Joseph Severn: The Letters and Memoirs by Joseph Severn, Grant F. Scott

Abstract

2I4 Reviews written in theUnited States, itgives most of its attention to theCaribbean. From the British perspective the eighteenth century was as much concerned with India, and, asWilliam Dalrymple has recently shown (WhiteMughals: Love and Betrayal inEighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002)), there the concept of a shared domesticity between white and black on foreign soil was more likely than in a context where relationships were grievously distorted by slavery.The theme of the book, however, isconcerned not somuch with what happens abroad aswith its impact back inBritain. The dilemma for those at home was tobalance the the desirability of money from abroad with the debauched values of thosewho obtained it.As Harrow points out, writers, and especially women writers, repeatedly negotiate thisproblem of desire and risk. This has been an area of lively discussion inAusten scholarship since Edward W. Said compelled critics' attention toSir Thomas Bertram's estates in Antigua (Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, I993)). Harrow assumes thevalidity of current discussion on thiswithout demur, and adds to it in interesting ways. She stresses the 'dark' qualities ofHenry andMary Crawford, as against the 'fair' colour ing of theBertram girls, as subliminally suggesting a colonial origin for their lapsed moral values, and she suggests that Fanny Price's physical weakness is to be seen as validating her as a proper representative of English bourgeois domesticity, since so much writing on theCaribbean noted the convenient view that thewomen of other nations could do physical work, just as lower-class women inEngland could. This is refreshing, since ithas been commoner to look forpsychological explanations of Fanny's weakness, rather than ones based on policing racial and class boundaries. This book has an interesting theme andmakes some good points. Itnever, however, explains itschoice of texts, leading one to speculate whether those chosen are typical or unique in theirperceptions-the former, I suppose. Its sense of thedomestic isex tremely limited,meaning little more than 'maintainingthe virtue of thewhite woman'. Throughout the writer should have lookedmore incisively at her often rambling chap ters, to ensure that the ideas she is tracing come across with the clarity theydeserve. NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY CLAIRE LAMONT Joseph Severn: The Letters and Memoirs. Ed. by GRANT F. SCOTT. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2005. xxxv+7I6 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-o-7I90-7I58-4. Like Charles Brown and J. H. Reynolds, Joseph Severn has come to be known as 'the friend ofKeats'. Unlike Brown and Reynolds, Severn has the distinction of having been buried next toKeats in theEnglish Cemetery inRome, with a gravestone that visually echoes thatof thepoet.While modern biographies and editions of the letters of both Brown and Reynolds have been published, however, this is the firstscholarly collection of the letters and memoirs of Severn (extracts fromSevern's letters and memoirs were printed inaccurately inWilliam Sharp's i892 Life and Letters, and later in two somewhat novelistic biographies by Sheila Birkenhead: Against Oblivion: The Life of Joseph Severn (London: Cassell, 1943); Illustrious Friends: The Story of Joseph Severn and his Son Arthur (London: Hamish Hamilton, I965)). That Severn was known at all in theVictorian period was a result of Shelley's effusive comments in thePreface toAdonais on his apparently self-sacrificingjourney to Italywith Keats in the autumn of i820, and of the cult of death that surrounded Keats's memory after thepublication of the firstbiography of the poet in I848. The nature of Keats's growing fame in the second half of the nineteenth century was determined in large part by themanner of his early death in Rome, and it is al most exclusively through Severn-through his letters, inparticular-that the factsof MLR, I02.1, 2007 2I5 Keats's final days and weeks gradually emerged. Severn became known as the only friend ofKeats thatwas prepared to travelwith him and nurse him as he died. And as the century progressed, Severn increasingly became 'a kind of livingmonument to his friend', as Grant F Scott puts it (p. 57)-in his care forKeats's grave, inhis repeated return in his paintings toKeatsian subjects, and in his sheer presence in Rome, the citywhere he devotedly nursed Keats in his last illness. But Severn was also a reasonably successful painter in his...