23 February: John Keats

John Keats died on this date in 1821. Here are 10 things you might not know about him:

1. John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in London, England to Edward Keats and Frances Jenning. The family owned stables in what is now Moorgate.
2. He was the eldest of four children, with two brothers and a sister.
3. His father died when he was eight, from a fractured Skull after falling from his Horse on his way home from visiting John and his brother at boarding school. His mother died of TB when he was 14.
4. He almost became a doctor. At 15, he was taken out of school by his guardian and apprenticed to an apothecary in Enfield. At 19 or 20, he registered at Guy's Hospital in London for further training. Within a month, he was assisting surgeons during operations, doing work equivalent of a junior house surgeon today.
5. By this time, however, he was already writing poetry as a hobby, and was resenting the amount of time his day job took away from that. In 1816, his first published poem, O Solitude appeared in The Examiner.
6. He left the hospital and moved to Hampstead with his brothers. By this time, one of them, Tom, had TB, or consumption as it was then known. Keats nursed his brother. In those days consumption wasn’t recognised as an infectious disease but was rather thought to be something weakness and sexual repression could cause, and so carried something of a stigma. So much so that Keats never mentioned the disease by name in any of the letters he wrote.
7. Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818, possibly when her family were visiting friends in the area before they moved there. Romance blossomed between them, but was marred by Keats’s brother’s illness, and then by Keats contracting TB himself.
8. He left for Rome, having been advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate. He knew he was dying and would never see Fanny again. He couldn’t bear to write to her or read her letters, but he did correspond with her mother. He died of TB in Rome at just 25 years old. His last request was that his tombstone should bear no name or date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water." However, the friends who commissioned the tombstone had other ideas and so his epitaph reads: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who, on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water Feb 24th 1821.”
9. Keats’s poems weren’t well received during his lifetime. His poem Endymion was damned by the critics. One, John Gibson Lockhart, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". Lockhart went on to write, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes."
10. John Keat’s career lasted just five years.

Character birthday

Smasher: aka Lee Pullman, a member of the Freedom League. He was a child martial arts champion who was later discovered to have genetic variant powers. He went to university in Birmingham where he could allow Unicorn to study his abilities. He joined the Freedom League when Electric Blue and Superwil left, although felt a bit of an outsider until after he graduated and had to move out of the halls of residence. Then he took a room in the Freedom League’s HQ. Despite his fighting skills, he is a gentle soul with a fascination for all things Oriental, and is a Buddhist by faith. He appears in Power of Love.