Keats-Shelley Journal Feature: Ann Wierda Rowland and Nicholas Roe

This post is the sixth in a series presenting blog publications from the authors featured in the latest volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume LXV. In these short pieces, authors reflect on their recent work and dialogue with other scholars in the discipline. Below is a summary/response submitted by Ann Wierda Rowland and Nicholas Roe addressing Rowland's article 'John Keats, English Poet (Made in America)'. This series is curated by Lindsey Seatter, for the Keats-Shelley Association of America Communications Team.Author: Ann Wierda Rowland, University of KansasThis essay presents the Keats memorial service held in 1894 in the Hampstead parish church as a case study in the invention and rise of transatlantic 'English'.  The service was the brainchild of two Boston 'Keats-lovers' and featured the dedication of a Keats bust (by American sculptor Anne Whitney) that remains in the church to this day. While part of a larger culture of commemoration that characterized late nineteenth-century literary life, the Keats Memorial was, above all, an expression of American investment (both emotional and financial) in an idea of Englishness, one which exposes the complex negotiation of national and transnational identities in what became 'English Literature'. After describing Keats’s nineteenth-century American reception, the essay turns to the particular literary activities of Fred Holland Day and Louise Imogen Guiney, the two Bostonians responsible for the Hampstead Memorial. Guiney and Day were central fixtures of Boston’s literary avant-garde, and they acted out their devotion to Keats and English literature in a variety of social and performative practices: dinner parties and costume pageants, the collection and exchange of Keatsiana, literary societies and clubs, and literary pilgrimages to England. For them, Keats was a figure that enabled them both to defer to and defy an idea of Englishness; in their love of Keats they staked a claim to elite Anglophile artistic culture and, at the same time, they championed the young cockney poet in the face of Old World class prejudice. They proudly proclaimed that the Hampstead Memorial, the first memorial to Keats on English soil, was 'erected solely by Americans' and that their donors were 'all American, all literary, and all young'.The speeches, letters and press accounts surrounding the 1894 Keats Memorial debate the questions of who rightly owns Keats and who best loves Keats, the English or Americans? This essay argues that we need to take seriously the conviction of these Boston Keats fans that Keats was theirs to honor and that English Literature was also an American heritage. American acts of tourism, collection and commemoration such as those of these Boston Keats-lovers contributed to the rise and consolidation of English heritage to the extent that we can understand Englishness as a diasporic identity designed for those who were not English and English literature as a transnational construct.Respondent: Nicholas Roe, University of St. Andrews'Which of you shall we say loves Keats most?'This odd, Lear-like question lurks at the centre of Ann Rowland's fascinating account of the Keats bust at the church of St. John-at-Hampstead. On the day of dedication in July 1894 the 1,200 who attended were drenched by English summer rain, and obliged to shelter while Lord Houghton, Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, and Francis Palgrave addressed the company. The Daily News observed more drily that 'oratory, though abundant, was not a distinguishing feature'. By championing Keats 'in the face of English neglect', Professor Rowland argues, the American Keats lovers Fred Holland Day and Louise Guiney, sponsors of the bust, represented 'transatlantic Englishness and ... America's deeply felt claim to English literature'. This was doubtless true, and perhaps that claim was nowhere more deeply felt than in late nineteenth-century Boston. The Keats-Shelley House at Rome was also largely an American inspiration; the first visitor to Dove Cottage when it opened in 1897 was a Miss Aspden of Chicago. That said, the essay’s larger claim that 'the rise and consolidation of English heritage' underwrites 'Englishness as a diasporic identity' is perhaps open to fuller investigation? And the 'idea of Englishness' in which the Boston Keats lovers had invested may also reward further elaboration.By 1894 there were numerous editions of Keats on both shores of the Atlantic and perhaps as many as a dozen biographies had appeared in Britain, the US and elsewhere. Keats was rarely out of the newspapers. So, 'expression of American investment' was indeed a complex negotiation, and a close national interest in Keats—rather than neglect—explains the success of this widely-reported Hampstead ceremony of dedication. While there was American money for the busts, memorabilia, and manuscripts, the foundational work for recovering Keats had already been done by Richard Woodhouse, Charles Brown, and Richard Monckton Milnes —to name just three. As Professor Rowland says, Day’s and Guiney’s dinner parties and pageants and their passion for celebrating 'Johnny's Day' were typical of Boston's 1880s artistic scene. She is right to point out, too, that it wasn't all candles and incense: Day and Guiney did some serious fieldwork as well. The Houghton Library holds Day’s photographs of Keats’s places—his grandmother’s house at Edmonton, photographed by ‘F. H. D.’ in 1887, and the bridge on the path between Edmonton and Enfield, dated ‘F.H.D. Photo 1889’. On one side of that bridge Johnny was mixing up the medicines, on the other side were his afternoons of poetry with Charles Cowden Clarke. These and other locations photographed by Day no longer exist—the bridge, with its pastoral backdrop of meadows and elms, lies under a suburban housing estate.  For us, then, Day is a guardian of London landscapes that Keats had known—his sense of Keats was strongly and locally grounded, giving us a perspective that is both rooted and also more placelessly 'transnational'?