It should come as little surprised that the literary works of John Keats have been the subject of numerous attempts at forgery.  Major George de Luna Byron (ca. 1810-1882), who claimed to be the natural son of the Lord George Gordon Byron by a Spanish countess, was quite successful at penning and pawning off fake letters of Byron, Shelley and Keats in the mid-nineteenth century.  And H. Buxton Forman (1842-1917), the legitimate editor of several editions of published letters and writings of John Keats was later implicated in one of the great literary forgeries of the early twentieth century. Manuscript forgeries were once so frequent that Simon Gratz’s 1920 A Book About Autographs included among its thirteen chapters “Chapter IV: Concerning Spurious or False Autographs,” followed by “Chapter V: The Same Subject Continued,” and “Chapter VI: The Same Subject Continued.”

Returning to Haverford’s own Keats letter, our records show that it too was once the subject of a forgery investigation.  In January 1965, curator of the Quaker Collection, Edwin B. Bronner, was contacted by a recent college graduate from Florida who had been shown the very same letter by a bookseller in Miami.  Supposedly found within the pages of an 1833 edition of Hogarth’s Anecdotes, the bookseller was not interested in selling the letter, but was anxious to know of its authenticity.  Bronner sent the young man a photostat of our original and the Florida letter was sent to the laboratory of the Metropolitan Dade County Police Department for inspection.  Their reply: “This is a clumsy, artificially aged print, not handwriting. As a manuscript it is worth nothing. 13 Jan 1965.”  The young man who wrote to us also stated that the document had been covered on both sides with an adhesive plastic and then partially burned, causing a “peculiar polka dot area in the upper right-hand corner of the front sheet.”  A negative photostat of the Florida imposter still remains in our files (along with the authentic Keats letter) and notice of the incident was reported by Bronner in the April 1965 issue of The American Archivist.

A recent Google search reveals that our Keats letter to Fanny Brawne—discussed in previous posts on this blog—has been transformed into something called a “poetic animation” and placed on YouTube.  One can only imagine what Oscar Wilde might have said about this!

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Our letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne which makes an appearance in the form of dialogue in the Jane Campion movie Bright Star came to Haverford with the autograph collection of Charles Roberts, Haverford class of 1864. Roberts began his collection of autograph letters while a student at Haverford and went on to amass one of the premiere collections in the United States.  After his death in 1902, his widow Lucy Branson Roberts gave the collection to the College, along with the funds to build an assembly hall which would long house the collection.

Whether it was Roberts himself who purchased this letter when it was put up for auction on March 2, 1885 is not certain, but realized prices marked in an extant auction catalog indicate that the letter went for 11 pounds, 10 shillings. The letter has received a fair amount of attention since it arrived at Haverford.  In a future blog post we will divulge who said what about our letter and even how it got caught up in a forgery scheme in the 1950s.  In the meantime, please enjoy images of the letter and a transcription below.

[October 13, 1819]

25 College Street

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love. You[r] note came in just here – I cannot be happier away from you. ‘Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion. I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my Religion. Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet – You have ravish’d me away by Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavored often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more – the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever

John Keats

As mentioned last week, text from a letter in Special Collections is featured in the new film, Bright Star. Jane Campion’s period piece tells the story of the tragic love between sickly poet John Keats and fashionable girl-next-door Fanny Brawne.

Following the death of John Keats in Italy, Fanny Brawne spent several years in mourning, “wandering the Heath,” as the film tells us. But eventually she did marry, and she bore three children. She never told her husband of her relationship with John Keats, but she did keep his letters-over three dozen of them.

After both she and her husband had died, Fanny’s children decided to sell the letters at auction. The news of this sale shocked the literary world. The letters, of course, are intensely personal and many believed they showed the poet in a desperate and pitiful state. One commentator on the sale was none other than Oscar Wilde, who, one day before the auction, penned this sonnet:

On the sale by auction of Keats’ love-letters

These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?

A first batch of letters was sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge on March 2, 1885 and fetched a sum total of 543 pounds. While Oscar Wilde was offended by the sale the day before, he found it in him to attend the auction and purchased one of the letters himself.

In a future blog post, we will describe how our particular letter made its way from this auction to Haverford and we’ll present a facsimile of this most famous billets-doux.

Bright Star, a movie by New Zealand film maker Jane Campion, tells the story of the secret love affair between English poet John Keats and the fashionable girl next door, Fanny Brawne.  The film makes use of several love letters between John and Fanny, including one from the Charles Roberts Autograph Letter Collection in Haverford College Special Collections.  The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was shown at Haverford alumnus Harlan Jacobson’s Talk Cinema in Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr this past weekend.  It is scheduled to open commercially on September 18.  Subsequent posts on this blog will reveal more about the Haverford Keats letter.
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