Keats' Background

About the lecture

In this module, we think about Keats’ background, including the kind of family he came from, his early education, and his later career as a doctor. In particular, we think about his association with the Cockney School of poets and the impact this had on contemporary views of his poetry.

About the lecturer

Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the English Department at the University of York. Prior to this, he was spent seven years at the University of Warwick as Professor of English and over a decade in the English Faculty at Oxford where he was Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College and Professor of Literature of the Romantic Period. Prior to moving to Oxford, Jon was a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne followed by a PhD at Cambridge.

Jon's most recent monograph is Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (Oxford University Press) based on research funded by a Phillip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. It will be published in paperback in October 2013. During the course of working on the book, he held fellowships at the University of Chicago (2008), the Yale Centre for British Art (2009), and the Australian National University (2009). He has also recently published The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens and an essay on 'Popular Radical Culture' in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s. Other forthcoming work includes the 15000 word plus omni-review of work in the early nineteenth-century for the journal Studies in English Literature. He is a series co-editor for Pickering & Chatto’s series The Enlightenment World.

He has just completed an AHRC fellowship to write a book on the print culture of popular radicalism in London in the 1790s. He is also currently the PI a Leverhulme Major Project Grant to form a group to work on 'Networks of Improvement: Literary Clubs and Societies, 1760-1840'. The project is interested in the circulation of ideas of all kinds through various networks (regional, national, colonial) in the period and also the construction of ideas of the ‘literary’ in relation to such networks.