strayed accidentally into his study, he confesses to having literally dined out many times on a gold medal awarded him by the Royal Academy. He was even visited several times by Gladstone, who admired his works and patronized him. The social networking paid dividends, because after being rejected for many jobs, Severn, with Gladstone's help, was appointed British Consul in Rome (1861–72). There were even scandals of both professional and personal kinds to liven up an account of his life. The letters reveal a congenitally boastful man, though occasional slippages in his more personal letters show him facing adversities like poverty, bankruptcy proceedings, angry creditors, and forcible separation from his family. He was even driven to pawn Keats's pocket watch for a loan. But a resilient optimism always kept him going and ensured his survival to more personally secure times. He was nothing if not a survivor. Unfortunately, despite his name-dropping of acquaintances, he seems not to have been much liked by anybody, and one can readily see why. The whole journey of Severn's long life reveals what only letters sent day by day can do—there was no anticlimactic uneventfulness or hiatus after Keats's death, but complicated vicissitudes where cracks are papered over by surface bravura.

One feels that Severn did not live so inhibited by Keats's long shadow as the more emotionally loyal Brown, who had turned down the opportunity of accompanying Keats to Rome because he believed the poet would recover, and who went on to live a somewhat disappointed and unfulfilled life. In old age painful memories were reopened for Severn when Buxton Forman, perhaps insensitively, sent him the batch of letters Keats had written to Fanny Brawne almost sixty years before. Severn expresses genuine pain and shock at these, of whose existence he had been ignorant, and he is almost lacerated to learn of the mental suffering Keats had undergone while also facing physical illness. He perpetuated the unfortunate anti-Brawne propaganda by confusing symptom with cause, assuming Keats's illness was her fault: “This fatal passion certainly killed the Poet who kept it secret” (558). There may have been other wounds reopened, since Brawne had never trusted Severn and had refused to meet him after Keats's death. Isabella Jones, the other woman in Keats's life, was openly contemptuous of the man she called “Mr Egotist,” remaining deeply skeptical about Severn's motives in going with Keats to Rome. It is one of the remaining lacunae in the study of Keats's circle that Brawne's own life has not been adequately written, nor her letters printed, apart from a small batch to Fanny Keats published in 1936.

Editing Severn's letters and memoirs must have been, if not a labor of love, at least one of stoical commitment for Grant F. Scott. The volume is presented as a suitably handsome complement to other editions of letters by Keats and his circle. If we read them for insights into Keats, the task will be frustrating, but if the letters are read as witness to an eventful life in its own right, written in appealing prose, they pay ample rewards.