NEWS

On 17^th September 1820, John Keats set sail from Tower Wharf in London on the Maria Crowther, beginning a six-week voyage to Rome. He was 24 years old.

Keats travelled to Italy in a desperate attempt to restore his health, which over the previous two years had been slowly wasting towards nothing by consumption. ‘A winter in England would, I have not a doubt, kill me,’ he wrote to his friend Charles Brown in August 1820. ‘So I have resolved to go to Italy, either by sea or land. Not that I have any great hopes of that,—for, I think, there is a core of disease in me not easy to pull out.’

To mark the 200^th anniversary of this extraordinary final voyage, the Keats-Shelley House is following in Keats’ footsteps and also his wake, day by day, and stage by stage – using the eminently 21^st century storytelling possibilities of Google Earth, which allows us to use maps, narrative, animation, images, videos and links to recreate a journey through time and space.

Click this link – https://bit.ly/KeatsFinalVoyage – which will you to the landing page of our project: John Keats’ Final Voyage.

Navigate through the chapters using grey Table of Contents box towards the bottom of the screen. It can take a few seconds for each episode to load fully (Google provides a handy % progress in the bottom left hand corner).

On the right-hand side of each chapter, there is a dialogue box: scroll down to read the story of that day and place. There are also links in the text – to other pages in Google Earth, and also to external resources. You can also interact with the map – zooming in and out, even to outer space, or just ambling about the neighbourhood.

Please email comments to ksmafriends@hotmail.com. Or via Twitter: https://twitter.com/Keats_Shelley

Next month, we will tell the wider tale of Keats’ final months in a podcast serial: John Keats’ Dying Year, which we hope to make interactive with our Google Earth project.

James Kidd