Later that same year, Keats’ brother, George, would emigrate to America, leaving Keats, himself not well, to nurse his other brother, Tom, exposing him to the ‘consumption’ that was then little medically understood.
As it did for their mother - and eventually George and his wife in America - tuberculosis would prove fatal for Tom, and he died in December 1818. Following Tom's death, Keats moved down the hill into the newly built Wentworth Place (now Keats House), half of which was owned by a friend, another member of the Hampstead artistic circle, Charles Armitage Brown.
Having lost the companionship of both of his brothers and enduring financial difficulties, this winter of hardship nonetheless gave rise to a spring of extraordinary creative output in 1819.