Having moved into a new London studio in 1817, while working on his painting, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, the painter Benjamin Haydon decided to bring a group of his friends together for a party, with the painting functioning as a centrepiece. Present at the dinner were Wordsworth, Keats (their faces are on two of the figures in the painting, which now lives in an Ohio seminary), and Charles Lamb. Also present that evening was the surgeon John Ritchie, and the perhaps less stellar figures of Tom Monkhouse, who was Wordsworth’s wife’s cousin, and the deputy controller of stamps, a rather dull chap called John Kingston, who, says Haydon, ‘the moment he was introduced he let Wordsworth know who he officially was’, thus rather rudely informing Wordsworth that he was meeting his boss (for the first and only time), Wordsworth being the official distributor of stamps for Westmorland.
‘The Immortal Dinner’ is Haydon’s own description of the evening, and it is only fair to say that the judgment of posterity is not one of universal agreement that the party was that significant. never mind ‘immortal. But this was the first time Wordsworth and Keats met, and it seems to be the only time all the guests were present together – and deserves special note as one of the few recorded social occasions at which Wordsworth looked as if he were enjoying himself.
Records Haydon: ‘There was something interesting in seeing Wordsworth, sitting, and Keats and Lamb, and my picture of Christ’s Entry towering up behind them, occasionally brightened by gleams of flame that sparkled from the fire, and hearing the voice of Wordsworth repeating Milton with an intonation like the funeral bell of St. Paul’s and the music of Handel mingled, and then Lamb’s wit came sparkling in between, and Keat’s rich fancy of satyrs and fauns and white clouds, wound up the stream of conversation’.
Keats in fact was reciting part of ‘Endymion’ for the first time in company (Wordsworth had read it a few days earlier and praised it faintly). Lamb – whose sister Mary was in his care, having killed their mother years before in one of her periodic fits of madness – got a bit squiffy and attempted to examine the skull of John Kingston after the latter persisted in asking daft questions about genius. Lest there be any doubt as to the general propriety of the evening, however, Haydon makes clear: ‘All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age. . .’ The essential guide to Haydon’s party is Penelope Hughes-Hallett’s The Immortal Dinner (2000).
What Happened Next
Joseph Ritchie, who was an anti-slavery campaigner, undertook an expedition to reach central Africa from the north the following year, and died in Murzuq in November 1819, less than two years after the party. At Keats’ request, Ritchie took with him a copy of ‘Endymion’ in order to leave it, for some mysterious poetical reason, in the Sahara. Haydon went bankrupt in 1823 and killed himself in the hot summer of 1846.