John Keats, earliest surviving manuscript of ‘In drear nighted December’ in the hand of John Hamilton Reynolds

The manuscript of Keats’s song ‘In drear nighted December’ was acquired for the collection of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome in July 2017. It is the earliest extant source of this particular poem and is in the hand of the oet’s close friend John Hamilton Reynolds. The manuscript was long considered to be autograph (i.e. in Keats’s own hand) since Reynolds’s handwriting closely resembles that of Keats. It reveals a number of textual variants from the standard edition of the published poem, whose first line traditionally reads ‘In a drear-nighted December’, rather than ‘In drear nighted December’ as we see in the manuscript. The poem itself was first published in 1829, some eight years’s after Keats’s death, in The Literary Gazette.

Keats, John, 1795-1821 (author)
Hamilton Reynolds, John (author)

1817

1 sheet

realia

paper

autographs (manuscripts)

KSH

REL-020