John Keats's Slaveholding Brother

Anyone who has delved into the works of the great English Romantic poet John Keats knows that his intense letters packed with his philosophical and aesthetic credo come a close second in importance to his marvelous poems. Many of the most important statements in that correspondence are addressed to his brother and sister-in-law with the harmonious names of George and Georgiana, who had gone to make a new life in the United States right after they married while still in their teens. So the name of George Keats has long been happily established in the firmament surrounding his more famous brother and, less happily, in biographies where he has been faulted for avariciousness in the settlement of family legacies and neglect of his tubercular siblings.