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Settling Affairs 1821-1828
- The University Press of Kentucky
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123 settLinG affairs 1821–1828 Central to the relationship between George and John was their codependency , at the core of which were money issues. John was somewhere between oblivious and irresponsible when it came to financial matters, whereas George was solvent but a rather sketchy bookkeeper during his London years. Finances became contentious after the scrupulous, if poorly informed, Charles Brown came between the brothers. The cast of Keats advisers, including Abbey, Reynolds, Rice, Walton, and Gliddon, who could have clarified dealings for the boys, did not. The overwhelming irony is that their financial predicaments were unnecessary because the money was there, in a mix of Jennings trusts maintained for the Keatses, without their knowledge, by the Chancery Court. No Keats biographer (all of them being poets or academics) has attempted to parse the substantial middle-class estate of John Jennings, with the exception of Robert Gittings. What follows is an effort to simplify and clarify the family finances, which lie at the heart of George’s reputational problems among many Keats biographers. If, as Gittings claims, the Keats family history was akin to a Greek tragedy, then George was as much a victim of the tragedy as John. The poet believed he was impoverished during his most prolific writing years. Both brothers were the unknowing heirs to a substantial middle-class inheritance, but neither fully understood his financial affairs. Brown’s ill-informed letter of 10 December 1820 to William Haslam blamed George for John’s financial plight, even though George was also in the dark about the Chancery inheritance. Starting with Brown’s 1820 missive and proceeding through numerous Keats biographies until 1964, when Gittings correctly interpreted the original John Jennings will, the misunderstanding persisted.1 The historical irony is that John Keats’s impoverishment coincided with his finest poetry, giving the inheritance a signal importance. It took the lawyers seven years to unravel the situation, with long-distance prodding by George and the beneficial intervention of Charles Dilke. Another 124 GeorGe Keats of KentucKy 130 years elapsed before scholars correlated the dysfunctional Jennings will, drawn up when George and John were eight and ten years old, to the equally dysfunctional Jennings family. The original flaw was that John Jennings’s estate was divided, following daughter Frances’s ill-conceived lawsuit against it. After its division and the death of Midgley Jennings, about three-quarters of the remaining assets ended up with Alice Jennings. These ultimately flowed through her trust to the control of Richard Abbey for the support of the Keats children. But a major portion of the balance of John Jennings’s 1805 estate ended up sequestered by the Chancery Court, not to be distributed until 1823–1825 and later—and, tragically, never for John’s benefit. This would not have been the case were it not for Frances’s suit. The story backs up even further, to the 16 April 1804 death of Thomas Keats. Dying intestate, his assets were reportedly less than £2,000, over which Frances gained administration about a year later.2 Whether the valuation was real or hypothetical, it went to Frances. It is possible that she ceded half the inheritance to her second husband, William Rawlings, upon their marriage (ten weeks after Thomas’s death). Another possibility is that the £2,000 was an imputed value of the Swan and Hoop business. If the full nominal sum existed as cash, Frances could have run through upward of £300 a year before her 1810 death, affording a generous lifestyle. In any event, Joshua Vevers assumed the Swan and Hoop leasehold on 25 March 1806, ending Frances’s business career and the need for capital. It is unknown what happened to Rawlings or his estate. When Frances showed up at her mother’s house in the winter of 1809, she had no money. By the time of her death the £2,000 had been entirely dissipated, without explanation . Owing to Frances’s financial incompetence, their father’s estate was of no value to the Keats children. The opening chapter of the family financial saga effectively started with the death of John Jennings on 8 March 1805. Nominally, his estate exceeded£13,600, but the stated nominal value was not the same as cash. Securities were described at their par value, even as their trading prices fluctuated dramatically. Business debts and mortgages also had stated valuations that were not readily convertible to cash. Based on a conservative conversion to 2012 currency values, the...