Charlese Armitage Brown (1787-1842)
(Roberta Ferrari, Univeristy of Pisa)
Though not a poet himself, Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) deserves renewed scholarly interest and a reassessment of his place within the broader narrative of British Romanticism, particularly as a respected figure in the early nineteenth-century literary circles and through his role as a friend, collaborator, and literary executor of John Keats’s legacy.
Born in Lambeth, London, on 14 April 1787, Brown was the sixth of seven sons of William Brown, a Scottish stockbroker, and Jane Armitage, daughter of a Welsh starch manufacturer. During his school years, he met Charles Wentworth Dilke, who would remain a lifelong friend and later become a key figure in Keats’s posthumous reputation. At fourteen, Brown entered a merchant’s office; by eighteen, he had joined his brother John in a trading firm based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The business thrived briefly, but soon collapsed due to a failed investment in bristles, rendered obsolete by the invention of split whalebone. On his return to England, he went through a period of great hardship until he became the London agent of his brother James, a resident of the East India Company at Krui in Sumatra. Upon James’s death in 1815, Brown inherited a modest estate and £10,000, which, as his son Carlino put it, “allowed him to lead a life of literary leisure afterwards” (Stillinger 1966: 4).
Brown’s first literary endeavour was the comic opera Narensky, or the Road to Yaroslaff (1814), based on his Russian experiences. With music by John Braham and William Reeve, it was staged at Drury Lane in January 1814 and ran for 10 nights, earning Brown £300 and free lifetime admission to the theatre. The author, however, later disavowed this early work and destroyed every copy of the libretto he could obtain.
The crucial turning point in Brown’s life was his encounter with John Keats, in the summer of 1817. They both lived in Hampstead, where Brown had built a double house – Wentworth Place, today Keats House – with his friend Dilke. His attachment to the young poet – Brown was eight years Keats’s elder – grew rapidly. They went on a walking tour of Scotland together in the summer of 1818, of which both left an emotionally charged testimony: Keats’s letters from the tour and Brown’s account in Walks in the North, which he later published in the Plymouth Journal between 1836 and 1840, document not only their adventures amid breathtaking landscapes, but also the deepening of an extraordinary friendship. “All was enchantment to us both”, notes Brown in his Life of John Keats (Brown 1937: 49).
Following the death of Keats’s brother Tom in December 1818, Keats moved into Brown’s half of Wentworth Place. Their cohabitation lasted until May 1820 and marked the most fertile period in Keats’s career, with Brown providing him with practical assistance, emotional support, and serving as both advisor and literary guardian. They spent part of the summer of 1819 at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, where they collaborated on a historical tragedy entitled Otho the Great: Brown supplied “the fable, characters, and dramatic conduct”, while Keats “was to embody it into poetry” [Brown 1936: 54].
In 1819, Brown began a relationship with Abigail O’Donaghue, an Irish servant described as a “good-looking woman” with “a great gift of repartee” (Askwith 1941: 278). The outcome of their liaison was the birth of a son, Carlino, in July 1820. The nature of their relationship remains rather ambiguous: a Catholic priest may have performed a marriage ceremony, but Brown never acknowledged it publicly. Abigail lived with Brown at Wentworth Place during Keats’s final months in England and may have helped nurse the poet during his illness. Brown’s letters reveal a conflicted and often callous attitude towards Abigail, whom he described as obstinate and inconvenient. His decision to leave England in 1822 was partly motivated by fears that Abigail might seek legal custody of Carlino.
Unable to join his friend Keats in Rome before the latter’s death, Brown later went to Italy, first settling in Pisa; here Leigh Hunt introduced him to Lord Byron just before the baron left Tuscany for Genoa. Brown was invited to contribute to The Liberal, which he did with three essays: “Les Charmettes and Rousseau” (vol. I, n. 2), “Shakespeare’s Fools” (vol. II, n. 3), and “Letter-writing” (vol. II, n. 4). The first two were published under the pseudonyms of Carlone and Carluccio, which eventually led to uncertainty regarding their authorship, to the extent that in 1877 S.R. Townshend Mayer attributed them to Charles Lamb and Charles Cowden Clarke, respectively. Brown later published essays about Italy and Italian literature in the New Monthly Magazine, while his story “La bella tabaccaia”, a favourite with Leigh Hunt, appeared in the Literary Examiner in September 1823.
