Two Luxuries

They lived as neighbors at Wentworth Place in Hampstead: he on one side of the house, she and her mother on the other. He had little money and a trade he had set down. She was young, clever, fond of fashion in a way his friends found easy to mock. The mockery is not evidence. He wrote to her as if attention itself were a form of keeping.

In July 1819, from the Isle of Wight, he sent a letter that has been asked to do too much work in the later cult of the beautiful dead. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. The sentence is his. What we do with it is ours. This office refuses to make the second luxury into the romance. Consumption is not a candle. Class is not a subplot. He was ill, and he was not rich enough to be a simple catch, and he loved her with a heat that frightened even him.

The letters of 1819 and 1820 are full of ordinary weather, walks, jealousy, a ring, the wish to be near without being watched. Intensity is not the same as wisdom. He could be demanding. She could be opaque. They were engaged. His friends disapproved. None of that is as famous as the death, which is a problem of fame, not of love.

He sailed for Italy in September 1820, hoping the air would do what England had not. Fanny did not go. He died in Rome on 23 February 1821, in rooms beside the Spanish Steps, with Joseph Severn. He was twenty-five. She was not in the room. That absence is not a failure of romance. It is how illness and money and family actually arranged the last months.