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Joseph was in some ways a lightweight character. Some of Keats’s friends, and indeed Dr Clark who treated the poet in Rome, doubted Severn’s suitability as nurse/companion to a dying man, but when the test came he rose to it magnificently. He was only 26 years old, had never been abroad, spoke no Italian and had no experience of nursing, yet he tended Keats devotedly to the end. He was sustained by a naturally buoyant temperament and a simple but strong religious faith. His subsequent career as an artist in Rome for 20 years and afterwards in England had many ups and downs, mostly downs. Later in life he was aptly described by Frederick Locker-Lampson as being ‘a jaunty, fresh-natured, irresponsible sort of elderly being, leading a facile, slip-shod, dressing-gowny, artistic existence’.
He was a competent and versatile painter, but tended to try to follow the fashion, from miniatures to large historical scenes, from Italian genre subjects to huge frescoes, rather than to speak with his own voice. An interesting feature of Grant Scott’s book is the large number of illustrations of Severn’s paintings. For most of his life he and his family were in acute financial difficulties, but he never lost his Micawber-like conviction that something would turn up.
In the end it did. After years of a hand-to-mouth existence, one step ahead of the bailiffs, involving at one stage flight to Jersey to avoid bankruptcy, Severn was rescued by his friends, Gladstone among them, who secured for him the post of British Consul in Rome. His youthful appearance enabled him to conceal the fact that, at 67, he was already 17 years over the official age-limit. He eventually retired at 78, and two years later was able to claim proudly that he was ‘still without a wrinkle’.
Grant Scott casts new light on Severn’s time as consul. Ruskin, whose first impression of Severn had been that he was ‘cleverish and droll, but what I should call a Cockney’, later warmed to him, writing in Praeterita of his earlier days in Rome:
He understood everybody, native and foreign, civil and ecclesiastic, in what was nicest in them, and never saw anything else than the nicest… Lightly sagacious, lovingly humorous, daintily sentimental, he was in council with the cardinals today, and at a picnic in Campagna with the brightest English belles tomorrow.
I have to admit to a personal interest in this book, as Joseph Severn was my great-great-grandfather and I inherited many of his papers. When Professor Scott, having already scoured the world for Severn letters and discovered several forgotten gems in the Houghton Library, was put in touch with me, he was somewhat daunted to discover that I had nearly 700 more in my possession, over half being from Joseph to his wife Elizabeth, illegitimate daughter of Lord Montgomerie and half- sister of the Earl of Eglinton, of the Eglinton Tournament. This news was made even more challenging by the fact that many of them had been crossed and recrossed to save postage and were extremely hard to decipher. I had found these letters wrapped in linen in a tin box in my grandmother’s stables shortly after my mother, Sheila Birkenhead, published Illustrious Friends, the story of Joseph Severn and his son Arthur, in 1965. This was infuriating for her, as they covered a period of Joseph’s life for which she had had rather scanty material. This deficiency is made good by the publication of selected parts of the correspondence in this collection. Professor Scott was surprised to find that my grandmother’s rather unconventional approach to manuscript storage had in fact left the papers in excellent condition, and a pressed flower which Joseph had sent to his wife from Rome was still perfectly preserved between the pages.
Severn was not a literary, nor even entirely literate correspondent. His spelling and punctuation are idiosyncratic, but, as is so often the case, this enables us to hear him speak with his own authentic voice. In his letters, as in life, he is lively, affectionate, improvident but generally optimistic, although ever preoccupied with the struggle to attract ‘a good com’ (commission) to keep the leaky Severn boat afloat. A strength of this book is the picture it gives of the life of an Englishman in Rome at an interesting and turbulent period of its history, particularly in the 1860s, when the Papacy was losing its temporal power and the city was often in ferment.
Professor Scott has produced a work of genuine scholarship with an introduction which is both informative and extremely readable. He has demonstrated convincingly that Joseph Severn deserves to be remembered for more th an the months he spent with the dying poet in 1820-21. Severn did not often mention ‘poor Keats’ in his letters, but he remained aware of the fact that their friendship had helped to open many doors for him. Even when he was over 80 years old he wrote: ‘What a fortune it was my meeting him in my early life, for he has been my stepping stone and is even now.’
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