His travels took him to Rome, Naples, Venice, and Florence, where he formed a lasting friendship with Walter Savage Landor, who, at the time, was living in a beautiful villa on the hills of Fiesole. Brown introduced Landor to Joseph Severn, Keats’s companion in Rome, and to Hunt, who had settled in Maiano near Florence. In 1829 Edward John Trelawny came to live with Brown in Tuscany, and during this period Brown helped him rewrite his tale Adventures of a Younger Son, published anonymously in 1831. The proceeds of the two published editions were divided equally between them. In Italy Brown also engaged in translations from Ariosto and Goldoni. His correspondence from Tuscany bears witness to his admiration for the Tuscan government and a good disposition towards the Tuscans, of whom he wrote: “I like them” (Stillinger 1966: 116).
In 1834, Brown returned to England with Carlino, settling in Laira Green near Plymouth. He soon immersed himself in the cultural life of the Plymouth Institution, serving as librarian, vice-president, and lecturer. Between 1836 and 1839, he delivered seven public talks, including the first known lecture on Keats, “On the Life and Poems of John Keats,” which drew upon his unpublished memoir of his friend. Brown’s activities at Plymouth marked the beginning of Keats’s posthumous rehabilitation: he organized exhibitions of “Keatsiana” and published fifteen of Keats’s poems in local newspapers (Roe 2020). In Plymouth he completed the translation of the first five cantos of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, which Lord Houghton deemed “admirable” (Rollins 1965, I: lx), and his best known literary work, Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems (1838), dedicated to Landor, in which, for the first time, he appended the maternal family name, Armitage, to his own. Though controversial in its interpretation of the poems as a coherent autobiographical narrative, Brown’s study still holds historical value, as it offers one of the earliest in-depth readings of the Bard’s sonnets.
In 1840, Brown decided to become a settler under the Plymouth Company of New Zealand. Before leaving England on 7 November 1841, on the passenger ship Oriental (Macfarlane 2012: 26), he presented his Keats biography and other manuscripts to Richard Monckton Milnes, who used them as the basis for his Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). Brown’s own biography of Keats, The Life of John Keats, was not published until 1937. Brown’s adventure in New Zealand did not last long: he suffered a fatal apoplectic stroke in June 1842, at the age of 55, and was buried at New Plymouth, on the seaward slope of Marsland Hill, overlooking the beautiful St Mary’s Anglican Church. The grave is marked by a plain marble plaque bearing the inscription “Charles Armitage Brown. The Friend of Keats”.
Works cited
Askwith, Betty, Keats, London, Collins, 1941.
Brown, Charles Armitage, Life of John Keats, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Dorothy Hyde Bodhurta and Willard Bissell Pope, London-New York-Toronto, Oxford UP, 1937.
—, Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Sonnets, London, Bohn, 1838.
McCormack, E. H., The Friend of Keats: A Life of Charles Armitage Brown, Wellington, Victoria UP, 1989.
Macfarlane, Lucy, “Charles Armitage Brown’s Library at New Plymouth, New Zealand”, The Keats-Shelley Review, 26 (1), 2012, pp. 26-28.
Milnes, Richard Monckton (ed.), Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, London, Edward Moxon, 1848.
Roe, Nicholas, “Charles Armitage Brown: The Friend of Keats”, in Norbert Lennartz (ed.), The Lost Romantics: Forgotten Poets, Neglected Works, and One-Hit Wonders, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 283-299.
Rollins, Hyder Edward (ed.), The Keats Circle. Letters and Papers and More Letters and Poems by the Keats Circle, 2 vols., Cambridge MA, Harvard U.P., 19652.
Stillinger, Jack (ed.), The Letters of Charles Armitage Brown, Cambridge MA., Harvard UP, 1966.
Trewlany, Edward John, Adventures of A Younger Son, London, Colburn, 1831.
Ultimo aggiornamento
05.12.2025