Higher Bockhampton Research Articles

John Keats’s Father: A New Theory

This article attempts to offer a possible candidate for the poet John Keats’s elusive father based on the author Thomas Hardy’s relationship and proximity to a family of Keatses living in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. Hardy had modelled characters in some of his works on certain members of this family. The patriarch of the family, James Keats, had a brother named Thomas; I believe this Thomas Keats fits several of the few known facts about John Keats’s father and would therefore, seem to be a plausible candidate.

Early Hardy Novels and the Fictional Eye

Late in his life, Thomas Hardy told a correspondent about his traumatic memory of an event that occurred when he was sixteen: am ashamed to say I saw [Martha Brown] hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth, and had to be in town at that time for other reasons. ... I remember what a fine figure she showed against sky as she hung in misty rain, and how tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back. 1 At about same time, Hardy recorded in third-person form a similar memory of another hanging he witnessed not long thereafter, watching through a telescope from heath near family cottage in Higher Bockhampton: The sun behind his back shone straight on white stone facade of gaol, gallows upon it, and form of murderer in white fustian, executioner and officials in dark clothing and crowd below being invisible at this distance of nearly three miles. At of his placing glass to his eye white figure dropped downwards and faint note of town clock struck eight.... He seemed alone on heath with hanged man and crept homeward wishing he had not been so curious. 2 Hardy's verbal reconstruction of these pivotal scenes from his adolescence, specific versions of which would recur in his first published novel and in two of his last three, have a number of striking elements in common: persistence in mind's eye of a highly charged from past with overtones of sexuality; definition of quality of light, either diffused, as in first example, or strongly centered, as in second; attention to colors and outlines in recreated scene; and emotional interaction between viewer and viewed, in which sight is seen through and colored by an affective lens-in these cases, that of excitement and shame.3 These hanging scenes, and numerous other such scenes in Hardy's Life and fiction (the Life being essentially a narrative text not unlike novels) are instances of the moment, in which seeing subject and seen object intersect in a diegetic node that both explicitly and implicitly suggests way in which world is constituted in and through scopic drive. In using term voyeuristic moment, I am deliberately invoking J. Hillis Miller's discussion of what he calls linguistic moment in Victorian