Sixpence a Pint: John Keats in Winchester

Sixpence a Pint: John Keats in Winchester by Keiren Phelan gives a fresh account of Keats’s weeks at Winchester in autumn 1819, quoting from some of the letters he wrote while there. Keats’s time at Winchester was perhaps the most significant period of ‘a remarkable twelvemonth’, as Phelan points out; after ‘To Autumn’ he wrote ‘little other poetry of note’. An intriguing contribution to Keats studies here is the speculation that Keats’s lodging were on Colebrook Street, from where he could walk ‘out at the back gate across one street’ – Paternoster Row, ‘into the Cathedral Yard … then I pass under the trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the Cathedral, turn to the left under a stone door way’. The booklet is illustrated with a help map setting out Keats’s Winchester, and early photographs of Colebrook Street and Paternoster Row.

Keiren Phelan, Sixpence a Pint: John Keats in Winchester. Fulflood Press, Winchester, 2015. 32 pp. To order, please send a self addressed C5 size envelope to Fulflood Press, 28 Clifton Road, Winchester SO22 5BU.