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What was John Keats’s childhood like?

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Keats, John — John Keats John Keats, drawing by Joseph Severn, 19th century.

John Keats’s childhood was marked by significant family instability and loss. The son of a livery-stable manager, Keats lost his father in 1804 when he was eight years old, and his mother remarried almost immediately. Following the subsequent breakup of his mother’s second marriage, Keats and his siblings—George, Tom, and Fanny—went to live with their widowed grandmother in Edmonton, Middlesex.12

Throughout his youth, Keats maintained close emotional ties with his siblings. He attended a school in Enfield run by John Clarke, whose son, Charles Cowden Clarke, later played a pivotal role in encouraging Keats’s literary interests. Although he was initially noted as a pugnacious student who was not particularly literary, he began reading voraciously by 1809. Following his mother’s death in 1810, the children’s affairs were placed under the care of a guardian, Richard Abbey, who eventually apprenticed Keats to a surgeon in 1811.12